Building Your Marketing Foundation with a Comprehensive Messaging Framework

It’s 1880 and you find yourself in Walnut Grove, Minnesota.

In fact, you’ve been charged with building your new family home on the prairie. You’ve spent months gathering supplies and stacking lumber. The plot is perfect—there’s plenty of room for a sweeping porch and the land is well-picked to hold the weight of construction.

But you wake up the next day with the premonition of a looming wind storm, primed to crash into your plot of land. The time for planning is over, and you realize it’s time for you and your family to make quick work. Excited to see your new home put together and nervous about the coming storm, you declare: “Let’s skip the foundation and go straight into building the main rooms.”

You work fast while the weather is still balmy. The walls go up, the roof finds its place, and you even have time to build some furniture. But come Sunday, your dream home has turned to soggy rubble, never standing a chance against the winds and rain of the night before.

When we think of strong marketing, we think of a well-built house.

There are different rooms for different needs, just as we use different marketing assets and tactics for distinct audiences in varying stages of the sales funnel. A targeted SEO strategy may get a neighbor through the door, but it’s up to a solution sheet to bring them into the kitchen. Sometimes homes have niche rooms, like a home-spa or a secret pantry, just as marketing campaigns can feature unique calls to action or incentives. You can customize and renovate your house to suit your needs, just like you can optimize any portion of your campaign.

However, the most critical component of every house is the foundation, just as every marketing campaign relies on the Messaging Framework.

A Messaging Framework is a comprehensive document containing messaging related to your company. Derived from market research, existing assets, product details, and more, the messaging framework stores information you’ll need to build a winning campaign.  From lead messaging and a strong value proposition to key product benefits and specifications to customer personas, pain points, and possible objections, the messaging framework serves as a single source of truth for team members to craft that perfect sentence, headline, blurb, or testimonial.

With a great Messaging Framework, you can create any marketing asset with confidence that you’re presenting the most polished, up-to-date, and relevant information possible.

As you can guess, without a strong messaging framework, marketing campaigns can crumble. Maybe your video features a call to action that conflicts with your email campaign, or your Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign targeting legal firms features messaging that’s only appropriate for a tech audience. The windows will start to crack, the door frame will push from side to side, the stairs will become weak and faulty, and the levels will start to shrink and wilt under the pressure of incoherent messaging. The social campaigns won’t feel cohesive, the branding will seem off, and the advanced content won’t drive to a sale. Your prospect simply will not feel at home in a house that’s been doomed from the start. 

When you’re building your next marketing campaign, call on Extra Mile Marketing to help you build a foundation that will last. With over seventeen years of messaging framework construction under our belt, we know what it takes to build a “home” that attracts prospects with the highest propensity to buy.

Get in touch with us today to begin discussing your next campaign or digital content piece. We’ll make sure it lasts through any storm.