A messaging framework for your business: who you are for, why you, and how to say it

A messaging framework is a single sheet in seven parts: who you're for, what they'd do instead, why you (with proof), one sentence, three supporting points, the words to use and avoid, and how you sound. Fill it in, then check your homepage, your Google listing and your proposals against it. There's a worked example below, and a blank version to print.

It fixes a common problem. Ask three people at a small or medium business what it does and you'll often get three answers: the owner describes the craft, the person on the phone describes the price, and the website says whatever was written five years ago. Between them, they leave a customer unsure what they're buying. A slogan or a brand book can come later, if at all.

Before you write anything, collect the raw material

Most good messaging is already sitting in what your customers have told you, so before you fill in the sheet, gather three things:

1. Your last twenty reviews, thank-you emails or referral messages. Highlight the words customers use about you, especially the ones you'd never have thought to use yourself.
2. Five short conversations with recent customers. Ask what they were trying to sort out, what they'd have done if they hadn't found you, and what nearly stopped them.
3. The homepages of the three businesses your customers compare you with. The point is to see what everyone already says, so you can stop saying it too.

An afternoon on this saves weeks of arguing about adjectives.

The seven parts

1. Who it's for

Describe your best customers so clearly that a stranger could spot one: what they do, where they are, and what situation sends them looking. Then write one line about who it isn't for. Saying no to some people is what makes the message sharp for everyone else.

2. What they'd do instead

This is the part that changes everything else. The positioning consultant April Dunford puts the question plainly in her quickstart guide to positioning: "What would a customer do if your offering didn't exist?"

For a small or medium business, the honest answer often isn't another firm like yours. It's doing the job themselves, putting up with the problem for another year, asking a relative, or going to the bigger firm because it feels safer. Whatever the real alternative is, that's what your message has to beat.

3. Why you, with proof

What do you offer that the alternatives in part 2 don't? Write down no more than three differences, and next to each one, the evidence a customer could check: a guarantee, a number, a qualification, a review, a photograph. A difference without proof is only a claim.

Leave out "friendly" and "professional". Everyone says them, so they tell a customer nothing.

4. The sentence

One sentence: who you help, what you help them do, and how, set against the alternative. Getting it right is a job in itself, which is why explaining what you do in one sentence has a piece of its own. Everything else on the sheet supports it.

5. Three supporting points

The three things you most want a customer to believe, each tied to a difference from part 3 and its proof. These become the sections of your homepage, the paragraphs of your proposals and the first things you say on the phone.

6. Words to use, and words to avoid

Two short lists. The first holds the words your customers use, taken from the reviews you collected. The second holds the jargon, the words all your competitors use, and anything you wouldn't say out loud. If customers say "kitchen fitter" and you say "bespoke interior solutions", use theirs.

7. How you sound

Three plain descriptions, each with an example sentence written in that voice. "Direct: we tell you the price on the first call." "Warm: we remember your children's names." Without examples, everyone who reads the descriptions takes them slightly differently.

If you're torn between this and a new logo, run the one-sentence test first: if someone outside the business can't repeat back what you do, a new logo won't change that.

Where it has to appear

A framework only works if it's used everywhere, in the same words, so check each of these against the sheet:

• Your homepage headline and the first paragraph under it. The most common problems there are among the homepage mistakes that cost enquiries.
• The description on your Google Business Profile, which Google limits to 750 characters.
• Your social media profiles and your LinkedIn "about" section.
• The first paragraph of every proposal or quote.
• How the phone is answered, and what gets said in the first minute.
• Your email signature and the footer of your invoices.

A worked example

Here's the sheet filled in for a made-up business: a two-person garden design studio in Somerset. Everything in it is invented for the illustration.

Notice what the sentence leaves out: the awards, the history, the list of every service. Those can live further down the page. The sentence is only there to make the right person keep reading.

Keeping it honest

Put the sheet where everyone who writes for the business can find it, and read it before writing anything a customer will see. Revisit it once a year, or sooner if the business changes what it sells or who it sells to. It sits well alongside a one-page marketing plan, whose third box holds the same sentence.

How much of this is proven

• The revenue figures. You'll often see claims that consistent branding raises revenue by a quarter or a third. The best known comes from Lucidpress, which, in a December 2019 press release, reported that it "surveyed over 200 organizations" and described itself as "a brand templating platform". That's a self-reported survey by a company selling brand tools, not a controlled study, so we don't rely on the figures.
• Where the method comes from. Dunford writes mainly about technology companies, and her examples come from software. We've adapted the method for smaller local firms because its core question, what the customer would do otherwise, applies anywhere, but we know of no study that has tested it on firms this size.
• Your customers are the evidence. The strongest test of a message is whether your own customers recognise themselves in it, so show the sentence to five of them before you rewrite your website around it.

If you'd rather work it out with someone from outside the business, our messaging sprint is a fixed £3,000 over about three weeks, and it ends with your homepage rewritten around the sheet.