How to Keep Messages Consistent Across the Company

It can be challenging as your company grows from a startup of one or two to a staff with departments to keep messaging consistent. What was once a quick call or a shout across the room now needs to be shared and understood by dozens or more people in different spaces.
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Ensuring the information is indeed grasped by the entire staff is vital to the growth and success of your company. After all, effective organization-wide communication is what has led to the brand awareness and consistent experience of many successful businesses. Plenty of corporations credit their success to not only having loyal clientele but also proud employees; a large part of that is due to consistent and transparent messaging.

When everyone knows where they stand within a company and what the goals are, it is easier to stay focused and on-brand. As a leader in your organization, it is up to you to support your staff as everyone gets on the same page. This means you want to minimize traffic and chaos when it comes to messaging. Your primary goal with messaging should be to keep it clear, comprehensive, and concise. Now, how do you do that?

Make Sure Your Communication is Understood

One of the first steps you can take to keep messaging concise and consistent is to make the information you want to share more easily digestible. Whether that means enunciating during a speech or providing visual aids to break down data, you want to make sure your message is received. If you work in IT or another field where you often communicate about complex softwares or processes, normal communication channels like a call or an email might not cut it.

Instead, you may need to screen-record instructions or have a side by side meeting with visual displays. In this day and age, more people are interested in getting their information from video, and you can respond to that interest. Rather than sending yet another long, confusing email, you can simply show your staff what to do by using a screen recorder. All you have to do is perform the function you expect your staff to repeat, and record the process as you do.

You can use a screen recorder to walk your staff through changes in procedure, brand messaging updates, and more. You can save the time and money you would spend on a meeting and capture the attention you might lose on an email. And while people may skim through a longer-than-necessary email, a tutorial can be much more attention-grabbing. It also creates a useful reference they can check later, so you don’t have to answer repeated questions.

Create a Brand Story

Another effective way to maintain consistent messaging in your company is to create and maintain a brand story. You’re probably familiar with this idea because most brands that you can think of have a noteworthy brand story. However, for newer or smaller businesses, that’s not always the case.

You may think your staff is already on board with your company’s brand. Unfortunately, without a clear brand story, you may see your employees behaving dramatically differently at work. What one executive views as a priority, another may minimize as not critical to the ultimate goals. Getting the story straight - along with your priorities — is one way to keep your messages consistent.

Create a brand story yourself or go through a marketing agency that specializes in brand storytelling, and streamline your message. Many agencies will spend several hours interviewing you to get to the heart of your business. From there, your brand story shines through and becomes the overarching message of your company. Then, you just need to share that story with your employees so they capture and carry out the vision within.

Have a Value Proposition and Positioning Statement

A small part of the brand story that can sometimes get left out is the value proposition and positioning statement. The value proposition for a business is a single statement, often just one sentence. This sentence typically identifies your target audience, tells them what you’re doing differently, and shares your “why.”

An example would be a tech company that promises, “We help computer programmers connect to the internet quickly and efficiently so they can keep innovating for their clients.” When your employees make any sales or marketing decisions, they can return to the positioning statement to ensure those decisions align. Alternatively, the value proposition shows the value your company offers and to whom.

The positioning statement, while often confused with the value proposition, is, instead, an internal-facing statement. It is often also a single sentence that describes your product or service, how it fills a market need for your target audience, and what makes it stand out. It is more straightforward than a value proposition, and it is used specifically to keep your staff on brand and consistent.

Ensure All Content Is Consistent

Once you have a brand story, a value proposition, and a positioning statement, your next step is to ensure consistent content across the board. All internal documents and marketing materials must line up with each other. This keeps a cohesive identity across your entire structure. Your employees will essentially be mini-ambassadors for your business, representing your messaging at every turn.

You can ensure consistent content by having a marketing team that knows your brand inside and out. From there, all documents should align with your messaging. This way, when your staff sees any internal memos, emails, or screen recordings at work, they’ll naturally recognize them as cohesive with everything else they know about the company. Then, when they craft social media posts or blogs intended for the clientele, that same messaging will line up with what they’ve experienced internally.

Finally, remember to treat your employees like valued members of your organization. Your job as a business owner or top executive is to stay the course with your employees. Lead by example, share your vision, and treat your staff like co-owners of the brand, and there’s little doubt you’ll see real business growth in no time.