Building Your Startup’s Strategy for Marketing Messages

“What’s in it for me?” We ask this question about so many things.

What’s in it for me if I lend money to my best friend?

What’s in it for me if I relocate for a new job?

What’s in it for me if I let my younger brother live with me rent-free?

In B2B marketing, the “What’s in it for me?” concept can “help create campaigns that resonate with the target audience by highlighting the benefits and value that they will receive from the product or service,” consulting firm Umbrex explains.

Your marketing messages must answer the question “What’s in it for me?” Otherwise, a prospect might not be persuaded to buy your product or service. Aside from helping convert prospects into customers, answering “What’s in it for me?” can reinforce the loyalty of existing clients.

Of course, you can’t come up with sharp messaging for marketing if you lack a deep understanding of your target audience.

Before we dig into how to build your startup’s messaging strategy for marketing, let’s look at HubSpot’s definition of a marketing message:

A marketing message is the words you use to communicate with your audience to convince them to do business with you. Your message is extremely influential in helping you meet your business goals, as it can be the difference between a new acquisition or sending a customer on to your competitor.

Key Takeaways

• Understand your marketing personas, also known as customer or buyer personas, to understand your target audience and develop stronger messaging
• Attach goals to key performance indicators (KPIs) so you can measure progress with your marketing messages
• Set a tone for your marketing messages based on the target audience, the media being employed, the goals of the messages, and the feelings you want the messages to evoke

How to Construct Your Startup’s Strategy for Marketing Messages

Every startup should develop a strategy for marketing messages before spending time and resources on a marketing campaign. Your strategy will propel the creation of content for your marketing campaigns. Start with a foundation for your strategy, and then adjust it according to:

• Feedback from your sales and marketing personnel based on input from your target audience
• Metrics that track the performance of your marketing efforts

Follow these three steps when you’re establishing or changing your strategy for marketing messages, as well as when you’re crafting each marketing message. 

1. Understand Your Marketing Personas

Before sending a single marketing message, be clear about who will receive the message.

Your ideal customer will shape what you say and how you say it. To better understand your ideal customer, develop marketing personas. These are fictional characters with demographic and behavioral attributes that represent your target customers.

Coming up with marketing personas helps foster consistent messaging across your organization, not just within your marketing operations. The process gives you valuable insights into your ideal customers, enabling you to speak to their needs, emotions, and interests.

2. Attach KPIs to Your Marketing Message Strategy

To evaluate the performance of your marketing messages, you must measure the results. That’s why it’s important to use KPIs to track results of your marketing campaigns.

However, KPIs are not goals. Your goals represent what you want to achieve with your marketing. KPIs are metrics that tell you how well your marketing is helping you reach those goals.

Here are five examples of how to assign KPIs to marketing goals.

Goal: Generate traffic for your website
KPIs: Website visits, bounce rates, clickthrough rates

Goal: Build brand awareness
KPIs: Social media likes and shares, inbound links (also called backlinks)

Goal: Generate leads
KPIs: Landing page conversion rates, email subscriptions

Goal: Convert leads into buyers

KPIs: Online sales activity, “thank you” page conversion rates

Goal: Improve customer retention
KPIs: Lifetime customer value, churn rates

Set the Right Tone

Your company should establish its own voice: the words you use, your brand’s defining characteristics, and your brand’s personality. This voice should help your company connect with its audience, and differentiate your company and its products or services from your competitors.

While your startup’s voice should generally remain consistent throughout your marketing, your tone can change depending on the situation. For example, the tone of an email about your company’s sales promotion shouldn’t be the same as the tone of an email about your company’s recent data breach.

While each marketing message and each marketing campaign should feature a unique but consistent tone, be flexible about making changes when, for instance, recipients of a marketing email react angrily to a message.

When setting the tone for your marketing messages, consider:

• Your intended audience (such as CEOs, millennials, IT professionals)
• You messaging vehicles (such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, company blog, email newsletter)
• Your marketing goals (such as educating, gathering leads, selling)
• The desired emotion of your audience (such as happiness, excitement, curiosity)
• The tone you want to convey (such as helpful, formal, informative)

To learn more, check out this rundown from job website Indeed of 21 types of marketing messages to consider.

Creating the Right Marketing Messages for Your Startup

Your startup’s strategy for marketing messages forms the foundation of all your marketing efforts. It should begin with understanding your audience, as they’ll drive your messaging. Equipped with knowledge about your audience, you can tailor the messaging tone to your audience, choose the proper vehicles for distributing your marketing messages, and achieve your marketing goals while still supporting your overall voice.

Oh, and don’t forget to pair KPIs with goals. You can’t figure out what’s working well with your marketing messages and what’s not working well if you don’t monitor and analyze metrics.

Need help creating a marketing strategy or crafting the right marketing messages for your startup? Sellerant can guide the way.