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how we unclucked our messaging (part five)
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It’s time for part five of How We Unclucked Our Messaging! This one is MEATY. Here’s what you’ve missed:
Part five:What we did in our positioning jam session, step by stepRight, so. We needed to figure out our positioning. We had gathered up a bunch of sexy outcomes, testimonials, and mini case studies of our work and did some pattern-spotting. Now we needed to figure out what it all meant. It’s time for a Positioning Jam Session. Here’s the working session blueprint / process / semi-chaotic brain space we used to figure it all out. 🤘 Touch up your mohawks, kids. It’s gonna be a rocking time! Pre-session homeworkWe made a section in our business planning MIRO board and tried to organize our thoughts visually. The buckets were:
We needed all of our research and learnings and thoughts dumped into one spot, not scattered across our Notion, desks, and brains. It ended up looking like this, a chaotic Strange Birds-ified version of April Dunford’s much more calm and collected positioning method. I gotta be honest, friends. I looked at the MIRO board before our Jam Session and had a little stress panic. It was A LOT to take in. I felt like we were back at the throwing-spaghetti-at-walls problem. Here we were, making everything so complicated again. Gah! And then the universe gave us a gift… Reason number 327 why we’re starting a podcastThe day before our Positioning Jam Session, we interviewed the one and only Haley Boehning for our podcast, Flying the Coop. 👋 oh hey it launches September 4th, go subscribe here Haley is the co-founder and owner of Storyforge. She helps leaders and their teams forge their most meaningful story, and then activate it—so they can get the results they need and the impact they want. She has decades of experience working with leaders of Fortune-500 companies, nonprofits, and start-ups to create clarity, alignment, and engagement through story. Our whole conversation centered on purpose. What does it mean to have a purpose for your business? What does it look like? How do you find it? Ah Haley, how did you know this was exactly the conversation we needed to have before we embarked on our own purpose/positioning quest? I love podcast interviews. You learn so much! In the interview, she laid out a great framework for where to start in finding your purpose. For us, it was easily translated into “how the heck to find your positioning without hiring a third party because you’re stubborn and people pay you to do this so you should be able to do it yourself” framework. Without knowing it, she took our chaos MIRO brain dump and helped us create a focused agenda for our jam session conversation. (Ahem, shall say it again: Flying the Coop launches September 4th and you should subscribe it’s gonna be super cool) The Jam SessionWe had one hour scheduled in our calendar to figure out the biggest blocker to our growth. WOULD IT BE ENOUGH??? We had our chaos MIRO brain dump. We had Haley’s wisdom guiding our session. It was time to jam! First: who do we serve?You gotta start every positioning conversation grounded in who. Who needs to find you? Our problem is that we don’t serve a particular niche or industry. We serve everyone. (except people who go against our ethics - feel free to respond via email to ask us what those are) We had to approach the ‘who do you serve’ conversation differently. Grace Baldwin, fellow copywriter and brand messaging wizard, wrote about target audiences and reminded me that who you serve isn’t always about demographics or company size. We work with solo entrepreneurs to large multi-national corporations to nonprofits. Each of those has very specific needs, and we couldn't speak to all of them without muddying up our messaging immediately. Instead, we focused on mindset. What emotional need was common across all of those sectors? What was the trigger point that led them to seek out help? Trigger point for clients to look for help:
We’ve grown, but our content feels like it belongs to the business we used to be.
I’m feeling squeezed. My team is feeling squeezed.
We’re juggling more moving parts, and the system that used to work is starting to fray.
We need results. We need the numbers to add up.
Once we answered that question, we could easily answer who we serve. Who we serve:
We work with companies that want to CARE LOUDLY.
Who are ready to say ‘this is who we are and this is how we show up for our stakeholders.’ And most importantly, they are ready to keep saying it. To keep showing up. To draw their line in the sand and build a brand that really stands out.
Second: who are we?This one is so hard for us. We’re a worker-owned cooperative, which is really cool! But honestly, most of our target audience either doesn’t understand what that means or doesn’t care. We settled on calling ourselves an agency because it best covers everything we do. We are strategists and executors and consultants and analysts and researchers. Agency is a word that easily and quickly says, “We do a lot.” Once we decided on what word to use to describe our business type, we could think through who we were in relation to who we served. We took a look at the emotional trigger point and the ideal client and settled on a clear way to say this is us. We chose ‘messaging agency.’ We didn’t want to say content strategists or strategic copywriters or consultants. They didn’t cover the deep work we always do with our clients. We needed something that went deeper than content. (this was very much inspired by our “but what about AI and the devaluing of “content”???????” brain dump) Who we are:
A messaging agency that gives a flying duck. Everything we do with messaging directly supports your business needs.
Third: what outcomes do we deliver?We had already gathered up a giant list of outcomes, along with data points and testimonials. We didn’t need to repeat that. What we needed to find was the BIG outcome. The one outcome to rule them all. The one that every single client gets when they work with us, no matter the problem or deliverables. The answer was: Clarity. It was best summed up by two client quotes: “PEOPLE FRICKING GET IT AND I DON’T HAVE TO WORK HARD AT IT.” “There are two different kinds of simplicity… one is clarity for us, and one is clarity for our users. You help us do both.” Now, clarity is not a sexy reason to hire someone. It doesn’t speak to results. We weren’t worried about that, because we had reams of results to back up our claim of clarity. Clarity was the angle we needed to take when talking about our work. We would still back it up with results, but the big emotional driver was RELIEF. What is the big outcome?
Clarity.
Fourth: what do we do?A company that is ready to care loudly has hired a messaging agency that gives a flying duck. Awesome. Huzzah! What have they hired us to do? 🤔 How do we show off all our skills without seeming too much like a Jack of all trades? Easy. We were a messaging agency. We had already decided that. Luckily, messaging happens everywhere. That means we could use our umbrella of messaging - our speciality - while also being very clear about our skills. 💡Specialty and skills are different things! Don’t forget that! What do we do?
Messaging.
Where does messaging happen?
Website
Sales pages
Email
Onboarding
In-product/in-app copy
Campaigns and launches
Pitch decks
Event promotion
Case studies
Blog posts
Video scripts
Fifth: how do we make it happen?Now, only now, do we get to how we work. Remember back at the beginning of our marketing meltdown, we were hyper-focused on how we work? Because it is seriously cool? We needed to figure out how to deprioritize how we work because frankly, no one cares about that. They only care about that once we show them how we can help them out. When we worked on this section, we made sure to refer back to the testimonials we had gathered up. We wanted to ensure we were framing how we worked in the words of our clients, not how WE wanted to talk about our process. How we work
Adaptable - We use flexible structures to support complex work. As your priorities shift, so do we. No bloated retainers, no rigid scopes.
Systematic - We zoom out before we zoom in. Starting from the big picture means we move both fast and smart.
Transparent - We bring sharp perspective, tailored thinking, and honesty you can use. We’re not here to parrot back what you said.
Alright friends. That’s the jam session. Phew! Are you tired? I’m tired. We covered
At every single step, we referred back to our chaotic brain dump of research and data points to ensure our decisions were based in reality, not in aspirational dreams in our heads. Next week in the final installment of How We Unclucked Our Messaging, we are going to show you how we implemented our new positioning and messaging. Cheers, Anna (they/them) 🏳️⚧️✊🏳️🌈✊🇵🇸 How We Unclucked Our Messaging series
What I'm reading The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar A little novella by one of the co-authors of This is how you lose the time war. Honestly? I am in absolute awe of her style and her prose. I aspire to write how she does. |
Strange Birds
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