The Four Types of Messaging Your Audiences Need

If you’ve built a house or gone through a renovation before, you know the challenge of coordinating contractors to make sure that construction work is done on time and results in a sturdy, well-built home. If the plumbing isn’t done at the right time, or it overlaps with electrical work, then not only does the project stall — but the risk of disaster (e.g. if that electrical line touches water) increases.

Building a messaging house requires the same coordination of activities to make sure that each piece of messaging is built well and works with other messages. At SiriusDecisions, we’ve identified four types of messaging that need to be built and coordinated with each other for success:

• Corporate messaging. Corporate messaging is the high-level messaging built by communications teams to express the organization’s core values. All messaging should be built for an audience, but with corporate messaging the audience is typically broad and includes buyers, customers, influencers, current and prospective employees, and investors. Corporate messaging manifests itself through a brand narrative that delivers messaging for each audience and conveys how the organization can positively impact that audience member.
• Buyer messaging. Buyer messaging is built by portfolio marketers to help a buyer during the purchase decision process. By using insight about what the buyer cares about and how he or she wants to consume information, organizations can leverage buyer messaging to help the buyer move as efficiently through their buyer’s journey as possible by answering questions at each buying stage. Buyer messaging is designed to be activated by those who interact with the buyer, including demand, content, sales and communications teams.
• Sales messaging. Sales messaging, also built by portfolio marketers, takes buyer messaging and transforms it into messages that reps can deliver to maximize every buyer interaction. Sales messaging is built with a sales audience in mind and ensures that the reps receive the insight they need in the ways that they prefer. Sales messaging is activated in purpose-built sales content that delivers the insight reps need at the moment of interaction with a buyer, and delivered to reps through sales knowledge transfer programs.
• Customer messaging. Customer messaging, or post-sale messaging, is built by either customer engagement teams or portfolio marketing to support a customer after the sale. Organizations need customer messaging to enable existing customers to maximize the value they receive from the offerings purchased and to help them to become advocates for the organization and the offering over time. This messaging is also built to motivate them to re-enter the buying process for upsell and cross-sell activities. Customer messaging is activated through assets and interactions that are delivered to customers throughout their lifecycle.

Communications, portfolio marketing and customer engagement should work closely together to secure a strong link between all four types of messaging. The three teams must coordinate efforts to ensure that the messaging is consistent and reinforces what they hear as buyers and customers are engaged.

Portfolio marketing and sales enablement work closely together to establish sales messaging that not only is effective, but also receives a proper transferred to the sales team. Sales enablement programs that take advantage of the sales messaging developed can help ensure that the sales messaging has the impact demanded and resonates with buyers that receive other messages from the organization.

As buyers become customers that hopefully become buyers again, portfolio marketing and customer engagement must work in concert to build messaging that is consistent — and provide seamless transitions between the buyer’s journey and post-sale customer lifecycle. This consistency is of particular importance at the transition points — when a buyer makes the final selection and becomes a customer, and when a customer re-enters a buying process.

To create all of this messaging, leverage tools like the SiriusDecisions Messaging Nautilus^®. The four iterations of the model Messaging Nautilus: Corporate Brand, Messaging Nautilus: Buyer’s Journey, Messaging Nautilus: Sales Process (client access only) and Messaging Nautilus: Customer Lifecycle (client access only) are designed to work with each other to build a solid and stable house to last for years to come.