The Foundations of Message First Marketing

But just what exactly is it? And how can you use Message First to your advantage?  

What is Message First?

A message first approach is the single, simplest way to transform your marketing and guarantee greater success with all your campaigns, all your activity (on and offline), and all your communications (internal and external). 

It improves every part of your sales and marketing, and has a substantial impact on your bottom line. 

Why? Why is message first so important, so valuable? 

Putting your message first puts your audience first. It puts your users first, your customers first. It puts your business first. 

Putting your message first is the essential first step in any strategic approach. It’s the first step in your marketing plan, the first step in your sales tactics, the first step in your business strategy.  

Before you do anything else – before you lift a pencil to design a logo, a pen to write a sales letter or a finger to code a website – you need to put your message first. 

Why? 

Because your message lays the foundations for everything. 

Getting it right from the get go 

Putting your message first before any other sales, marketing or even business development activity, is the clear, compelling and cost-effective way to get results.

Put message first and you will: 

• Build better brands – with the messaging, tone of voice and a unique verbal identity that perfectly engages your audience

• Maximise marketing results – with the most relevant, most effective web copy, landing pages, brochures, videos that get clicks 

• Win more sales – with the simple three step-process that guarantees more influential, more profitable, longer-lasting relationships with your clients and customers. 

Discover, Distil, Deploy – the three step process at the heart of message first marketing 

With your brand’s key message in hand, every part of your marketing just falls into place. More impactful branding and design. More purposeful, easier-to-understand briefs. More engaging campaigns and copy. Faster sales. 

It’s simple when you know what your message is. 

And finding your key message? Putting it first? 

That’s easy too, when you put all the foundations in place with our three-step message first methodology. 

1. Discover

Before you can craft the perfect message, you need a comprehensive understanding of your brand’s foundations, your customers’ wants and needs, and the competitive landscape.

You need to get all the insights and inputs you can, ideally from three key streams: 

• Stakeholders – Start internally with your own team. From leadership to your frontline staff, find out how they really perceive your business and your brand. Dig deep into positioning, target audience, challenges and points of distinction and differentiation. 

• Customers – Remember that your stakeholders aren’t your target audience, so if you want to get input directly from your customers, you’ll need to speak to them. Whether it’s through customer interviews or a voice of customer analysis (exploring touchpoints and interactions like surveys, FAQs, reviews, chat transcript, forums and more), uncover their needs, pain points, and buying triggers by hearing straight from real customers.  

• Competitors – Take the time to thoroughly analyse your competitors. What are they saying? What are they doing? How are they positioned? Any opportunity to differentiate yourself is one that should be seized. 

The key for this discovery stage is to be as detached and unemotional as possible. Everything should be on the table. 

That’s why it helps to bring in external help, someone who can run an interactive discovery workshop to really poke and probe your stakeholders. Someone who can interview your customers with an impartiality that sees them more likely to open up and share the most valuable feedback. 

Someone like HNW. 

Tone of Voice is another essential input

At the discovery stage, if you don’t already have a clearly defined tone of voice, now is the time to find one. It’s an essential element of your brand identity, and a core input you need to feed into the creative process to help craft your key message.

It’s why our tone of voice workshops are so foundational to Message First.

Tone of voice workshops

2. Distil 

With all your insights to hand, the next stage is to distil them into your key message. 

This is all about the creative process. 

You’ll need to gather all your input and insights from the first stage, organise, group, theme, brainstorm and craft the message that will become central to all your marketing. 

You should:

• Solidify your brand foundations – If you don’t have that crystal clear brand identity, now is the time to codify it, taking everything you learned during the discovery stage to update and refine everything from your mission, vision and values, to your brand story, personality and promise.These guide the direction of your key message.

• Identify themes and patterns – Look for common threads across your discovery insights, from industry trends to customers’ wants, needs and desires. Group these findings into 3-5 overarching themes and key topics (like core challenges, desired outcomes, or long-term goals).

• Prioritise pain points and USPs – Lay out your audience’s top pain points alongside your unique selling propositions. Prioritise what’s most important to address and see where you can align and tailor your features and benefits to their wants and needs

Then, you need to get creative. 

Brainstorm ideas, draft elevator pitches, try writing formulas, and experiment with messages that may or may not work. 

There’s no easy way to do this. No hack, no shortcut, no ‘quick and dirty, foolproof way to get what you want in seconds.’ That’s probably why so many clients turn to us as brand messaging experts.

Crafting your key message

When exploring options for your key message, always try and make sure it’s CRAFTED:

• Clear and Concise: Simple and direct, ideally fewer than ten words
• Resonant: Connects internally with staff and externally with the audience
• Authentic: True to your brand identity
• Flexible: Broad enough to encompass all business operations
• Timeless: Avoids trends, focusing on long-term relevance
• Evocative: Contains emotional weight
• Distinct: Unique and stands out from competitors

3. Deploy

Crafted your message? Now it’s time to put it first. 

First, you’ll need to roll it out through your brand identity, revisiting all the core elements of both your verbal and visual brand to make sure they reflect your new key message. 

Next, use your key message to create the most influential parts of your brand messaging: 

• Your brand promise – the single, most important thing you deliver
• Your brand purpose – the reason you’re doing it 
• Your value proposition – the details of your offer 

The what, the why and the how. 

With that in place you can: 

• Create (and test) campaign ideas – Translate your key message into slogans, campaign ideas, product/service-specific messaging, and audience-specific messaging. These will form the foundation for all your marketing materials across multiple channels and mediums. 

• Update your website – Make sure your key message is reflected throughout your website. Refresh headlines, copy, and the overall presentation, site architecture and UX so that they all align with your new value proposition

• Implement across your marketing strategy – With such a clear foundation for your brand message and a supportive messaging hierarchy in place, developing future assets like fresh campaigns, new product launches, sales tools and customer engagement journeys becomes far easier. Your key message, put first, guides it all.

Of course, if you don’t have the time, the experience or the expertise to deploy your messaging, you might want to look for copywriting or content marketing support. 

The difference between message and messaging

Your message is your big idea that underpins your brand, your business and your marketing. Your messaging is the way you communicate that message.

Brand messaging is all the outputs that your key message informs…. Which is why it’s so important to put that key message first.

Discover, Distil, Deploy – Inputs, Ideation, Output 

Follow this simple, three-step process, and you’ll uncover all the insights you need to put your message first. 

You’ll streamline every part of your marketing activity, improve briefs, transform campaign material and make it easier for everyone inside and outside your organisation to do their jobs more effectively. 

You’ll guarantee your brand and your business the very best chance at success.

Discover. Distil. Deploy. The foundations of message first marketing. 

And if you need help putting them in place:

We can help