Determining your story serves as a critical first step in developing a successful marketing and communications program. Recipient-oriented stories are key to success.

Whether you are experiencing change, launching a new initiative, or revising your go-to-market strategy, recipient-oriented messaging sets the foundation for your communications efforts and helps ensure you tell a consistent story across all channels.

Your story comes to life through your messaging. Here's how to create a key message platform that will resonate with a range of audiences.

Knowing your audience is essential to effective key messaging

The first step is knowing your audience. When crafting your key message platform, it’s tempting to get caught in the trap of simply telling people what you want them to know. But, it’s not about you. It’s about what the people you are engaging with want and need to hear.

For some companies, this means research with key audiences to gauge recipients’ perceptions of their brand and current marketing messages. For others, it means diving into audience personas and using the information captured in these valuable tools to guide message development.

One technique I often use is to ask the following question about each audience before I begin writing:

"After he or she hears, reads or sees my message, what do I want the recipient to:"

1. Think?

2. Feel?

3. Do?

The answers to these three questions become building blocks and frames of reference when creating your key messaging. With your answers in hand, you can reverse engineer what messages your audience will need and/or want to think, feel and take your desired action.

Crafting recipient-oriented key messaging

Once you have a clear understanding of your audiences’ wants and needs, and how you can move them to think, feel and do, you are ready to begin crafting your key message platform.

Create a multi-level platform that includes:

Elevator Speech: Your five-second billboard that quickly gives the highlights of your story. Importantly, your brief message should easily lead to follow-up questions.

Overarching Messages: These messages resonate with all audiences and can be used in multiple applications, on multiple channels.

Audience-Specific Messages: Many communicators stop at overarching messages. However, to create a truly recipient-oriented key messaging platform you must speak directly to different audiences. That’s where audience-specific key messaging comes into play.

For example, when communicating about a business acquisition, the information your internal employees — at all levels — will need and want to hear, and the actions we’ll want them to take, are much different than the information your customers will require.

Next, your story should always follow the Pathway to Message Excellence. It contains six pieces; the first three are the content of your message and the next three are the context of your message:

1. What? Describe the important facts, features and benefits.

2. So, what? Why should the recipient care? What’s in it for them?

3. Now, what? Tell the recipient exactly what to think and do.

4. Are these messages simple? Are they direct, and easy to understand?

5. Have I captured what my audience needs to hear, not what I want to say? Are my messages recipient-oriented?

6. Do I use everyday language? No jargon, no acronyms. Have I written my messages the way people actually talk?

These six steps lead you down The Pathway to Great Messaging.

Download a copy of the Pathway and pull it out any time you craft new key messaging. It serves as a powerful visual tool and reminder of what it takes to create messages that truly resonate.

Bring your key messaging to life

Once you’ve created your key message platform it’s time to share it with the people who matter most to your organization. This platform becomes the DNA of your brand or initiative story. Include messages in talk tracks, collateral and on social. Share the appropriate messaging with your customer-facing teams to ensure everything harmonizes. Every individual should internalize these messages and use them in authentic ways.

If you would like help developing your key messages, contact me. We also offer key message training to help your teams discover how best to use key messaging in their work, or to train spokespeople to use key messaging during interviews.

Onward.