Your Corporate Messaging Needs A Makeover

Your Corporate Messaging Needs A Makeover

by | Mar 2, 2022 | Blog

Recently, I was listening to a podcast featuring the CEO of a healthcare tech company that’s doing fantastic things in a new way—an actual innovator, as much as that word is overused. The podcast wasn’t sponsored, so the line of questioning was broad and geared toward thought leadership. In response to the host’s first question, the CEO launched into a detailed explanation of the issues with just a quick “At [Company Name], we deal with [thorny topic] all the time, starting with A and B.”

The rest of the conversation bounced around from there, and it was a decent interview overall, except for one thing: I never found out what the CEO’s company did, exactly. I agreed with many of his sentiments about the industry and was already predisposed to think highly of his company, but the onus fell on me, the listener, to search online for more info. That CEO had one shot to make a first impression, but he failed to take advantage of it: he didn’t introduce his own brand.

As an account director, I see clients fail to effectively communicate their corporate message. When prepping for an interview, clients tend to focus on which successes to share. They talk about how to answer tricky questions that might come up, and discuss whether a data point from Client 1 or Client 2 would be best. But they don’t focus on the messaging basics: how to say what you do as efficiently as possible, in a variety of settings. Your leaders need to agree on the language they’ll use to give a quick introduction, and they need to practice this phrasing until it becomes second nature.

When I was listening to that podcast, if I had heard something like this: “At [Company Name], we provide [innovative feature] to [type of customers] to help them [accomplish this result]” before the CEO continued with “So we deal with [thorny topic] all the time…” I would have had a context for all the insightful things Mr. CEO said from then on. I would have been properly introduced to the company, grounded in what they provide to a particular market.

You Need More Pitches Than You Think You Do

At large companies, marketing departments will hammer out corporate messaging templates with several components: the top 3 bullets that describe the company’s accomplishments; the 25-word elevator pitch; the 50-word elevator pitch; the 100-word boilerplate; the corporate mission; the list of values. Smaller companies, being nimbler and more mission-driven, tend to think of such messaging docs as unnecessary—and completely disconnected from what their leaders will say to the press.

They’re not. Just as all companies must determine their market positioning, they must also determine their specific language: how will we introduce ourselves? Your company’s oral and written messaging needs to include both features and benefits. What do you make/provide/enable for customers, and how does that feature benefit them?

Once you’ve got your messaging down, you need to spend time iterating it in multiple formats. Contrary to popular belief, the best 25-word intro to your company is not the first sentence of your “About Us” page on your website. Be thoughtful about each version, and note who it’s for: 50 words to describe us to investors; 5 bullets to include on slides for existing customers; 3 key messages for trade shows; etc. This legwork will pay off in spades as you apply for awards, send reporters background information, complete RFIs, connect with potential clients, and more.

Lastly, don’t forget to train your leaders in the verbal version of your messaging for conversations and interviews. While it doesn’t need to be exact every time, you should certainly have at least one or two phrases that are consistently said aloud by your executive leadership.

Revamping Your Boilerplate

Found at the bottom of all press releases, a company’s boilerplate is a standardized paragraph that describes the organization’s purpose, size, and presence. It often includes details such as the year the company was founded, its annual revenue and/or financial backers, and market share or angle. Your boilerplate should also incorporate a few key words—or even better, a unique phrase—to enable search engine optimization.

Unfortunately, many companies write their boilerplate once and then forget to refine it as their messaging evolves. Along with your messaging, you should review your boilerplate at least once a year. Does it reflect where you are now? If your key phrases aren’t getting any traction, but your customers all respond enthusiastically to one specific value prop, consider the SEO version of that value prop. Will it work in your boilerplate? Is it clear and meaningful, or did you accidentally jargonize it?

While this is not an exhaustive how-to post about how to write an excellent company boilerplate—for that, see this post from PR expert Dmitry Dragilev—I do have a few tips for you.

#1: Don’t be aspirational.

