Top 7 MUST-FoLLoW MESSAgINg MEcHANIcS FoR CoNSULTANcY gRoWTH

1. You have no proof it works
2. Sounding like the others is as good as being invisible.

If your dream clients don’t even know you exist, you have no hope of them ever remembering, talking about or loving your consultancy. But when you get your strategic messaging right, you’ll stand out — not blend in.

In this article, we’ll walk you through seven practical steps that will help you develop an impactful messaging strategy that aligns with your growth objectives.

And if you’re thinking, ‘Seven steps! That sounds like a lot of effort,’ consider this: Every moment you put off refining your message is another day your consultancy remains invisible to your ideal clients. Trust us — you’ll thank yourself three months from now when your messaging draws in clients like moths to a flame.

What is strategic brand messaging?

Great strategic messaging is about more than just punchy words. It combines psychology, marketing know-how, and unrivalled audience understanding to guide what your consultancy says, how, when, and to whom. 

Remember, stories are remembered up to 22 times more than facts alone. Why? Because they’re relatable, memorable and, most importantly, MOVING. That’s why we’ll get you carefully crafting narratives that go beyond simple slogans and witty (and quickly dated) taglines.

Your narratives are the heart and soul of your brand, underpinning your communication efforts at every stage of the customer journey. Your content should be tailored to these outcomes, whether you’re driving awareness, causing consideration, influencing decisions, or inspiring delight.

If you want to create strategic brand messaging that has your phone ringing off the hook, stop trawling through your competitors’ websites for inspiration and keep reading as we’re diving into the how-to of crafting a messaging strategy that your audience will remember and that will differentiate you from cookie-cutter consultancies.

First things first… Read this before you begin

Don’t worry, we’ll get onto the seven steps to achieving messaging success in no time at all. But first, you’ve got to do some prep work. Think about this as laying the groundwork for your strategy; without a solid foundation, one prod from an uncertain prospect is all it’d take to send it tumbling down.

Understanding your target audience

While jumping straight into brainstorming witty messages and sticky punchlines is tempting, skipping this step would be a catastrophic mistake. The goal of strategic messaging is to craft narratives that truly resonate with your audience. And you can’t create resonant messaging without an intimate understanding of your audience’s pain points, challenges, and aspirations.

This is where audience personas come into play. These fictional profiles represent the different segments that make up your target audience, which can be broken down based on industry, size or needs. By assigning each persona a name, the pain points and goals you associate with the segment it represents and other relevant interests, you can gain a crystal-clear understanding of who your ideal client is.

So, why is this step so important? Simply, engagement is driven by well-defined messages that resonate deeply with your ideal client. When your messaging resonates, clients are drawn to you like a magnet. And when it doesn’t? Well, even the most beautiful, well-crafted messages will fall flat.

At TGO, we believe persona profiling is incredibly powerful, but only when done right. Too many marketing agencies rely on imagining the last concert a persona went to or their favourite drink. This may be creative, but it’s a waste of time; your ideal client's imagined preference for a spicy margarita over a glass of merlot does not impact how they’ll engage with your consultancy.

Instead, we recommend looking up previous clients on Facebook and LinkedIn and noting details like what business books they’ve read or what professional groups they’re part of. These relevant behavioural insights will be so much more valuable than arbitrarily deciding your persona loves tennis.

Conduct a messaging audit

Before you begin crafting a new messaging strategy, we recommend taking a step back and auditing your current messaging.

The goal here is to evaluate how you engage with audiences across all platforms and touchpoints, identifying inconsistencies in your messaging, any areas that require clarification and opportunities to align your messaging more closely with your new ideal client.

So, how do you conduct a messaging audit? There are three key steps to follow:

• Centralise your messaging. Start by mapping out the buyer journey and your consultancy's message at each stage.

• Analyse consistency and cohesion. Almost as many consultancies are plagued by inconsistent messaging as those that overuse the word ‘synergy’. Your messaging should feel cohesive across touchpoints.

• Evaluate customer alignment. Finally, ask yourself: does this message speak directly to the buyer's stage in their journey? Is it addressing their needs, offering compelling solutions, or just broadcasting my services?

If you’re looking for brand messaging examples, keep reading.

7 steps to follow to crafting compelling messaging

Now that you’ve established an unshakeable foundation for your strategy let’s move on to the meat of the matter. If you want to craft unforgettable, head-turning, business-winning messaging that has clients clinging to you like ivy on a wall, follow these seven steps.

