Choosing Your Key Messages

Recently, I had the opportunity to visit the beautiful, rugged Rocky Mountains. Between the stunning scenery all around and the cool crisp mountain, I was left feeling recharged and inspired. And best of all, it was a work trip, so I didn’t even have to feel guilty about it! The best part? The entire trip had me contemplating key messages of business…let me explain.

The one thing that struck me most while out amongst the swaying pines and soaring peaks was how many different things the mountains mean to everyone who comes out to visit them. Some people enjoy the mountains for their snowy ski hills. Others who come out to explore them have never touched a ski pole in their life. Some enjoy the kitschy little shops in towns like Banff and Canmore. This ties nicely into today’s blog post in which I will be discussing how to choose your key messages. The best thing about the Rockies is that they aren’t telling people how to enjoy them. Instead, people determine what it is they love best about them and enjoy them on their own terms.

Key Messages Are All About Providing Value for Your Customers

This “Rocky Mountain method” is precisely how you want to approach determining your business’s key message. Keep in mind, it isn’t your role to tell your customers what they think about your business is. Rather, take a cue from the mountains, and learn from your customers what it is about your products or services that they think is most important. The important thing is to offer them value. They might like you, and they might trust you, but if they can’t parcel out the value in what you’re offering, they won’t want anything from you.

Questions for Key Messages

In order to bring a customer onboard to your business or service, you’ll need to offer them value. To determine the best way to accomplish this, take a moment and dwell on these questions:

• What do most people ask about when they inquire about your business?
• What do people rave about when they talk about your business?
• What do they need to know about you?
• What do they think they know about you, but actually don’t?
• What’s something intriguing about your business that people have no idea about?
• What can you do that no one else can?
• What is it about your business that will change someone’s life? (Does it help their career, help their business, help their network, etc.?)

By having rock-solid answers to these questions, you’ll easily be able to provide clear-cut reasoning to potential clients and customers about the value your business is able to offer them. Now, recall the discussion we touched on in another blog, about identifying your target audience. We discuss determining what’s important to a client, to their family and happiness, and to their goals and desires. By combining these questions and your target audience’s values, we’re able to start honing in your business’s key messages.

Promoting Value to Your Target Audiences, Through Key Messages

So, we’ve sussed out who your target audiences are and how your business is able to offer them value. Now, it’s a matter of combining these two groups of information to determine what your key messaging should be. By putting together what you know about your target audience with the answers you came up with while establishing how your business is valuable, your key messages should basically begin writing themselves.

For example, consider what’s important to a potential client (a Target Audience question), and then ask yourself what they need to know about you and your business (a Value question). Where these two answers intersect, you’ll find one of your business’s key messages. This is how you are able to present value based on what you and your business are able to offer by factoring in what a potential client considers to be important. Voila: one key message, ready to go!

It’s Not an Easy Task

Coming to a conclusion on what your business’s key messages to your clients will be is not a particularly simple task. It is not something you should spend 10-15 minutes on before wrapping up and moving on to something else. The direction and course of your entire business will pivot and shift around these key messages. They could be the difference between bringing in multitudes of clients, and wondering why the phone won’t ever ring.

Take your time. Dwell on the points in this blog post. Put your whole self into figuring out what your company’s key messages will be. It’s your business, after all – make sure it gets off on the right foot!

If you need some help putting together your business’s key messages, give me a call. I’ll be happy to help you find the value in your company, and to make sure your clients and customers are aware of all the great products and services you’re able to offer them!