Have you recently developed new company or product medical messaging? Are you keen to ensure that you’re implementing your messaging in the most effective way so that it helps you achieve your marketing goals?
We’ve waxed lyrical about the wonders of messaging many times before. For us, it’s the keystone of successful marketing. Without great messaging, everything else falls apart (or at least isn’t nearly as effective as it could be).
But even when your company has developed amazing messaging, things can still go wrong when it comes to implementing it. You can still confuse your audience and lose their attention, making you blend into the crowd. The question is: what impact does this have on your sales?
In this article, we’ll cover what you can do to make sure that your messaging will play its part for you, and by the end, you’ll clearly see the potential downfalls that can occur during implementation and how you can avoid them.
Accuracy in conveying your message
The first step is to ensure that you convey your message accurately and clearly so that it isn’t misconstrued.
Drifting away from your original message will lose its impact. Remember the rule of 7, now more like the rule of 15-25, which states that your audience needs to see your message 7 times before they really take note and action. If you change or even just tweak your message each time it goes out, you’re effectively resetting the ‘rule of 7’ back to 1 each time (or close to it).
This is a big reason why medical messaging often doesn’t resonate as it should, and great work is undone during implementation.
In reality, you’re confusing your audience, which is a major problem. Each time you slightly change your message, your audience will struggle a little more to understand it, causing them to take time and energy to link the two versions of your message together.
But what does that really mean? When your message is not resonating each time, your audience will likely lose interest and go elsewhere, or at best, take longer to understand that your technology is the answer to one of their problems. Neither is optimal for a growing business.
The impact of confusing messaging
You may not think that confusing messaging is a big deal, but its impacts are far-reaching and can be extremely harmful to your audience engagement rates, whether that be on your website, at a congress, or during a live presentation or webinar.
Loss of trust and credibility
Consumers need to trust a brand before they commit to it. Inconsistent or confusing messaging can make your brand appear unprofessional and unreliable, which can damage your credibility and lose the trust of your customers.
Decreased brand recognition
A consistent brand message is crucial for creating a brand identity that is easily recognisable above your competition. If your messaging is confusing, it can be difficult for consumers to recognise and remember your brand, meaning they won’t be able to recall you when they’re ready to adopt your technology.
Wasted marketing efforts
Each piece of marketing content you produce is an investment and takes time (and budget) from your team. If your brand’s medical messaging is rolled out in a confusing and inconsistent manner, these efforts will be devalued as your marketing will not effectively engage your target audience or drive the desired action of increased adoption and revenue.
Lower customer retention and loyalty
Consistent medical branding is key to building customer loyalty. If customers are confused about your brand, they may be more likely to turn to competitors with clearer messaging and more predictable offerings. As Donald Miller from Storybrand says: “People don’t buy the best products; they buy the ones they can understand the fastest.”
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How to ensure accuracy
We’ve laid out why accurately sharing your messaging is so important, but what can you do to ensure it?
Create a communication guideline document
This should be a comprehensive guide to your brand’s verbal identity (and visual, if included with brand guidelines). It should include details about your key messages, brand voice, and lexicon (words that you use and don’t use and grammar preferences) as well as your logo usage, colour schemes, typography, and imagery (if your brand guidelines are included).
This document will serve as the “source of truth” for all brand communications moving forward, to ensure consistency is achieved without exception.
A great tip is to keep a document (OneNote is great for this) that has all your approved materials in one place (in image form). This will allow you to quickly compare your new materials with previous ones. You’ll be amazed at how inconsistency in wording and style creeps in without anyone noticing.
Conduct a communication workshop
Organise sessions where you educate your team (marketing and sales are a start) about the brand, including the importance of maintaining message consistency. These workshops should cover how to use the communication guidelines and provide real-world examples of correct and incorrect message usage.
You can go back to your OneNote document that contains all approved materials to show examples of good and bad usage.
This can be extended to your entire company, so your customers experience consistent messaging when speaking with your sales team, customer service representatives, or when reading your materials online or in print.
Provide easy access to communication materials
Make sure everyone has easy access to your messaging framework and examples of how it is implemented. You could use a shared drive or a cloud-based brand management platform.
Appoint a communication (and brand) steward
This could be someone in a senior or junior marketing role whose responsibility includes maintaining communication consistency. They can oversee brand usage, including your messaging, and help answer any queries your team might have.
If you’ve created one document with all your approved materials, checking message and brand consistency will be a relatively quick task to do but add significant value to the overall consistency of your message.
At Podymos, this task is completed by a junior marketing team member and any inconsistencies are elevated to a senior manager for review.
Regular updates
If there are any changes or updates to your communication (and brand) guidelines, relay them promptly and clearly to the whole team. You might need to arrange additional online or in-person training sessions in these cases, depending on the number of updates.
Implement your messaging in all your materials
Materials and channels your messaging should be used on:
Here are some of the main touchpoints where your messaging should be incorporated, and it should be identical on all as you don’t know where your audience will engage with you:
- Website
- Social media platforms
- Email marketing
- Printed materials
- PR material
- Advertising
- Packaging
- Internal communication
- Customer service
- Videos
- Content marketing
Remember, consistency in marketing does not mean being repetitive or boring. It’s about creating a strong, reliable brand identity and maintaining it across all platforms and points of interaction with your consumers.
Get the most out of your messaging
By now, you probably have a good understanding of the impact of getting it wrong when distributing your message, as well as an idea of how well it can work for you when done right.
And yes, getting it right really is as simple as being accurate and consistent. You will soon start to see the rewards of your hard work.