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

Ask three people at a small business what the business does and you will often get three answers. The owner describes the craft, the person on the phone describes the price, and the website describes something written five years ago. None of them is wrong. Together they leave a customer unsure what they are buying.

A messaging framework fixes that. It is a short document, one sheet for most small businesses, that settles who you are for, why they should pick you, and the handful of sentences everyone uses to say so. Think of it as the reference you check your homepage, your Google listing and your proposals against. A slogan or a brand book can come later, if at all.

What follows is the sheet we would ask a small business to fill in, part by part, with a worked example and a blank version to print.

Before you write anything: collect the raw material

Most good messaging is already sitting in what your customers have told you. Before filling 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 would never have thought to say yourself.
2. Five short conversations with recent customers. Ask what they were trying to sort out, what they would have done if they had not 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 is for

Describe your best customers so a stranger could spot one. What they do, where they are, what situation sends them looking. Then write one line about who it is not for. Saying no to some people is what makes the message sharp for the rest.

2. What they would do instead

This is the part that changes the rest. 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 business the honest answer is often doing it themselves, putting up with the problem for another year, asking a relative, or going to the bigger firm because it feels safer, rather than another firm like yours. Whatever the real alternative is, that is what your message has to beat.

3. Why you, with proof

What do you offer that the alternatives in part 2 do not? Write no more than three differences, and next to each, the evidence a customer could check: a guarantee, a number, a qualification, a review, a photograph. A difference with no 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. We wrote a whole piece on explaining what you do in one sentence, and this is where it goes. 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 your homepage's sections, 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 words your customers use (from the reviews you collected) go in the first. The jargon, the words your competitors all use, and anything you would not say out loud go in the second. 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." Descriptions without examples get read differently by everyone who reads them.

Where it has to appear

A framework only works if it is used everywhere, in the same words. Check each of these against the sheet:

• Your homepage headline and the first paragraph under it; the most common problems are in 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.
• The email signature and the footer of your invoices.

A worked example

Here is the sheet filled in for a made-up business: a two-person garden design studio in Somerset. Everything below 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 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 customer-facing. Revisit it once a year, or sooner if the business changes what it sells or who it sells to. The sheet sits well alongside a one-page marketing plan, whose third box is the same sentence.

Where the evidence is thin

• The revenue figures. Claims that consistent branding raises revenue by a quarter or a third circulate widely. 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 is a self-reported survey by a company selling brand tools, not a controlled study, so we do not rely on the figures.

• Where the method comes from. Dunford writes mainly about technology companies, and her examples come from software. We have adapted it for small local businesses because the core question, what the customer would do otherwise, applies anywhere, but we know of no study testing it on firms this size.
• Your customers are the evidence. The strongest check on a message is whether your own customers recognise themselves in it. Show the sentence to five of them before you rewrite your website around it.

If you would like to work it out with someone outside the business, our messaging sprint is a fixed £3,000 and takes about three weeks: what your customers say about you and what your competitors claim, who you are for and why they should pick you, the handful of sentences you use everywhere, and your homepage rewritten around them.