Create Your Messaging Framework
A step by step guide for coaches, creatives and other service-based business owners
Creating a messaging framework is what I do with clients in my Unlock Your Message programme. I believe that it’s the necessary first step before you can write engaging copy or build an effective marketing strategy for your business. It’s also a critical element in fully owning your expertise - and until you do that, it’s hard to be respected, or paid, as an expert.
First things first, what is brand messaging?
At its simplest, brand messaging is how you express in words what you do, who you do it for and what results you create. People tend to think of messaging in terms of taglines (the most-often cited being Nike’s ‘Just Do It’) but it’s broader than that. It includes your niche and other elements of your positioning (such as your USP; what the real value is that you offer to your ideal clients; who your ideal clients are).
At its heart, messaging is about communicating. It’s great if you feel an internal sense of clarity about your niche (and that clarity is definitely likely to help you to communicate better), but if you express that internal knowing in a jargon-filled meandering ramble, that’s still poor messaging.
What’s the benefit of having a messaging framework?
Maybe the best way to answer this is to think about what it’s like when you try to market your business without a firm foundation of clear messaging. When you can’t describe the real value of your work, the rest of your marketing efforts can feel like you're swimming through treacle. Uphill. Oh, and the tide's against you... and did I mention the fog?
When you've got a clear message in place, you can use that as the basis for creating copy that will draw your ideal clients to want to buy your services. The stress goes out of sales calls - you’re only speaking to potential clients who resonate with your message and are eager to learn more - no more wasting time on discovery calls with people who are the wrong fit, and no more trying to convince people to buy.
Since your message is unique to you, it means you no longer need to compete with other life coaches/designers/insert-your-specialism-here on price. Obviously, price is still going to be relevant for your clients, but it won't be the defining factor for them choosing you, which means you can charge based on the value you're providing rather than being constrained by the average rate in your niche.
Once you unlock the message you really want to tell the world, you'll want to share it, meaning networking and reaching out to people will be a thousand times easier.
Using a messaging framework will give you more clarity and ensure that you don’t miss important elements of your message. Working on your messaging is an investment (of time, if not of money) and a robust messaging framework should last your business for the next 3-5 years. If you continue to refer back to it, refine it and use it to help you in your decision-making process for new business ideas, it should save you from disappearing down rabbit holes and wasting time on poor-fit (but initially shiny) projects.
Messaging helps you to create an evergreen marketing strategy - one that works for the long term and compounds over time, so that it’s sustainable and doesn’t require you to be ‘on’ all the time (in contrast to a launch-based strategy that’s heavy on your social media presence or ad budget).
It’s also the necessary basis for authority marketing - you can’t be seen as an expert in your field if you never claim a specific area of specialization.
Finally, once you’ve been in business for a while and you’ve developed your own unique methodology, the processes that you know work for you and your clients - that’s your intellectual property. Creating a messaging framework (especially if you start naming your proprietary systems) is part of owning and acknowledging the work that has gone into creating that IP. It’s validating - and it helps you to be paid as the expert that you are.
How does a messaging framework work?
A messaging framework brings together different ways of expressing your message. These vary a little across industries (and, of course, different coaches or marketing consultants approach their frameworks differently), but they usually include the following elements:
A brand promise (or ‘why-buy’ statement)
A description of who benefits most from your service
At least one differentiator (your Unique Selling Point)
Some form of elevator pitch
An expression of the ‘bigger why’ behind your work
A description of your brand voice & values
Optional extras may include headline benefits, brand pillars, taglines and brand story examples.
In my own messaging framework (my Unlock Your Message programme) we start the whole process with one of those ‘optional extras’, brand storytelling, and use that as the foundation from which we uncover the other elements of your messaging.
I also like to include more creative and personal elements to the messaging frameworks I co-create, because my clients are usually solo business owners (or they have small teams, but they are still very much the founder, ‘face’ of the business and its creative director).
This means that we get to create messaging that revolves around their personal passions and values (with the limiting factor of course that they still need to intersect with the interests of their audience), including the founders’ personal strengths.
Who should create a messaging framework?
The short answer is, all businesses should have one. This is because, if you don’t, you’ll have to reinvent the wheel every time you write a new piece of website copy or marketing material, and it’s likely that your marketing will come across to others as being either muddled and all over the place, or bland and forgettable.
Where coaches, consultants and other solo service providers can get tripped up is either assuming that messaging is just for big brands, or in attempting to emulate big brand tactics. Companies like Apple or Nike have been around for decades, have teams of hundreds of people working on all aspects of their branding, messaging, copywriting, content creation, and they have huge budgets to spend on advertising. What works for them is highly unlikely to translate directly for you.
What are the non-negotiables for creating your messaging framework?
Your brand messaging exists in that sweet spot where your self-knowledge (your understanding of your real strengths and unique way of doing things) meets your empathy (your ability to understand the needs of your ideal clients).
You need to be willing to do some investigating to make sure you really grasp the difference between all the things you’ve developed skill and competency in versus your true deep-down strengths. This is one of the most rewarding elements of my own work with clients in Unlock Your Message - that lightbulb moment when someone really starts to own their own brilliance.
