What is a Key Message?
A Key Message is an important statement designed to convey a crucial point to the audience in a memorable way across all communication channels, including images, videos, articles, audio (podcasts), advertisements, and more.
Key Message is the heart of a brand’s marketing and sales communication. It serves as a concise summary of the most important value that a business offers to its customers.
The Importance of Key Message
Key Messages should precisely represent the essential aspects of your brand’s products or services that you want customers to understand. They form the foundation of all marketing strategies and tools, including:
Establishing business stance: Differentiation, stories, missions, and values that the organization upholds must be conveyed through clear Key Messages.
Targeting: Key Messages create competitive differentiation among companies in the same field. They should always present a unique proposition over competitors.
Viral advertising: Advertising is an excellent choice to deliver Key Messages to customers through websites, service proposals, ad campaigns, social media posts, etc.
Business stance, target audience, and advertising all use Key Messages as a common reference foundation for marketing and developing sales closure opportunities.
Best Practices for Key Messages
The best Key Messages adhere to the following principles:
- Be concise: Focus on creating important points using 3-5 words related to the business, allowing the audience to understand quickly. Key Messages should be readable or spoken within 30 seconds in media.
- Memorable content: Produce relevant messages that tap into current trends related to the content you want to communicate.
- Use simple words: Convey important messages using easy-to-understand language, avoiding slang or abbreviations.
- Create a highlight: Emphasize the unique features or properties of the product and service that stand out the most. The wording must have a concept that differentiates from competitors.
- Reproducible: Create Key Messages for marketing campaigns in a way that can be shared and reproduced, allowing the same important content to be used in new and diverse channels.
- Increase engagement: Stimulate emotional reactions or mental connections from the Key Message to naturally and easily generate positive reviews, comments, or critiques.
Examples of Key Messages in Thailand
Toyota Hilux Revo: “Tough, Real, Durable, Real” reflects the performance of a strong, durable pickup truck with good road grip, targeting customers who need the Revo pickup for long-distance transportation and travel.
Lay’s: “Because life must have flavor” communicates to a target group of teenagers who want fun in life. The Key Message has an interesting, exciting, and fun tone, easily understood that Lay’s is a crispy snack for teenage life with various delicious flavors.
Ovaltine: “Ovaltine 4 Regions” on TikTok invites viewers on social media platforms from 4 regions, according to the provincial division in Thailand, to participate in a dance activity with a record. The goal is to create brand awareness for the overall customer group, understanding that Ovaltine customers are in every province throughout Thailand.
Creating Your Own Key Message
When you understand that short, concise Key Messages with highlights and memorability are the best, the next step is to analyze and create your own business’s Key Message. Some phrases may sound beautiful, but when used in practice, they may produce marketing results in the opposite direction.
Initial Stage
In the initial stage, we recommend starting with a brainstorming meeting with internal team members up to the company’s co-executives. Creating a Key Message requires close collaboration between the marketing team and the executive team who will ultimately approve the important message. Key Messages are crucial as they will affect the business’s image in the long term.
During the brainstorming process, gather necessary information including communication goals, assess whether sending the Key Message is a short-term or long-term campaign, and consider the business’s strengths, issues, and trends. Work together to refine the Key Message to respond to the diverse needs of your target audience, separating into multiple sub-target groups (if any).
After identifying communication goals, necessary factors for message delivery, and segmenting target sub-groups, the next step is to develop the Key Message. Choose keywords related to your business and services, defining messages that clearly cover issues, products, services, organization, or internal company research results. Explain the importance of delivering this message to the target audience, emphasizing what makes this message unique or different. Explain why the Key Message viewers should care about this information, considering the benefits and value presented primarily.
Additionally, planning to deal with potential obstacles or problems by creating Key Messages is something to be cautious about, as communicating with short important phrases can also be negatively interpreted (backlash). Therefore, always confirm your key points with supported information, references, facts, and credibility.
Later Stage
After discussions and meetings to reach goals and conclusions about the draft Key Message, you must evaluate it critically using specific criteria. Assess whether the message aligns with the goals of this communication.
Are all the words copyrighted?
Does it sound interesting when read aloud?
Begin to consider the possibility of making the language easier to read and the message more concise. Evaluate whether the draft Key Message can effectively motivate the target audience to take action or close sales.
In the later stage, as you begin to improve and develop the Key Message, it must be tested to ensure positive feedback from both internal and external audiences, including those within the target group.
Try consulting with a marketing company in Thailand to test the message, as well as receiving feedback from the audience through public forms, which is necessary and important.
Finally, when you are confident that the Key Message is ready to start its job and when the marketing campaign has been running for a while, we recommend ensuring that, over time, the Key Message still aligns with the company’s needs and current marketing development trends.
