Communication & why it’s important to ensure consistent messaging

"Two monologues do not make a dialogue." – Jeff Daly

Television, radio, print, online, social media, outdoor — today we are dealing with more communication channels than ever before and each of these mediums differs in the way it delivers and communicates information. Certain elements, such as a visually creative story, are more essential to a medium like television than to radio. The content created for a social media platform should be significantly different to a media release written for a print journalist.

As a PR agency, our services are channel agnostic. We communicate with audiences across each and every platform and medium, and can therefore advise our clients on how to manage their communications across all of them.

Tactics to help businesses deliver consistent messages regardless of the medium:

1. Identify your audience:

Accurately determining who you are trying to communicate with is the first and most important step to ensuring messaging consistency. The better you know your audience, the more effectively you can create and deliver appealing content, information and ideas.

2. Develop three to four key messages:

Key messages differ for each organisation or brand but they are essential to ensure that ‘everyone is singing from the same song sheet’. They help you prioritise and crystallize information as well as ensure consistency, continuity and accuracy.

3. Utilise a brand voice:

Brand voice is the decisive, consistent expression of a brand through words. The personality of your brand is mostly determined by the words you use so it is therefore important that your brand voice accurately reflects the persona of your brand. For example, if you want to portray a young, hip personality, then the messages created need to have a young, hip tone. Likewise, if your audience is older and highly educated, the language and tone of the message needs to match the speech and character of that audience.

4. Use repetition:

Repeatedly expose the target audience to executions of the same messages over an extended period of time. This will help a business assert a position and retain it.

5. Communicate internally:

It is important to make sure that everyone within the organisation knows what the key messages are and understands them. If every employee knows the key messages, this will in turn ensure consistent messaging across all mediums, including word of mouth.

It is important to remember that messaging is part of a company’s branding. Just as an organisation ensures that its logo and colour schemes are used appropriately, it must also ensure that its messaging is used consistently.

Today, the general public are bombarded by lots of different messages from many and varied companies. It is therefore more important than ever to maintain a consistent persona, and one of the best ways of doing this is through delivering consistent messaging.