It’s the nature of the Internet and our social sharing habits that we take narratives of every kind and break them into tweet-sized pieces, leaving content to float around like so much pollen in the wind. This is one reason marketing professionals must work harder than ever to define the essential parts of a brand story–and to ensure that each part has integrity–before releasing content online.
How do you do this? You start by building a structure that helps to clearly define each part of your brand story in ways that add business and consumer value. A tool we’ve found useful is something called a “messaging matrix.” It helps to plan for “why” and “when” content lives in the same way that site IAs help to plan for “where” content lives. (As Lou Rosenfeld, author of “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web” has said, “If information architecture is the spatial side of information, I see content strategy as the temporal side of the same coin.”)
A messaging matrix houses the story you need to tell consumers—from beginning to end—to persuade them to choose your brand’s products and services over the competition. While the document does not contain actual copy, it articulates the strategic objective of each message you need to create. Once assembled, you and your content development team can refer to this document to target what messaging is most relevant for specific audiences in specific digital channels. From there you’re in a far better position to thoughtfully invest resources in creating content that’s contextually meaningful, strategically relevant and consistent with your brand story.
Building a messaging matrix can take several hours or several weeks. For steps on how to build one, check out my article at iMedia Connection: “Simple steps for planning your marketing content.”
The benefits of this tool?
- You see the whole story – The holistic view makes it easier to pinpoint where a change in strategy impacts specific messaging.
- Easy to add more structure – By isolating each message and its strategic focus, you’ve started to draft semantically rich content that your team can use to create even more structured data, such as tags for modeling a content management system or metadata for search engine optimization.
- Supports personalization – By clearly defining the core components of your brand story, your team can now begin to identify where it’s valuable to target personalized content.
Remember, just because people consume your marketing content in tiny pieces all over the place doesn’t mean that’s how you should build your content. Even a small investment of your time will go a long way toward providing the strategic guidance your team needs to develop consistent, clear, relevant, and persuasive content across your many marketing channels.
