The Top 5 Ways to Find a Winning Message

Sometimes a good message can beat out a good policy. Even when a bill or proposal to do something popular is put forward, if the messaging is bad, it’s significantly less likely to succeed.

If you have something you want to get across the finish line, it’s critical to find the best message. This article will outline the top three ways to find a winning message.

Find Your Audience

The first thing you must do when finding your winning message is identify to whom you are speaking. If you’re selling food to people who just ate, you’re unlikely to succeed – you want to find a starving crowd.

When it comes to politics and advocacy, finding your version of a starving crowd means finding the people who will vote to deliver a victory. That starts with a demographic group – men and women over the age of 35 who have voted in the last two elections. You can narrow down from there by location, family, income, etc.

More than likely, you’ll need to narrow further into different groups that receive tailored messages, but it’s vital you know who you are speaking to – the more specific your language and messages, the more your audience feels like you are speaking to them. This creates a connection and helps move them to vote for you or for your issue.

Understand Your Audience

Once you have your audience, it’s time to start to understand them. Learn about the traits that define them, the details of their lives that often dictate their behavior. You can do this through existing data, but you can also disseminate new surveys to learn more. Find the most important issues – for parents of young children, it could be education and safe communities while for older adults it’s the economy, Medicare, and Social Security.

Go beyond this to understand how your audience spends their time or money – understand their thinking when it comes to specific issues. This will help you tailor your message and it will help you continue to evolve your message. If you understand that the main motivator for parents is a brighter future for their children, you will be able to predict where they stand on specific issues- like a new tax to fund better schools. Likewise, if you understand that the main motivator for older adults is the ability to live on a fixed income, you’ll have a better understanding of how they might react to a tax increase or inflation.

Determine How You Need to Win at Messaging

This next step is key. Depending on your issue area, you need to determine if the message you are creating requires that you inspire people, assuage their fears, dispel myths, create fear or scarcity, or all of the above to motivate action. For example, issues like reproductive freedom may rely on fear to remind voters that their health is on the line – that a different legislator or law could seriously limit that freedom. Meanwhile, if you are facing an uncertain economy, a candidate’s main goal might be to inspire confidence and certainty. Or perhaps you are working to advance a piece of legislation that has a long and confusing history. People may have heard a lot of different things and therefore your job is to educate and dispel myths and incorrect information.

Make sure you determine the techniques your message must use to make an impression and inspire action in people – all good marketing and communication understands the emotions of their target audience and plays into them.

Test Your Audience to Find What Resonates

Now that you have a clearer picture of your audience, it’s time to develop your messaging. Using what you learned about your audience, you can craft language that reflects their values and addresses their concerns. It acknowledges what they want and addresses some of their objections or barriers that might keep them on the fence.

As you do this you will need to test and experiment. You can use a range of tools to do this from polls to conversations or reactions on social media to help inform your message and how you speak to people.

By engaging in conversations or seeing how the public reacts, you can learn more about their fears or priorities. A well-crafted poll can show you the public’s limit on a certain amount of government intervention or where they want to see more action. Conversations on social media can show you where people are most preoccupied – they might say their top priority is the environment when the reality is it’s the economy and economic security that they continue to talk about. Prioritize gauging your audience to learn more about where they stand.

Adjust and Evolve

While you might have a strong message when you start your campaign, a lot can change in a few weeks or months. It’s vital to continue taking the temperature of your audience. Perhaps the economy has started to show signs of weakness and people are feeling more economically uncertain – you might need to adjust your messaging or priorities.

Or perhaps people are especially concerned about an issue that has hit an inflection point – make sure you don’t sound tone-deaf if you ignore it. All of this requires that you keep your finger on the pulse of your audience and adjust your message as necessary. The perfect message at the start of your campaign may not be the perfect message at the end – be open and willing to evolve as you go.

Conclusion

The first and most important step towards finding your winning message is determining your audience and understanding what drives them so that you can speak to their specific needs, worries, fears, values, etc. Once you know them, you can craft your message and the means by which you deliver it to ensure you make an impression. It’s vital to continue to test and adjust your messaging as necessary. This shows them that you are listening – that you hear them and that you will be a trustworthy representative. These tools will help you find the strongest, most effective message to accomplish your goals.