As marketing consultants, it shouldn’t be a surprise that we advocate taking the time to flesh out a marketing strategy. We often see our clients rush into execution – we can all be guilty of this! One area we see this most often is in messaging. The temptation is to narrow in on one message right away in order to quickly execute on a marketing campaign. But, we recommend strategically thinking through the various options first. I want to share the power of diverging before converging on one message. When you skip the diverge stage, you risk leaving value on the table by overlooking a message that resonates more deeply with your consumer. I want to help you have the most valuable conversations with your customers!
DIVERGE: THE MESSAGING MATRIX
We recently worked with a global energy company to help them craft the right messaging strategy. We began with purposeful divergent thinking. The first step in divergent thinking is to take a key insight for one of your target audiences. Then, list messages that connect this insight to a benefit your product or service has. Benefits could be primary, emotional, or functional – you want to list as many benefits as possible. For our client, their customer was dealing with anxiety due to instability in the energy industry. So, we connected this insight to benefits that directly addressed it. Lastly, we developed a list of testable reasons to believe that our client could fulfill this product benefit. You should repeat this process for each of your audiences.
CONVERGE: THE STRONG TEST
After going through the diverge process of forming various messages for each audience, it’s time to choose the single, right message to share with each. The average consumer sees nearly 250 marketing messages a day, so being targeted and clear is essential! This is the art of smart messaging, or picking the one thing you should be, and letting go of all the other things you could be. This is the second step of messaging: converging on the right one. To test the messages we constructed during the first step, we use the acronym STRONG:
- S: Single minded
- T: Targeted and relevant
- R: Real reasons to believe
- O: On brand
- N: New take
- G: Goals
Evaluate each message against this STRONG test, to see which messages pass. Just like the Survival of the Fittest, only the strongest messages should be used to engage your customer.
DIVERGENT THINKING: MARKETING’S SECRET WEAPON
Bringing us back to our example, we provided our client with 4 powerful messages – 1 for each of their main audiences. Using this 2 step process of diverging and then converging, we knew our messaging was powerful and would build trust and value with their audiences.
I hope you have been convinced of the power a marketer can leverage through divergent thinking! When we engage in this process, we are able to ensure our messaging is as strong as possible. Without this first step of divergent thinking, we risk picking the most obvious message to share. By diverging to see all the possibilities, we are sure to secure the BEST message that connects with our audience in a deeper way. And isn’t that the main purpose of marketing, anyways?