4 steps to creating sales messages that have impact

This article aims to help you to create sales messages that are of the most interest and relevance to your audience. And to ensure that those you engage with can easily gather the information and insight that they need to become your biggest advocates.

For a limited time, we’re offering a free strategy session with our team of experts. It’ll give you a unique opportunity to quiz us and use our expertise to help provide insight into some of your current challenges. You can contact Gill or Kirsty to arrange a time that suits on gillian@lewis.co.uk or kirsty@lewis.co.uk.

Creating your key messages

Creating your marketing and sales messages is an opportunity to evaluate the best parts of your product and to develop succinct ways of talking about them. Matching your needs and expectations with that of your users’ behaviour, gives you a simple roadmap to create relevant content. It can be summarised as a 4-step process:

Stage 1: Your audience needs

You will likely have a handful of target audience types (we recommend up to 6) that you have created your product for. But, within those groups, users will have varying desires depending on their current experience of your brand.

We recommend mapping out each of your audiences with the following information:

• What’s their goal or need for using your product/service?
• What pains or challenges does your service solve?
• What questions might they ask about your product/service?
• What channels are they most active on?
• What content appears on those channels that competes with your product or service?
• And what’s their overall importance to your organisation?

For new audiences you can use audience interviews and desk based research but for existing audiences the best approach is to ask them directly either via interviews, surveys or feedback questionnaires.

This stage gives you an audience picture that will frame the most important product features and messaging for your target audience.

Stage 2: Your needs and expectations

This second stage gives you the opportunity to match up your best features and most important messages with the needs of the audience (from stage 1).

In a workshop format, take the audience research from stage 1 to identify your content and messaging that matches those needs. In this session you’ll create a priorities matrix of what is of most value to your audience to help you to focus your efforts on these areas.

The workshop may also identify areas of the product/service that don’t currently exist but would be attractive to your audiences. So, using this approach, you can prioritise a roadmap for enhancements and messaging for the future too.

Stage 3: Crafting the sales message

Once you understand what matters most to your audience and the key components of your product which will resonate most, you can create hyper-relevant and useful key messaging and utilise the channels that they are most engaged with.

Stage 4: Creating the impact

Social media gives you the platform to ask your audience the questions you want answers to. But when it comes to the overall customer experience and a significant investment, such as a website update, it’s worth enhancing the research data to stress test if the expectations match the reality. You can do this using a combination of surveys, Google Analytics and HotJar, tools which you may already have on your website, but they can be easily added if not:

Analytics

Once you have a picture of the audience needs and business expectations, you can use analytics to identify any further key points of interest which may validate existing findings or give further context for the HotJar analysis. We usually recommend the analysis focuses on some of the following:

• Are the top performing pages gaining expected traffic?
• Are there any pages getting traffic that seems unusual or unexpected?
• Which pages have high/low bounce rates?
• Which pages generate most entrances/exits?

Surveys

For a website update, validating and enhancing the audience needs using on-page surveys will give you useful, primary insight on the needs of the existing audience. To gather sufficient data, it’s usually best to publish the survey over around a one-month period. It should ask questions which build clarity around whether the user’s website expectations are being met, such as:

• Why have you visited the site today?
• Did you find what you needed?
• If not, what information would have been useful?
• What tools/information were particularly helpful?

HotJar data

Using the research gathered you can identify a selection of HotJar screen recordings to build further insight on:

• Key entrance and exit pages: By understanding the journeys that these pages generate you can identify particularly long or short journeys and pinpoint what causes them.
• Feature and content interaction: Looking at the pages that have previously been identified as having high importance you can identify themes and trends in content/feature interaction to create opportunities for improvement.

Data checkpoints

Once you have gathered the data baseline, it’s worth creating ‘Data Checkpoints’ that you will use as indicators for success and evolution of your audience groups and messaging. These should consider:

• Strategic effectiveness; publishing times, channel mix, cost per acquisition and journey drop offs
• Creative effectiveness; social engagement and email engagement
• Behaviour changes; Conversion ratios, review scores and purchases.

Some of our clients have in-house capabilities to carry out the above processes and others call on us to help out with some or all of these stages. If you’d like to know more, contact Gill or Kirsty to arrange a free strategy session on gillian@lewis.co.uk or kirsty@lewis.co.uk.