1. Speak to the pains that prospects are experiencing in their language

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that resonant messaging is key to getting (and keeping) the right eyes on your services.

This means tailoring your messages to your ideal audience, talking to their pains and using language that they’re familiar with. Together, this is the perfect recipe for cooking up personal, relatable and impactful brand messages. Here’s how.

Tailoring your sales message to their pains

This is when crafting detailed, relevant audience personas finally pays off. Having these to hand makes it easier to craft meaningful messages that prove you understand your audience’s challenges and have the experience to solve them.

Ask yourself: what keeps my audience up at night? What roadblocks are stopping them from experiencing success? How can I solve them? Weave your answers into your narrative.

Speak their language

Using language your prospects are comfortable with reduces friction in the early stages. Speaking their language and using their industry’s terminologies shows you understand their world, making them more likely to engage with your consultancy.

Mirror their experiences with examples

Prospects want to see their struggles mirrored back at them, as this proves you have an in-depth understanding of the challenges relevant to their specific industry.

We recommend integrating specific examples into your messaging that show real empathy rather than surface-level understanding.

2. Present your methodology as the path to solving those pains

The next step is to present your methodology as the solution to your prospects’ problems.

Succinct value proposition

By crafting a crystal-clear value proposition that speaks to their pain points, you’ll show prospects how you’ll transform them from their current state to their desired state. Your value proposition should get your point across in two seconds flat and use specific language that speaks to the challenges and goals you previously identified.

Here’s an example of a generic (AKA, sleep-inducing) value proposition:

‘Our consultancy helps businesses succeed.’

To hit on real pains (and make prospects sit up and take notice), let’s make it more specific: 

‘Struggling with inefficient project management? Our services enhance your strategic planning, boosting productivity and reducing stress.’

A proven methodology

Remember, prospects don’t want to feel like guinea pigs risking an experimental approach promising great results. Instead, build trust by emphasising that your tried-and-true methodology is designed to solve their problems.

One way to do this is by breaking your methodology into easy-to-understand steps using a unique mechanism. A unique mechanism communicates your processes, tools and approaches and says, ‘We understand your challenges, and here is the specific approach we’ll take to solve them’.

In this example, The Win Academy simply states that their methodology is a ‘proven process’. More on proving value later…

3. Use vivid imagery and analogies to make intangible concepts tangible

Remember what we said earlier about people being more likely to remember stories than facts and figures? Well, busy people don’t have the time (or mental energy) to pick through complex concepts. So, you need to make their job easier by using analogies and metaphors.

This tactic will help you take complex ideas that make prospects feel like this:

And translate them into relatable, easily digestible narratives that convey the value of your services.

By tailoring your analogies to your target audience’s industries and culture, you’ll unlock their full power, illuminate your message and make the intangible tangible. For example, a football analogy will resonate with those in the sports industry but might miss the mark with an engineering client. 

4. Quantify the outcomes and ROI you’ve delivered for clients

Every day, prospects come across dozens of consultancies boasting about how their innovative processes will solve all their clients’ problems. While shouting about your value from the rooftops is important, you won’t turn conversations into contracts if you can’t prove that value.

If you want to prove the value of your services, make your outcomes the star of the show by quantifying the impact of past projects with tangible results and social proof.

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Proving tangible value

First, provide the tangible outcomes you’ve achieved for past clients using quantifiable data, such as the ROI you’ve delivered or similar results. The key is to choose things clients will care about, boosting relevance and building trust.

In one of our favourite key messaging examples, Reson8 immediately shouts about how they deliver an 8-to-1 ROI for clients as soon as you land on their homepage. 

Here’s another example that connects the process to the tangible benefits you can deliver, courtesy of The Win Academy: ‘Helping sales leaders deliver a 30% uplift in deal closure using our proven E³volve system.’

Leveraging social proof

Sharing happy clients’ success stories through case studies and testimonials not only acts as evidence for the value clients have gained from your service but also helps prospects envision the benefits of working with your consultancy, building trust in your ability to deliver.

5. Make their decision a no-brainer with risk reversal guarantees

What big decisions would you make if you knew any risk would be mitigated or reversed? Would you try a new haircut? Invest in high-risk stocks? Or try a strategy that promises to make your business millions?

Prospects love risk reversal guarantees because they minimise or remove the perceived financial risk of engaging with your consultancy. Plus, they make your consultancy’s offer un-turn-downable by communicating a high level of confidence in your services.