You also need to be willing to do some Voice of Customer research in order to ensure that you can communicate the real value of your work to your ideal clients using the precise words and phrases they use themselves (instead of drifting into using industry jargon, as the curse of the expert has so many of us doing).
A great message needs to be emotive. We make buying decisions (in fact, all decisions) on an emotions-first basis (which we then go on to post-rationalise with all the logical reasons why we should do the thing we are emotionally driven to want to do).
The final non-negotiable for messaging is that you really need a second pair of eyes to look at whatever you come up with. As a messaging coach, I’m biased of course - but while you don’t necessarily have to work with a coach, communication is a two way street, so you need to know whether what you’re saying is landing with its intended recipient.
An image that is often used to describe one of the things that makes messaging so hard, is that it’s as if you’re trapped inside a glass jar full of good things. You want to explain to people outside the jar how much goodness is inside, but there’s a large label on the outside of the jar, which means that they can’t see what’s inside. You, on the other hand, can’t see what’s on the label. Working with a coach means that you have someone who can tell you what’s showing up on the label outside and can help you to unpack what’s there inside the jar.
You don’t need to come up with another Ideal Client Avatar to create your messaging framework
My clients are usually intensely relieved to discover that Ideal Client Avatars are irrelevant to the messaging process. A deep understanding of your clients is key to all marketing work of course, but I think creating ICAs is a pointless distraction.
An invented Ideal Client is based both on generalizations and, often, on wish-fulfilment. In-depth customer research, by contrast, is based on real data. You’ll need to look at your client intake forms, session notes, feedback forms and testimonials, plus potentially also check out forums, blogs and podcasts that are popular with the people your work is there to serve.
As well as looking at the data, I encourage my clients to choose one, two or three of the people they’ve most enjoyed working with, and know reasonably well as individuals, so that they can hold them in mind during the messaging process. As we come up with various elements of their messaging, we consider whether each would resonate with these specific rounded individual human beings.
Here are the steps for uncovering your message
Step 1 - it starts with you. Identify your strengths, your unique experiences. I do this with my clients via journaling and story prompts, followed by a coaching session to dig deeper into what the journaling has revealed.
Step 2 - what is your core offer? What’s the real value it delivers for your clients? When I do this with my clients, our understanding emerges partly from their journaling and our coaching call, and partly from looking at their client intake forms and testimonials to see what impelled people to sign up and what made the most difference to them in the end.
Step 3 - what makes you different from others in your field? Again, this emerges from the journal prompts and our further exploration in the coaching call.
Step 4 - what’s your ‘bigger why’ and how does this connect to your business? This is usually clear from the answers to the journal prompts.
Step 5 - what’s your soapbox topic? I describe this as, what would be the subject of your book or TED talk? What do you know so much about that you could give an interesting 15 minute talk about without needing to prepare beforehand? What do you have a unique point of view about?
Step 6 - what stories can you tell to illustrate your message, give more depth? Because my methodology revolves around storytelling, we already have a cache of stories that have emerged in the process of unlocking the message, so it’s just a matter of deciding which ones are most resonant and relevant, and then spending some time honing them.
Step 7 - voice of customer research - what are the exact words your clients use themselves? We come back to the customer research to make sure that we have a word-bank to use to express our ideas.
Here is a template for creating your messaging framework
An example of a messaging framework from my own business:
My brand promise (or ‘why-buy’ statement)
I’ll help you put the real value of your work into words, so that your perfect-fit clients will immediately ‘get’ what you do, love your take on it and will be eager to hire you.
A description of who benefits most from my service
I work with coaches, creatives, therapists and course creators who know that their muddled, confusing or generic messaging is holding them back.
A differentiator
I have an uncommon background for a messaging coach - I come from the publishing and non-profit books world and my pre-business experience was as an editor. This gives me a deep understanding of how stories and communication work, how to tap into readers’ emotions and how to write compelling and memorable copy.
My background as an editor also means that I have an unusually collaborative approach - I consider the messaging, copywriting and marketing work that I do with clients to be a process of co-creation, and my ideal clients thrive with this approach.
A disruptor
Something you believe that goes against the mainstream thinking in your field. I believe that we don’t need to use high-pressure or manipulative tactics for our message, copy or marketing to be effective. In fact, not only do I not want to engage in sleazy tactics for ethical reasons, I think that they’re less effective than being transparent and leading with emotional intelligence.
An elevator pitch
This smooshes together your brand promise with your description of who benefits most from your service. So for me, that would read:
I work with coaches, creatives and therapists who know that their muddled, confusing or generic messaging is holding them back. I help them put the real value of their work into words, so that their perfect-fit clients will immediately ‘get’ what they do, love their take on it and will be eager to hire them.
The ‘bigger why’ behind my work
I believe that the world needs more alternatives to big business and monopolies. We need a multiplicity of voices and ideas, and sustainable microbusinesses, supporting people to lead independent creative lives.
