Messaging Workshops
Have you ever asked your employees or customers to describe in one sentence what it is your company does?
Are their responses all consistent? Are their responses what you expected them to be?
This simple exercise can be a good indication of whether your business needs to review their messaging. If your employees aren’t clear on your mission and what it is that makes your business stand out from the competition, then chances are this won’t be clear to your customers either!
As your business grows and your team expands, channels of communication increase, and your original message can be distorted with inconsistent versions that can in some cases actually hurt your brand.
In addition, your offering might evolve with a change in the market, so revising your messaging to align with these changes is important!
A messaging workshop is the ideal solution to ensuring consistent brand messaging. It aims to establish your company’s key messages and capture them in a framework that can be shared and used by everyone throughout the business.
Ultimately this will lead to consistent communication of your brand to customers.
As well as defining the messaging around your business, a workshop can also be useful for defining the communication around a particular product or service.
A messaging workshop can of course be run internally, but external facilitation brings a different, balanced perspective that will challenge any self-serving rather than customer focused messaging.
Here’s how we run our messaging workshops.
Pre-workshop
In advance of the workshop we will ask for some information from you including:
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Your overall objectives and reasons behind wanting to review your messaging
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Who will be involved on the day and their job functions
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Who your competitors are – which will allow us to do some research on their offering and how it compares to you
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If hosting at your facilities – the room size and layout
The workshop
Our messaging workshops usually take half a day, but this will depend on the size of your business, who’s involved, and whether you are looking to include a review of each of your products and services.
If possible, we will come to you and facilitate the workshop at your organisation, or, depending on your current situation and social distancing measures, we can run the messaging workshop via video call.
We will use a series of interactive exercises and facilitated discussions that will aim to obtain the following information:
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Your target audience: Who is your target audience, what challenges do they face, how does your offering help them to overcome their challenges
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Audience personas: What are your different types of customer, how do they respond to different messages and which channels do they use
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Positioning statement: The simple ‘what we do’
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Your mission: What does your business aim to achieve by offering its products and/or services (other than being successful and making money of course!)
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Your value proposition: What is it that makes you stand out
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Proof points: What proof do you have that you stand out
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Tone of voice: How do you want to be perceived – i.e friendly and approachable? Professional and corporate?
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A new or revised strapline
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Your company values: What values underpin the way you want to be working and how does this come across internally and externally.
Workshop output
We will pull together the notes and discussions from the workshop and develop a messaging framework document. This can be used internally to roll-out across your marketing, update your brand guidelines, and used as a reference point for employees and as a training document for new additions to the team.
You can download our messaging framework template for free here.
We also offer an additional half day workshop with your employees to inform them on how to communicate your brand message with customers. This includes guidelines around the use of social media, how to share the correct visual identity of the brand (e.g. logo and colour palettes), and of course what it is that should and shouldn’t be said to customers.
We realise with the current situation that not all businesses can accommodate workshops in person, so we are currently also running workshops online, get in touch for more information.