Creating effective marketing messaging can often feel like a balancing act. Too often, product marketers find themselves caught between two pulls:
- broader strokes of creative branding, and
- granular details of product management and their feature/function mindset
Effective messaging starts from the top with the overarching strategic family of messages that provide a “true north” for buyer persona and product specific messaging. In this blog we explore how this kind of top-down approach creates a seamless narrative; one that helps guide potential customers through the sales funnel.
What Is Strategic Messaging?
Strategic messaging is the process of creating a unified message that resonates with your company’s overarching goals, vision, and market positioning. This is unlike tactical messaging, which focuses on specific products or features.
Strategic messaging takes a broader, more holistic view by incorporating macro-level elements like competitive positioning, industry trends, and the needs of all buyer personas across a multi-product portfolio. Such a broad perspective ensures that messaging reflects and supports the company’s strategic focus. It also sets up a consistent narrative to guide all other communications.
Why Is Strategic Messaging Important?
A strategic approach to healthcare IT messaging can significantly impact how your various target audiences perceive your company and products.
In smaller companies with a single product, strategic messaging might articulate your overarching vision—the aspirational benefits you hope to offer healthcare organizations and their patients. This approach ensures that the messaging remains anchored to your core mission even as your company grows and evolves.
Additionally, strategic messaging provides a cohesive framework within which all other messages can align. This is particularly important as a company scales up to a larger organization offering a broader solutions portfolio that requires multiple products and messages to coexist. Each product message needs to fit into the overarching company message, creating an all-encompassing narrative that reinforces the brand’s core values and objectives.
Where Does Tactical Messaging Fit?
Strategic messages are more stable and provide a consistent and aligned tone for all communications. Alternatively, tactical messages focus on specific products and the needs they meet for various buyer personas. These messages are more granular and may change to adapt to new product features, market trends, or customer feedback.
Tactical messaging is essential for communicating a product’s immediate benefits and functionalities. This helps potential customers understand how the product can solve their specific problems.
Striking a Balance
One key challenge in messaging is finding the right balance between being too vague and too specific. On one end of the spectrum, messaging that is too specific can get bogged down in technical details, focusing too much on features rather than benefits. This is a common misstep for technical founders or marketers who are deeply familiar with the product and may not see the bigger picture.
But messaging that is too vague can fail to communicate what the company or product does and the value it provides. To stand out with creative messaging, some founders create statements that lack clarity and again fail to convey their product’s unique value proposition.
Consider the following examples:
- Overly Specific Messaging. “Our radiology software includes a 3D imaging module with customizable settings for tissue density analysis.” While technically accurate, this message might not immediately convey the benefits to a broader audience.
- Overly Vague Messaging. “Revolutionizing radiology for a better tomorrow.” This message sounds promising but doesn’t provide tangible information about what the product does or how it benefits the user. It could be universally applied to any radiology product.
- Balanced Messaging. “Our innovative software enhances radiologist diagnostic accuracy and efficiency with flexible 3D imaging capabilities that empower caregivers to improve patient care and clinical outcomes.” This approach combines the clear articulation of the product’s purpose and benefits while communicating relevant context to the target audience.
A Structured Approach to Crafting Effective Messaging
You can create a compelling narrative that guides potential customers through the buying process. How? By maintaining a clear alignment between the strategic messages at the top of the funnel and the detailed, tactical messages in the middle. This top-down approach to messaging offers several key benefits:
- Consistency. Ensures all messages align with the company’s overarching goals and values, creating a more consistent and recognizable brand narrative.
- Relevance. Tailors messages to the specific needs and perspectives of different clinical, technical, and operational personas to increase the relevance and impact of communications.
- Clarity. Provides a clear pathway for information to flow from high-level strategic messages to detailed product-specific messages. This helps potential customers better understand the value propositions across each sales funnel stage.
A Recipe for Strong Strategic Messaging
Creating effective messaging takes time and effort. The more time spent iterating and involving various internal stakeholders and customers, the better the outcome. Testing messages with sales leadership and running them by customers can help identify what resonates best. This ensures the final messaging is impactful and aligned with the company’s strategic goals.
Are you ready to strengthen your strategic messaging? Our healthcare IT product marketing experts can help you build a framework that will result in cohesive, relevant, and compelling messaging that guides your potential customers from awareness to purchase. Contact us to learn more.