But until small business owners really own their expertise and start telling the world about it, they can end up working hard but struggling to be found by the people who most want to work with them. Messaging is a crucial element of growing your business and increasing your influence. The work my clients do, as coaches, designers, educators and healers, is making the world a better place for all of us to live in. I want to do my part to help you and your business to step into your larger purpose, so that we can all benefit.
Brand voice & values
My brand voice is authoritative, wholehearted and supportive. My brand values are clarity, connection, creativity, sovereignty, self-expression and kindness.
Headline benefits
you’ll know, own and be able to articulate your unique strengths and your bigger purpose
you’ll have several different ways to express your message, to use in different circumstances
you’ll be confident about what makes you stand out from others in your field
we’ll identify 3 signature stories you can use in your web copy, emails & social media
you’ll feel good about becoming visible and putting yourself out there beyond word of mouth
Brand pillars/Conversation topics
The three topics that I keep coming back to (and that relate to my three core offers) are brand messaging; the power of storytelling; and the importance of replacing commonly-used manipulative marketing practices with an emotionally-intelligent, transparent and effective approach to copywriting and marketing.
Tagline
I put your secret sauce into words.
Brand story examples.
Here’s one of my brand stories, as it appears on my About Page:
“The hardest thing I’ve ever done (and also the most rewarding) was to become a parent. My daughter’s birth triggered the development of a chronic illness, which wasn’t diagnosed for several years. As a result, I had no idea why I was so desperately tired all the time. I understood that I wasn’t getting enough sleep, but it was so much more than that.
I felt like all the colour had drained out of the world, leaving me trapped in a greyscale existence. I loved my daughter but I felt like I’d lost who I was. I desperately needed time to myself and time with other adults and barely had any of either. It felt like the world was going on as usual and I was stuck behind glass - I could see what was going on in the wider world but I couldn’t touch it or be part of it.
It taught me that I need connection and I need to express who I am as a person. And I need time to myself and time to write and to read every day. And I need more than 4 fractured hours of sleep a night…
This may not sound like the obvious starting point for a business working with entrepreneurs to uncover their stories - but everything I’ve done since has been related to self-expression and identity, connection, belonging and communication. My work is about helping other people find and claim their voice and identity and step fully into it, and then helping them to connect with their ideal audience.
Communicating your passion and expertise is the foundation of your business. Your words will help your right people to find you.”
Personal Strengths
Clarity, empathy, ability to hold both the big picture strategy and the small details in mind simultaneously.
Common enemy
Burnout/hustle culture; Manipulative high-pressure marketing & sales tactics.
Where are you going to use the different elements of your messaging framework?
All over the place! You’ll use your ‘why-buy’ statement on your home page and sales page, and probably in conversation with potential clients or at networking events too.
The description of your ideal client will appear in several places on your web copy, and in social media bios, the sign up page for your newsletter - anywhere where you want people to be able to self-identify as ‘your people’.
Your differentiators will appear on your About Page and probably in longer-form bios, such as your LinkedIn profile. They’ll probably be prominent in places such as podcast guest pitches.
Your disruptor ideas will form the basis of your thought leadership - they’re what will make your content stand out from all the other people in your niche. Ultimately, you may want to lead a movement of others who share your ideas - if that’s the case, then you’ll be looking to foreground this more polarizing content so that your stance is obvious even from a quick glance at the home page of your website.
The bigger why behind your work should be on your About Page and potentially also your Home Page and Sales Page (depending on how intrinsically linked it is to what you actually do in your business). You’ll also want to create blog posts, or social media posts going into more detail about your bigger why.
Your description of your brand voice is an internal document that would only be shared with people you hire, such as a VA, copywriter or business coach. Your brand values on the other hand can be shared on your About Page (or can get a whole page dedicated to them) and can regularly be referenced in your content more generally.
Your headline benefits will probably be on your Home Page and definitely on Sales Pages and they’ll be part of your overall content, especially if you write case studies.
Your brand pillars are another internal document that will guide your content strategy. They’ll emerge in your social media and blog posts, your newsletters and as core conversation topics for podcast guesting.
Your tagline will be on your homepage, social media bios and maybe in your email signature. You may also use your tagline as the name of your signature programme, or your podcast, newsletter or anything else you want to be indelibly associated with your work.
And your personal strengths, common enemies and brand story examples will be on your About Page, in your nurture sequence, referenced in podcast interviews or as part of your keynote speech or workshop, and used in all your content marketing.
Ultimately, you’ll take your framework and use it to drive your messaging strategy, which is how you’ll plan to spread the word about your message so that it reaches your right people.
3 things to remember when creating your messaging framework:
It starts with you and ripples outwards to your ideal clients - but if it isn’t grounded in what makes you unique, you’ll end up with a generic message that sounds just like everyone else in your field.
That said, for your message to land, you need to express it in the exact words and phrases that your ideal clients would use themselves.
The ideal message is both immediately understandable and provokes a bit of curiosity too. My client, health coach Zoa Conner, has a message of ‘feel better, not older’. For her ideal clients this encapsulates something they already know they want - to feel better as they age instead of worse - but it also piques their curiosity - how exactly will she achieve that result for them?
And of course, if you decide that you want to work with an experienced messaging coach to create your own messaging framework, check out Unlock Your Message.