Getting your message across effectively

What is the chance of the mythical message in the bottle, thrown into the ocean from a fishing boat off the coast of Norway, to reach a loved one in South Africa?

Photo by Jayne Harris on Unsplash

The chance of the bottled message reaching its destination, is not much better than an advertising campaign in perfect Afrikaans, attempting to promote family planning in Botswana. Or a car sales representative bombarding an elderly lady client with technical engineering jargon that even her racing driver son finds difficult to understand. Nothing is ever quite as lost as a lost message.

Getting your message across first time, every time and being understood as intended, is the key of outcome for every professional communicator, from journalists and PR practitioners to politicians, sales people, marketers and corporate leaders. Yet, so often one hears a third party interrupting the conversation with something along the lines of “what John means is that you should…” or “I think this is intended for the engineering guys” or, even worse, “I have no idea what this is all about”. How do we get to this?

One would think that the ever-increasing and improving (or is it?) social media, digital technology, WhatsApp and smart phones would have ensured much more effective message delivery, but it does not seem to have achieved that. It has indeed enabled a world in which much, much more information is being dumped on an unsuspecting public on a much larger scale than ever before. Many professional communicators have honed their technical skills to communicate simultaneously through multiple channels and diverse platforms, but larger volumes of content, whether written, spoken or filmed, does not in itself guarantee better understanding, does it?

So where do we go wrong?

It all starts with your key messages…

A good place to start is to determine exactly what your key messages are. The key message refers to the very essence of what it is you wish to communicate. There could be more than one key message, in which case it is important to identify all of them and to capture the essence of each key message in simple English writing. This is not the time for verbosity and verbal diarrhoea, but for simplicity, clarity, brevity, completeness and correctness.

The purpose of the key messages is help you focus as you plan the delivery of your communication. Every now and again you will refer back to your key message to ensure that your delivery is still aligned to it and on track.

Key messages also ensure that all who will be involved in larger communication programmes and projects are on the same page; focussing on exactly the same message in every communication delivery. What the CEO says during a media conference may never differ from the messaging in the accompanying media release, or a feature article written by the PR department or the messaging featured in an event covering the same theme.

Being Key Messages implies that they are of key importance to your organisation or to the media. That, in turn, suggests that you must ensure that each key message is clearly and unequivocally aligned to your business strategy. Review the organisation’s vision, mission and shorter-term goals and objectives and then compare the key messages with the strategy and goals to ensure that they contribute to the achievement of the organisation’s vision.

That should also ensure that you don’t send out messages that harm or jeopardise the brand. Your messages must speak the language of the brand and reflect the brand’s imagery and its look-and-feel. Marketers must be careful not to harness words, phrases, analogies, images – even colours! - etc, that your intended audiences may strongly associate with your competition.

Speaking to your audience

By now you should have clearly identified and verified your target audiences in terms of demographics, language, age groups, interest groups, etc. Your audience profiles will determine whether you can use a “one size fits all” approach to messaging or whether your messages will need adjustments to make them accessible for the different publics.

Some Important Variables

Be sure to spend some time considering the following aspects, all of which will assist you to create better, clearer and more compelling messages.

1.       Speak to them in their language

Once you have defined your key messages, it is of prime importance to ensure that your target audiences receive it and understand it the way it was intended. This requires as much knowledge of your audience as you can muster. If we need to bring a message to different audiences, it is highly unlikely that one message will suit all equally.

It becomes a matter of adapting language, style, content and complexity to best serve the audience you are targeting. When PR people talk about stakeholder analysis, messages resonating with publics, or “the 5 Ws and 1H” it makes very little sense to the non-communicator. It is PR jargon and should either be avoided or explained. This is not different from engineers who need to tone down their technical jargon when speaking to their clients. The more technical the content becomes, the more important it is to explain terminology in simple and clear language.

With children we may want to resort to simple story-telling to bring the same essential details across that we would do with a twenty-page position paper in very formal English for a senior management team. Never speak to all audiences in the same language, tone and style.

