To reach your customer in today’s competitive landscape, you need to speak their language.

Meaningful relationships with your target audience are built on the back of informative, educational, and entertaining interactions with your brand. Every blog you post, email you send, or social media update you publish is a chance to make your voice heard. If you don’t know how to craft a powerful marketing message, you could be wasting these valuable opportunities.

95% of B2B buyers say they trust content to help them make their purchasing decision, and 60% of companies say they’re producing content every day. But a huge number of organizations don’t know if they’re sending the right message with their content. Only 42% of marketers consider themselves “effective” at content marketing.

Learning how to craft every piece of content to better connect with your brand is how you convince your customers that you’re the only choice for them in a sea of similar brands. Your marketing message lifts you above the clutter, highlights your unique brand value, and puts you face-to-face with your target audience.

1. Make Your Audience The Hero

The best marketing messages aren’t about your company and how amazing your product or service is. Instead, the focus of the conversation should be the people you want to serve. Too many companies focus exclusively on talking about themselves, and they lose the interest of their audience instantly as a result. Instead, think about how you can shift the focus to your customer.

What kind of problems can you solve for your target audience? A company selling computer software for accounting could use phrases like “Save time and money”, to demonstrate how they can make the client’s life better. The primary concern of your audience is figuring out which products and services are going to solve their problems and improve their lives. If you can focus on responding to your customer’s pain points, you’ll be more likely to earn their attention.

2. Leverage Your Brand Essence

What makes your brand different? With so many competitors in the world today, customers are looking less at things like features and price points to make purchasing decisions. Instead, your audience wants to know that they have an affinity with your company when it comes to certain values, missions, and expectations.

When crafting a highly effective marketing message, focus on allowing the most important elements of your brand to shine through. How can you highlight your values as a brand? You can focus on how your new product is environmentally friendly, or ethically produced? What sort of language will you use to show your personality? Will your words be sophisticated, or simple and laced with slang to capture a younger audience?

4. Adapt Your Message To Different Channels

A good marketing strategy involves talking to your audience in multiple different locations both online and offline. Though the underlying voice behind your marketing message needs to stay the same on every channel, the way you present your message can change according to the platform.

The content you produce for your website blog is likely to be a more long-form, engaging article with helpful tips and actionable insights. The content you post on Instagram, on the other hand might need to condense ideas down to a single quote, a caption, a short video, or an image.

Consider how your audiences expect to interact with your brand on each channel and translate your message accordingly. This will help you to reach a wider range of potential customers.

5. Use Visuals To Add Context To Content

A marketing message isn’t just audio or text – it’s also the images and visual content you use to add context to your conversation. Around 90% of companies use images in blog content to help customers understand the topic in question. Studies even show that the more images you have in your written content, the higher the success rate is likely to be.

When figuring out how to craft a powerful marketing message, ask yourself how you can implement graphical assets to connect with your audience on a deeper level. Options could include:

• Using graphs and charts to show data in an easy-to-consume format
• Adding photos to bring a human element to your content
• Using illustrations and graphics to define an idea in your content
• Sharing infographics for quick access to information
• Using videos and clips to demonstrate an idea

6. Be Original

Your marketing message isn’t just a way to reach customers – it’s also an important part of differentiating your brand. While it’s fine to use competitor content as a launching point for inspiration on what kind of messages you should produce, make sure your final assets are original.

Start by researching your competitors and finding out what kind of marketing messages they create to reach a similar audience to yours. Once you know how other companies are using content, you can put your own spin on things. Instead of writing your own version of a popular blog in your industry, take a new approach and explore the idea in video form, with insights from market-leading influencers.

The more original your marketing message is, the more memorable it becomes.

Always

The Always brand is one of the better-known in the world for creating emotional, meaningful marketing messages. Always focuses on helping all women to feel their best, no matter their shape, age, or origin.

In 2013, the company launched the #LikeAGirl campaign through collaboration with Holler and Leo Burnett Chicago. The marketing campaign caught the attention of a younger audience of 16 to 24-year-old girls Always had begun to lose touch with. Managed mostly on social media, the ad looked at turning the phrase “Like a Girl” into a positive thing, as a way of empowering younger women. 94% of customers since have agreed that #LikeAGirl has encouraged young girls to be more confident. Three times as many girls now have a positive association with the phrase “Like a Girl” too.

Smile Direct Club

Effective marketing messages focus immediately on the features or benefits of your product that are most important to your target audience. This means you need to understand your audience before you start crafting your message. The Smile Direct Club knows its customers are looking for excellent dental care, without the stress of high prices.

The ads created by the team use references to “less than $3 per day” in the headline, to let customers know they can save money. The rest of the content in the ads highlights the other elements customers might consider to be important when making a purchasing decision. You learn the product is “safe”, that you can use it “for home”, and that it works within 4-6 months: