Building an effective message map for your brand is increasingly challenging in the modern marketing world. The average user experience continues to grow ever more dynamic and personalized, with the integration of evolving AI technology and other tools that allow an audience to address their pain points at a granular level instantaneously.
A message map gives you a more dynamic perception of marketing personas for your brand. It also provides a powerful roadmap for how to communicate effectively, with a consistent brand voice, about products and services across all external communications.
Aligning your communications with the specific challenges your personas face so you can offer a solutions-based approach to addressing their problems will allow you to better navigate the modern marketing landscape, meet individual audience expectations, and take your brand messaging strategy to the next level.
Moving from Personas to the Personal
The drive of a powerful message map isn’t simply to align your brand voice and deliver the same message in the same way to each of your personas. Each of your personas comes with his or her own unique psychological drives, including challenges, benefits, and desired outcomes. The best messaging strategy provides a dynamic, adaptable framework to target each of your personas in unique ways that provide them with tailor-made solutions.
Each persona your brand is targeting faces unique pain points, challenges, goals, and other characteristics specific to them and their place in the buyer’s journey. That means the solutions and outcomes your brand offers won’t apply the same way to different prospective customers. The goal of personas is to move beyond simple demographics and build authentic, personalized communication with the people who can benefit from the solutions your brand provides.
Matching Your Personas with Individualized Brand Benefits
It’s critical to personalize your brand messaging so the solutions you’re communicating match the persona you’re trying to connect with.
Take the example of a company selling business software. Necessarily, there are a number of different types of software users within a business who perform different roles with different priorities, and each could represent a different persona. While each business-level user has unique goals and pain points, you must present the outcomes and solutions that apply to each.
Consider these business personas as examples of how to approach message mapping for the solutions your brand offers.
The Executive: The Buyer’s Persona
An executive user is tasked with making high-priority directorial decisions that affect their staff and company as a whole, and they may not necessarily be as technologically savvy when it comes to specific details of software functionality as other users. Their pain points are centered around the risk versus benefit of investing in new technology or software over the long term. They’re looking for a reason to justify the cost and weighing it against other business-wide priorities.
A successful brand message for this persona may be centered around how their software benefits the business holistically, how it improves their processes and operations, what software integration and the level of customer support looks like, and how using the software impacts their bottom line, backed by solid data and evidence.
The Technology Leader: The User’s Persona
An IT-level user is concerned with what the day-to-day operation of this software looks like, how it compares to existing technology, its functionality and ability to integrate with existing systems, and other more granular concerns.
A successful brand message for this persona might be to show how the software addresses tech-specific challenges faced by technology leaders within a given industry, versus competitors, and the benefits of investing the time and energy of integrating the new software for a business and its employees. This messaging may be more jargon-heavy and take a deeper dive into specifics about software features and functionality.
A lack of specificity in brand messaging is like trying to hit a dart board with a blindfold on. Sure, you’ll get a lucky hit or two, but you’ll miss far more often, which translated to your marketing efforts means wasted time, energy, and money. A message map that incorporates each of your buyer personas in a way that is specific and dynamic gives you the ability to offer the right solutions at the right time, with clarity and consistency that helps you connect with your audience’s pain points on a human level.
Using Your Message Map to Build a Successful Brand Message
A strong message map helps you visualize your personas in new and innovative ways while tailoring a unified brand voice to each in specific ways. This lets you humanize your approach and present your solutions in a way that shows the real impact on people’s day-to-day experiences.
Once you’ve built your message map, including what your personas care about, how they measure success and the cost of failure, and their challenges and pain points, you can begin to explore how to tailor your brand messaging to meet their needs, including solutions, benefits, and outcomes that would help improve their lives.
Here are some considerations when it comes to putting your message map into practice:
Build team unity by ensuring everyone understands the message map fully. Make sure everyone in all departments who will communicate about the brand externally understands the message map, including its core message, supporting points, and sub-messages. Workshops and training sessions for various departments and allowing team members to voice questions or concerns can help bring a cohesive approach to implementing the message map.
Integrate your message map with your Brand Style Guide. A message map should be included in your brand style guide, with clear directions on how to implement the message map in various contexts with a consistent brand voice.
Let your message map guide your content strategy. Your message map can be used to guide content creation across platforms and deliverable types. That way, all your content reflects the brand’s core messaging. Whether you’re producing a blog or web page, a social media post, an email campaign, or ad copy, your message map should directly inform a consistent brand voice across all content.
Don’t overcomplicate things. While a good message map is thorough and considers the various complexities of messaging to various personas, it’s also important that you cut to the core of things in a relatively simple way to understand. In other words, can you create a short elevator pitch that summarizes your solution to each persona type? Can you find a central theme or themes across your messaging that drives your brand’s story? Your message map should facilitate clarity both internally and externally about your brand’s messaging.
Test and Adjust Your Message Map Over Time. Use analytics and success metrics such as conversion rates, engagement rates, and feedback. When messaging isn’t resonating with your audience in a way that meets your key performance indicators, revisit your message map and be ready to make adjustments. Pay attention to feedback from internal members as well as customers targeted by your messaging, and incorporate the feedback into how you refine your message map for relevance and effectiveness.
Evolve Your Message Map as Your Brand Grows
Your brand isn’t static, nor is what types of messaging are most effective in the marketing landscape. As your brand evolves and grows over time, it makes sense that your messaging will evolve as well. Revisit your message map regularly and revise and refine it to meet your current product or service offerings and the types of markets you’re targeting. By building an effective message map, you can continue to grow your brand messaging strategy and see the benefit effective messaging has for your business.