Messaging Strategy in Communication

We communicate. It’s a routine for us as corporate communications professionals to continuously deal with, discuss, talk, narrate and modulate the issues related to communication around the brands we are associated with. Whether it is how should our website look like or how should our Instagram and Facebook page highlight us among the audience. Whether we can reach out to our customers effectively or not. Whether we are communicating in the right way or not. And many more such questions that run past our minds all the time.

For corporate communications professionals, the task is truly multidimensional, and we need to think of sales, human resources, brand value, customers, business associates, stakeholders, etc., almost every minute as to how our communication will impact them.

So, it’s all about connecting the message, media, messenger, and the audience in a truly productive manner, ensuring the delivery of a well-designed message in an impacting manner. It’s also about finding out what is the audience that needs to be taken care of, who is your core audience, who is the influencer, who are the decision-makers, and who could probably play in negatively influencing dissuading our audience away from us.

We craft our messages keeping in the best insights we have about our customers, and we design them for targeting potential customers, and we also ensure that the messages are customized for our target audiences. On one hand, there is a corporate message, and, on another hand, there is a product-specific message, and both need to be delivered to various audiences including some overlap of different audiences.

The message being rightly used through media and targeting of right kind of media will help us amplify the message appropriately among the audiences. Not all communications need to reach all the media even if they carry a similar interest in reporting. Media is evolved and even if we talk of one media beat, today we have reporters, special correspondents, experts, reviewers, and opinion-makers among them. Each of them will look at the same story from a different perspective, and therefore, it is crucial to choose the right set of media even within the same sector to ensure the message doesn’t get diluted and the audience outreach is maximised.

Messaging strategy is something that becomes our key to success in delivering brand communications. It starts from the most suitable positioning, building communication around distinguishing factors, bringing out USPs, completes at the creation of a compelling story to tell our audiences. It’s a story that audiences believe in, makes the highest impact on their liking, attachment, preference for any brand.

It is the messaging strategy that helps facilitate implementing all further actions in the chain of communication. Whether it’s marketing communications or social media campaigns, messaging strategy becomes a starting point in our lives as corporate communications professionals. It’s not just about the use of a few words or images, but a lot about what and how we communicate to our audiences.

In today’s times, our audiences are flooded with loads of information constantly even before they consume something, so it becomes most crucial to think and plan about our messaging well, understanding how they will react to it, how they will notice it, how they will absorb it, and how they will take decisions based on this.

If our messaging strategy is driven by a purpose, has been well thought out, driven by customer insights, is open to feedback, is flexible to change, and tells a compelling story to the audiences, it is most likely to make into a great delivery of messages and their impact.

The views and opinions published here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the publisher.

Praveen Nagda

Praveen Nagda is the CEO of Peregrine Public Relations, a full-service corporate communications and public relations consultancy firm delivering a pan-India reach to its clients. He also heads White Coffee, an independent events & celebrity engagement company.

Praveen has been closely associated with many national and international events related to cinema for children, art and culture. He has a well-rounded experience that cuts across all key sectors of PR & Corporate Communications.

He started his career with URJA Communications, an advertising agency specialising in technology brands, where he was instrumental in developing the PR division. Post this, he had a stint with Horizons Porter Novelli, a global public relations consultancy. Thereafter, he was heading the IT & Telecom division at Clea PR, a leading Indian public relations and communications company followed by a fairly long stint with Omnicom Group agencies viz. TBWA\India and Brodeur India.