2.       Make your message relevant to them

A good start would be to ask yourself: what’s in it for them? What MUST they know about my topic and what would be nice for them to know? By considering in advance what all their likely questions are going to be, you can weave the answers into your content as you go along. One benefit of this approach is that you can determine where in the text to answer which questions to optimal effect for your message.

Be careful not to come across as superficial or shallow in your style. Be as specific as your topic allows you to be and avoid becoming too generic in your content. Be particularly careful not to patronise your audience. That can very soon turn into mistrust and scepticism about your message. Rather be brutally honest as gently as you can, than lie to them.

Reflect an ethically strong personality of yourself and your organisation and ensure that you stand out as a trustworthy and reliable authority in your field. That cultivates respect, trust and buy-in more than any number of white lies and half-truths.

3.       Be Focussed and to the point

Although brevity can cost the communicator if it is not done with great caution, elaborate, lengthy and cumbersome texts very seldom hit the target. Time is precious and your audience’s needs in respect of time are no different to yours.

My suggestion always is to first set your mind free and write what you want to convey as freely as you like. Now go back to the text and start by breaking it up into useful info chunks with not more than one key element per chunk or paragraph.  This already makes the text much easier to read, but more can still be done: replace lengthy discussions with short, punchy sentences. Replace long words with shorter, more descriptive ones.

Lots of paragraphs are always better than one, long block of text. Those were reserved for the likes of the Russian masters such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn. Many of their books are well in excess of 1000 pages. You are (hopefully) not one of them.

Your text must read concisely, yet meaningfully and compelling.

4.       Communicate clearly

Clarity is vital. It requires simple, easy to understand language in easy-to-read fonts and letter types and visually pleasing pages. If graphic material can add to better understanding, then consider using good pictures, infographics or simple graphs to illustrate your message for effect.

One of the most difficult things for keen writers is to know where to stop.  Use the least amount of information required to make your point and to reach you audience. Information overload normally drives readers away or causes major misunderstandings. If the message has to be long, revert to the previous section (3.) and follow my advice there.

In spite of everything above, you still need to get your messages across complete, correct and consistent. Brevity does not justify poor grammar, sloppy punctuation or bad language. Have your text edited and checked by another pair of eyes before finalising the communication. That means: never edit your own work in the final instance; you will miss many of your own mistakes. That is the human condition.

5.       Be Compelling

If you had done your homework on audience profiling, you will know exactly what turns them on and what is likely to put them off. Take your time and all your creative potential to craft a clever, catchy opening statement that cuts right to the bone. Wow your audience and get their undivided attention before you proceed into the nitty gritty of your messages. They need to be taken to where they want to know more.

6.       Help them remember

Your message should always conclude with a call to action, i.e., what you want the reader to do once the message has been read. The call to action should be a seductive invitation to do something such as buying your product, voting for your candidate, booking a room at your hotel, etc, all in such a manner that the reader will remember it. You will ideally create an easy to remember and easy to repeat catch phrase or slogan to assist your audience.

Roto-Rooter, a plumbing business created its well-known jingle: When your drain is being naughty, call 011 444 4040.

7.       Be courteous

It requires respect for your audience to earn their respect. Respecting their values, culture, history, heroes, etc., will take you a long way. Be polite throughout.

8.       Provide for Feedback

Sending a message into a void with no means of follow-up is the epitome of the message in the bottle. You see it drifting out with very little hope of ever getting any feedback at all. Feedback is what feeds your messaging for the future. It teaches you what to keep on doing and what never to do again. It brings you closer to your audience.

Remember: unlike face-to-face conversations where you can observe body language, answer clarifying questions and hear objections, a sent text has to be provided with a feedback link if that is what you want. Very few readers will go through the trouble of Googling you to get your contact details to send you feedback. Make it easy for them and either follow up with them directly to check for feedback or add a boilerplate at the end of your text. The boilerplate is a short, often blocked, paragraph that provides readers with a brief “About us” kind of background on your company and which can include your contact details.

On a web page you can offer a simple online feedback button. If a digital feedback button is provided, it is essential that someone in the organisation is given the responsibility to check responses and act on them regularly.

I sincerely hope that some of these thoughts will be of value to my readers and my students alike.