When a business has lots of cogs creating marketing copy, it's essential you standardise messaging without stamping out creativity.
Anyone who's worked for a big corporation knows there are different departments for direct marketing, above the line, digital, app, PPC and P&L marketing teams. When there's a rogue's gallery of people all working in the same business areas with different KPIs, media and agencies, it's difficult for customers to get a consistent, joined up message. And it makes brand's job a hell of a lot harder to sign off different executions.
The way to remedy this particular ailment is to put together a messaging matrix. And here's how:
- Determine your objective - in my case, it's to standardise 3 or 4 marketing messages that can be used in all comms, depending on what's being said. These will need to be product/business area specific and generic to the company. The matrix will also need to include headlines, short and long copy. Plus, any SEO requirements.
- Put together a framework - something that gives everyone working with creative one version of the truth. And easily accessible, editable and controllable. In my case, we built upon my tone of voice and house style guidelines built in Confluence. This gave my team overall control on what appeared in the guidelines and it automatically generated emails to anyone who was watching that particular page.
- Governance - I insisted that product owner were responsible for the content, so they needed to make sure it was up to date and accurate. I also insisted that my team were guardians of the matrix (sounds like the next Marvel franchise), so all requests and changes were sent to them to check and update. No one else was allowed to tamper with the matrix. Or feel my Mediterranean wrath.
- Agree key messages - business ones are easy as they're provided by brand. The product areas are tricky as they need to be fully integrated into the development process.
The biggest task is getting legal to sign everything off and buy-in from the business. Once they realise the benefit that their material will sale through sign-off, they'll love it.
