Shouting lots of messages at once just creates white noise.

When you're in a room with lots of people shouting at you, trying their hardest to get your attention, you would struggle to pick out any words at all, let alone a whole sentence.

The same theory applies to your marketing strategy. Your business is amazing right? And you want everyone to know about all the services you offer and how good you are at doing them. But, if you try to say too much in a single piece of communication, then it all gets diluted, nothing hooks you in or grabs your attention because the hierarchy is lost.

So...

How many messages do you want to get across in your marketing?

How many messages you NEED to get across in your marketing is a very different thing.

If you try and say too much you can end up with a bunch of headlines that have the same effect of shouting at your potential customer so much, that they can’t take anything in, it all just becomes white noise and they look away to someone else who is communicating clearly.

I’ve had clients in the past give me enough text to fill an A4 sheet that they ask me to squeeze on a single sided A5 leaflet. That can get really tricky so I'd go back and ask more questions about their objective and see if we can come up with another solution.

Some clients have asked me to communicate about 6 different messages at once. 

What you need to do first is ask yourself ‘what is my main objective here?’ Who am I talking to, exactly? Is there one section of my target market that I can relate to in a particular way? What’s the most important thing I want that part of my audience to get from this?

It’s way more effective to prioritise which message you want to lead with, tease people in and get them interested. Only then will you be able to hold their attention long enough to tell more of your story.

If you have several different types of customer, it's worth considering if you can talk to them separately. Perhaps create a set of different social posts that target each sector individually, rather than trying to be all things to all people.

In an old agency I worked in, we included a section on the brief that asked ‘What’s the SINGLE most important message you want to get across?’ There would often be several secondary messages but if the account team could fill this in it really helped us creatives work out the best starting point for a design. 

My job is to find visual ways of drawing people in with that single minded message, and then guiding them down into any secondary messaging and further detail without overwhelming.

If you have lots of things to say that’s absolutely fine! Get in touch with me to find out how we can get them all across clearly.