If your company makes teapots, but your five-year plan involves the creation of compostable coffee, tea, and mimosa single-serve pods, you’re not an “major vendor in the eco-friendly breakfast beverage supply chain”; you’re still a teapot manufacturer.

Startups in particular are frequently tempted to include their overarching vision in their boilerplate, as they can’t yet do what they mean to do – and they want everyone to know the scope of their ambition. While this is understandable, companies run the risk of undermining their own success if they stake their reputation on future-state aspirations. Potential clients may simply want a beautiful teapot; they need to know that your company makes them.

Don’t let your excitement about what your company will eventually do overcome reality; market what you have now, and market it well. If you’re afraid that your company will be discounted because everyone’s talking about single-serve beverages, then find a way to incorporate your proximity to the Hot Topic without overselling what your company does in the present moment.

(Apologies to the Ask a Manager readership for the teapot analogy. This site answers reader questions on workplace dilemmas, and it’s well worth your time: the letters are often hilarious, and writer Alison Green gives useful advice for navigating difficult work situations.)

#2: Keep it modest.

This is not the time for verbs like ‘transform’ or ‘revolutionize,’ nor for adjectives like ‘impressive’ or ‘powerful.’ Your boilerplate should state what you do and why you do it, but not offer its own opinions on how well you do it. We don’t include self-referential compliments when we’re introducing ourselves for a reason. While you may call yourself “adept” in a cover letter, you don’t say it in conversation; your boilerplate should not be the corporate version of “I’m Jessica, a skillful communicator!”

You should also stay away from superlative phrases like “the industry’s leading platform” or “the world’s largest system,” especially if you’re relatively unknown. Even if your software has twice as many users as your closest competitors, comparative phrases invite readers to respond with skepticism. There should be nothing in your boilerplate that is arguable; your statements should be clear, simple, and unassailable.

If you work for Amazon, then sure, you could say you’re the world’s largest online retailer—but readers would know that already. For everyone else, it just sounds like a humble brag that may or may not be true. If you want to show size or range, opt for facts instead: “used by 65% of U.S. health systems” is more believable than “the industry’s leading platform.” If you’ve won a prestigious award, make sure to include it in your boilerplate. Let others do your bragging for you!

#3: Avoid nonsense taglines.

My husband’s favorite tagline of all time was for the beer Stella Artois: “Reassuringly expensive.” For 25 years, the company used this phrase in television and print ads in the U.K., where it hit just the right note: this beer tastes so much better than its low-end counterparts that it’s not even in the same category—nor are you, discerning drinker!

In corporate America, and especially in healthcare, there’s a tendency to choose random inspirational words for your tagline. Often these aren’t even connected to what the company does, but just a collection of positive qualities or actions: “Collaborate. Innovate. Accelerate.” Taglines should be clear, practical, and instantly relatable to what your business does, according to this advice from entrepreneurs.

In healthcare, I’ve seen many variations along the lines of “We move care forward” or “We put the care in healthcare.” Avoid stating the obvious (nobody moves care backward), and avoid being cheesy. Your tagline requires real thought and a sense of what sets your company apart from competitors. This is where you can get creative and evoke your company’s higher aspirations (as long as they relate to what you do now). Where do you want to be in ten years? What mission connects your present and your future?

You won’t be able to encapsulate every last thing that you do in one tagline, but you should be able to come up with an evocative phrase that distinguishes your approach. Don’t be afraid to test it out across your company, or ask your employees for help brainstorming. Once you have a good tagline, use it to close out your boilerplate, along with a link to your website. Now, you’re ready for prime time: You have everything you need to make a good impression.

Kindly Do The Needful: Coping With Outcomes Anxiety

Kindly Do The Needful: Coping With Outcomes Anxiety

by | Sep 29, 2021 | Blog

In healthcare, we’re always talking about improving patient outcomes, clinical and financial outcomes, or even the mind-numbing phrase ‘operational outcomes,’ whatever that means. Recently, I’ve been thinking about the intersection of language and performance anxiety, and I keep circling around the concept of what I’ve been calling outcomes anxiety.

