Messaging
Now that I have a fairly decent grasp on who the audiences are for this project, today I began working on the messaging for the brand and the website.
Messaging Messaging is one of the most important aspects of any brand or website project. As Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach state in Content Strategy for the Web,
Messaging brings your core strategy to life. It helps you define what this specific web content needs to communicate in order to get you closer to your ultimate goal. It helps you prioritize content needs, keep content consistent, and align content owners on content requirements.
A brand or website’s messages are what tie everything today. Those messages permeate throughout every piece of content that brand touches or website hosts. So understanding what the key messages are for this project is extremely important.
Card Sorting As with most areas of content strategy, each strategists has a slightly different way they recommend coming up with the key messages for a website or a messaging strategy.
To begin working on the messaging for this project, I went with Margot Bloomstein’s card sorting method that she details in Content Strategy at Work: Real-World Stories to Strengthen Every Interactive Project.
With this method, Bloomstein recommends that stakeholders sort through index cards that have possible adjectives to describe their brand or website on them. Stakeholders are to sort the cards into the following categories:
“Who we are: How do you think your brand is currently perceived?”
“Who we’d like to be: How would you like the brand to be perceived?”
“Who we’re not: Which terms don’t you want to associate with your brand?”
In the end, I found this method to be very effective. It was interesting to see how some of the words were instantly weeded out, but others I haggled over and contemplated for quite a while before putting them into a category. By the end of the exercise, I felt like I had a fairly decent grasp on the messaging for this project. Or at least a good start on the messaging.
UBBN Messaging The messaging below is still in a early stages and needs to be fleshed out more. At this time, the messaging is currently just adjectives describing the brand and the website.
The following messages are considered to be key messages that should come through on every page of the website, without few exceptions:
Unique (This adjective is literally in the name of the business.)
Fun
Trendy
Friendly
Regional (Southern)
Other possible messages for the brand and website:
Customer-oriented
Enthusiastic
Casual
Over the next couple of days and into the weekend, I am hoping to fully flesh out the messaging for the website, since it and the target audiences will be major factors in my recommendations for what revisions and changes should be made moving forward.
