You may know how important the concept of ‘message match’ is in marketing – It’s about aligning the language and visuals of your ads with your landing page and products, ensuring a seamless journey for customers. This consistency reinforces your brand and reassures customers that they’ve found the right place.
What is Message Match?
However, you’ve probably also heard that it’s essential to tailor your marketing for each channel you’re on. Whether it’s various social media platforms, paid search, email campaigns, or articles, each needs a unique approach and accommodates different types of creatives. But how can you effectively tailor your marketing strategies while maintaining consistency across all channels?
At Sprint, we have a few key things we always focus on when running a multi-channel campaign:
Technical Specifications
Before anything else, you must make sure your visuals and copy suit the technical specifications of the channel you’re advertising on. Here are a few questions to make sure you’ve answered:
• Are your image dimensions correct, or will they be cropped oddly on some screens or placements?
• Are your videos too long or too short for the platform they’re on? Do you have both landscape and vertical (Story) versions created?
• Does your video need closed captions? Remember – most people watch with the volume off.
• How long are your captions, headlines and descriptions? Make sure you check the preview – you don’t want your clever copy being cut off!
You can use these as a starting checklist for making sure your creatives are optimised for each channel’s requirements. Finally, remember – mobile first! Your ads will be seen more often on mobile than anywhere else, so make sure they look great on a phone.
Tone and Style
This is the tricky part. When tones and the way people interact are so different depending on the channel (think TikTok vs LinkedIn), how can you make sure your brand is still presenting a unified message?
If you’re running a specific campaign, there’s no getting around it – you need your key message to be present on every channel, in every ad. However, you can:
• Create shorter and longer text versions of your message
• Write more and less formal versions of your text that still have the same core message
• Use the same key words and ‘hero’ phrases in each version to ensure message match
Try to match the tone and style of each platform. There are a lot of great guides out there breaking down what these are for all the major platforms, which can be very helpful, but don’t be afraid to do your own research too. How do your competitors talk to customers on Instagram? Do you think it’s a good approach, or are there tweaks you’d want to make for your own brand?
Personalise It (When Possible)
Finally, personalise your campaigns! In most cases, you should avoid running just one campaign targeting your entire audience. This may work if you have a very simple product for one very specific audience, but most businesses are trying to talk to different groups of people and have different selling points for each audience segment. Don’t be afraid to run different campaigns for different parts of your audience.
Running different campaigns ensures that you can keep your messages for each campaign matching and specific even across different channels – because you aren’t trying to talk to everyone at once.
Instead, you can use messages for each campaign that all suit the larger goal of reinforcing your brand’s visuals and products while also talking to specific niches of your audience. You’re making your job of message match easier and also running better campaigns!
You can also really personalise your message on some channels, especially email. Take advantage of email tools that let you insert someone’s name, see which kinds of products they like to purchase from you, and more to make sure you’re communicating with them about their interests.
But don’t forget – make sure the message in your email matches the message on your landing page! If you feature a specific package or piece of clothing in your email, it should also be on the landing page they get to. This goes for all your channels.
What’s next for your digital marketing?
We hope these tips and tricks and helpful to you for the next digital marketing campaign your brand runs. If you’re looking for a partner to help you execute that campaign, don’t hesitate to get in touch with the team here at Sprint.
We’re passionate about all things digital, from web design to paid search, social media, branding, and more, and would love to help you get started.
