Anne Janzer

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Messaging part 2: The messaging review

In my last post (There’s always time for messaging) I talked about a few strategies for selling the ‘messaging’ part of a content marketing project. It’s important to nail down key messaging before writing website content, white papers or other content.

How do you conduct a review of the messaging, particularly if it’s something that you had to champion in the first place? I doubt that there’s one correct answer – but here are a few strategies that may be useful.

The ‘creative brief’ strategy
For smaller or contained content projects, you can include messaging in a ‘creative brief’ or an extended outline for the piece. Asking for a review at this phase saves time down the road – and protects you from review cycles that dramatically change course.

This is a very palatable approach to messaging: nobody complains about reviewing an outline. Just make sure that the outline contains a bare-bones messaging component, with:

  • Audience: Who are you trying to reach with this piece?
  • Objective for the piece: What’s the explicit messaging –and sometimes the implicit messaging for this paper/website/brochure?
  • Competitive differentiators: What are the key points we need to make sure come across in this content?
  • Tone/style: What are we trying to communicate about the author or the organization represented by this piece?

I’ll take my best stab at each of these, put them on top of the outline and ask for comments. Sometimes this outline review generates interesting discussion that focuses the project. And, I let clients know that I’ll interpret lack of comment as a green light.

The explicit messaging review
If the messaging discussion is bigger than you can fit into this format, you may need to prepare a messaging document or presentation for the client. Use whatever format you think best fits the client – if you’re able to have a meeting, then a presentation can be effective. If you’re doing everything offline, a document works well.

The trick is communicating clearly that this review is around messaging only – not execution. To bring the point home, make sure that the messaging material looks nothing like the end product – and is delivered in the way that best serves discussion.

  • If you’re doing a Word document, consider using tables to lay out messaging, so it’s clearly not an early draft of the deliverable.
  • If you are using a Powerpoint presentation, don’t add graphics or special effects. Make it as bare bones as possible. Otherwise, people will start to focus on the medium, not the message.
  • Use a ‘map’ created from a program like MindNode if that fits the format well.
Sample of a MindNode map for messaging

You want people to focus only on the content – not the execution of the content. Because people are so anxious to see the final product, they might want to start talking about word choice or layout. Delivering a starkly internal document keeps the discussion on the messages. It also prevents people from taking slides or pages and plunking them directly into other documents, before the messaging is fully baked.

Once you have the review process, your task is to incorporate the comments and get sign-off on the messaging promptly before continuing with content development.

Respect the resistance
As my friend Claire Wagner pointed out, messaging can be a hard sell. There may be political reasons for avoiding the messaging process. Perhaps there’s an unresolved conflict within the organization on how to position something. And sometimes people simply don’t feel that there’s time.

Whatever approach you take, you should respect and understand the source of any resistance. But if you need to clarify messaging to proceed, then it’s fair to insist on at least a limited messaging review.

There’s always time for messaging

Sometimes when I face a complex project, I tell the client that I’d like to create a ‘messaging map’ or messaging document to get their approval on key messages before I proceed. I often get the response “We don’t have time for that” or “Just work with what you see on our web page, the messaging is implied.”

That’s kind of like a ship’s captain saying “We don’t have time to chart a course, just start sailing and we’ll figure it out as we go.” You just might end up on the rocks.

Adding a ‘messaging’ step to a marketing content project can be a hard sell. It’s another step and another deliverable, and if you’re close to a deadline, it might seem like too much.

Experience proves that if there’s any confusion in the exact messaging, it’s much easier and faster to iron it out up front – before you’ve started writing that paper or creating that website.

The difficult discussions happen around the core messages and positioning, not how they are executed. When you can separate the messaging from the execution, your first draft will be much closer and any review cycles much smoother. Reviewers can focus on issues of tone/style, presentation, precise wording, etc.

In many ways, the less time you have, the more you need a messaging review process. But you might need help selling it to reluctant clients. Here are some suggestions for pitching the benefits of a messaging review cycle:

  • It will streamline the review cycles for the end product – probably removing one review cycle.
  • The positioning is work you (the writer) need to do anyway to develop the content well.
  • If the client thinks the messaging is already on their website, then it will be a good exercise for you to extract it and put it out for review. They may find that they’re not communicating exactly the messaging they think they are.
  • The messaging document, once in place, will streamline development of additional resources, including web pages, papers, presentations, etc. It can become part of sales training as well.

In a future post I’ll write about potential challenges in this messaging process. Use the comments if you have something to add to the discussion.

Crusading against random Capitalization

Letter A by cheesy42, on Flickr
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License  by  cheesy42 

I’m taking a break from marketing-related subjects to launch a campaign against random capitalization in the middle of sentences.  It’s a tough job, but apparently someone has to do it.

Some subset of the population has a compulsion to capitalize random words for little apparent reason.  It’s almost as if they have a memory from some long-ago German class about capitalizing nouns.

If someone’s not a professional writer, I don’t complain much. But too often I see random and inconsistent capitalization in signage, in website copy, or from other people who should know better.

Capitals are acceptable for names that could be trademarks, such as Acme Analysis Engine. But if you take this path, you need to be consistent and capitalize it every time, not just periodically. And it doesn’t work for something generic, such as “our Reporting capability.”

For most of us readers, capitalization within a sentence implies some kind of proper name. To plop it into the middle of a sentence for no good reason gives the brain a micro-second freeze that interrupts comprehension.

Perhaps people think that if they capitalize something, the reader will feel that it is inherently important. If you want emphasis, use italics. (Don’t even get me started on underlining….)