“Messaging is not the copy, it’s the subtext.”
-Marcia Riefer Johnson of the ContentMarketing Institute
Messaging should evoke feeling and emotion, but how do you translate that into practical site content? There’s a place for messaging on the deeper pages on a site as a whole, but it takes a subtler approach than simply repeating what’s outlined in a mission statement.
Your high-level brand concepts can apply to functional and informational content across your website (not just your About Us page) in a lot of ways. GatherContent hosted a webinar on how to do this for higher education and research institutions, but it can be applied across any brand with a website.
So where do you start? One of the best ways to harness your messaging is with a design approach. Here are the steps:
Empathize
- “The What” questions about your audience. What do they like? What are they like?
- Understand your current website’s navigation and content.
Define
- Determine where to focus your energy.
- Set goals with stakeholders.
Ideate
- Determine how you will get the results you want.
- This is when to determine the person, places, things in your brand concepts.
Prototype
- Create, compile, and curate your content on your site (copywriting as well as thinking about photography).
- See how pages will look with that content.
Test
- Time for some validation and execution! Rearrange content placement and see how it performs.
- This is when you should have a set of analytical tools to know exactly how content is doing.
Now that you have the approach, you can breathe easier to start building out your content. View GatherContent’s webinar replay to learn how to bridge the gap between your brand messaging and your website content.