There are several risk reversal guarantees that you may want to try, including:

• Conditional guarantee. Promising to deliver specific outcomes under specific conditions.
• Unconditional guarantee. Clients love this because they can claim compensation if they’re not satisfied for any reason.
• Reverse guarantee. You take on extra risks, like compensating for losses.
• Success-based charging. Your fees are linked to the success of your service’s outcomes, such as achieving specific results.
• Revenue share. You receive a portion of the revenue generated by your engagement with a client.

Here’s how Waymark had fun with risk removal by creating a guarantee that they’ll refund their workshop if the client isn’t happy with the results.

6. Give personas and solutions creative, descriptive names

Make your offering stand out by establishing a language library unique to your consultancy. Not only does naming your solutions something unique to you add a layer of personality to your brand voice, but it also makes your services more memorable.

The key is to use terms and phrases that resonate with your audience and reflect your positioning; remember, consistency is key. Here’s an example of how Advice Cloud named their services in a memorable, relatable way that characterises their prospects’ pain points.

7. Road-test with ideal prospects continuously and refine based on feedback

If your messaging doesn’t resonate with your target audience, this is all moot. It’s easy to become complacent but to avoid publishing irrelevant messages that fall on unhearing ears, you must test and refine your messaging as your services evolve and your prospects’ needs change.

By remaining open to adapting your messaging based on learnings from your audience, you ensure your communications always hit the mark. Here’s how:

Talk to your ‘friendlies’

Friendlies are your clients, ex-employees, industry leaders, suppliers and others who:

• you have a good relationship with
• have the ear of your prospects
• will give you honest feedback (sugarcoating their thoughts won’t fly here)

Ask them for their honest thoughts on your messaging and make changes based on their feedback.

A/B test your messaging

Your messaging is a living component and requires ongoing refinement. This is where A/B  testing, which pits two messages against each other on a landing page, comes in clutch.

By measuring different messages' conversion potential, you can learn what works best for your audience and iterate based on results.

What’s next?

Your messaging strategy has the power to shine a spotlight on your consultancy in an overwhelmed market. To stand out from the cacophony of cookie-cutter competitors, follow these best practices to ensure your messages hit home every time.

Building a messaging hierarchy 

Think of your messaging hierarchy as the blueprint for your communications. Outlining the key components that make up your messaging helps ensure everything you say, do or shout aligns with your vision and speaks to your audience.

Building your messaging hierarchy includes defining your:

1. Primary headlines
2. Taglines
3. Core messages
4. Supporting messages
5. Value proposition
6. Secondary messages
7. Calls to action
8. Proofpoint
9. Metaphors

Each item builds upon the last, creating a cohesive narrative. The first step is to define your ‘Why,’ which will reflect your overall vision. Then, work through each item, developing specific messages for each audience segment or persona while ensuring they align with your primary message.

Ensure consistency

If you want to increase brand recall (which you do), you must ensure your message is consistent across channels. While an inconsistent message will confuse and push away your ideal customer, a unique and consistent messaging strategy will make your brand more memorable.

Plus, with the help of your language library, you’ll reinforce your message through repetition and fortify brand recognition. That means their challenges and your solutions will become irreversibly linked in their minds.

Choosing communication channels

You have dozens of communication channels to choose from. Trying to optimise them all is impossible and a waste of already limited resources, so unless you have billions to spend on marketing, take the time to identify which channels your ideal prospects are most active on.

You may find different audience segments are more receptive on different channels, so use this opportunity to reach them all with tailored messages.

Rollout planning

Last but not least, your rollout schedule will combine everything you’ve created until this point.

This handy plan will outline when and how each item on your messaging hierarchy will be communicated across your channels, providing a timeline for roll out while allowing you to anticipate responses from your audience.

This will help you plan your follow-up strategies, which may include automated email responses, upskilling your team to engage with prospects on social media, or prepping Q&A documents to support live webinars.

Take the MEH out of your MEH-ssaging

Want to learn more? We bet you do! In just 30 minutes, our Messaging Mechanics webinar covers how to:

• balance the emotional with the rational across your marketing collateral
• position  your consultancy in a ‘category of one’ to differentiate from the competition
• build your language library so that prospects remember you long after you've touched base
• develop messaging that truly lands, using the ‘zone of optimal resonance’ strategy

Watch the replay!