Our inability to control the future often manifests in an urge toward excess—the desire to subdue all unknown variables with an overwhelming volume of material. It’s the opposite of a strategic approach, and it’s unfortunately fairly common. Many healthcare companies err on the side of quantity rather than quality, assuming that whatever sticks to the wall will function just as well as an intentional choice.

I’ve seen 15-touch email campaigns delivering 18 assets on 11 disparate products; product lines with 85 fact sheets; website rebrands of hundreds of pages doomed to start over again in six months’ time.  When you don’t know what will work, you try everything, right?

Wrong. This is always a bad idea, both for your company and your career—not to mention your mental health. Let me explain.

The Anxiety Spiral at Work

Most of us have at least a passing familiarity with the anxiety spiral when it comes to our daily lives. One asks oneself a reasonable question, which is immediately answered with the worst possible outcome and escalated to ever more dire hypotheticals. What if my child’s cough is a symptom of Covid? becomes she’ll miss school for two weeks and morphs into all the grandparents could die before you’ve even removed the thermometer from its case. The literature calls this catastrophic thinking.

Of course, given the pandemic, we’re all trying to grant ourselves extra leniency as we cope with our anxiety; after all, there are real consequences at stake. For my friends with clinical anxiety, however, the spiral is triggered a thousand times a day by the most mundane concerns: a meeting conflict, a late payment, an unreturned email. As a healthcare writer with generally deadline-driven anxiety, I try to stave off stress with the usual preventative measures: deep breaths and long walks.

At work, I notice that my worry tends to coagulate around long-term outcomes. I don’t have time to research this byline today becomes nobody will like what I write and morphs into this whole week will be a firestorm of horror before I’ve written the first paragraph. As the things we tell ourselves are mostly subterranean, it can be tricky to diagnose yourself with outcomes anxiety.

For me, it starts with the language.

Marketing Speak: The Original Social Distancing

Whenever I think about healthcare jargon, I remember listening to intake calls with one freelance writer who routinely strung together industry phrases without apparent concern for their meaning (or lack thereof). He asked questions like this: “So we leverage clinical intelligence efficiencies to thread the needle of those at-risk enterprise social determinants and optimize technology-enabled solutions to close the gap, right?” The subject matter expert he was talking to would pause for a moment, frown ever so slightly, and resume her explanation.

Even more puzzling was the reputation this writer had among marketing management. “He knows his stuff,” I heard time and again. This could not have been further from the truth, at least not in my opinion. While the final product of these intake calls was serviceable, particularly as SEO fodder, it wasn’t very good. His copy did not help readers understand a new concept, or elucidate product intricacies, or address how the company could help clients. It just put all the relevant jargon in a blender and served it up like an ambitious smoothie: empty calories, suspicious taste, but certainly filling.

Why do so many people talk this way on calls? I think they suffer from an acute case of outcomes anxiety, one that’s particularly endemic to marketing. When you don’t yet know what you need to, you worry about the ultimate outcomes of your work. Will the piece miss the mark? Will the audience click on your links? Will any of this result in sales?

That misguided writer was trying out all his phrases at once, hoping the cumulative effect would be impressive. Although he thought he sounded knowledgeable, he was too insecure to ask the useful questions, the kind that might be perceived as too simplistic: “So, how does this product help patients? How does it work?”

When I edit copy for a client, I try to eliminate marketing speak, and I often get pushback. People tend to believe that dense language sounds more professional, and it can be a struggle to help them understand that jargon is the enemy of clarity. By its nature, marketing speak is an agent of exclusion: it alienates readers who are unfamiliar with the terminology. This is not for you; this is for those who can decipher this code. What a pernicious myth! Readers should not have to decipher meanings, at least not in professional writing. It’s the writer’s job to deliver the message with grace and clarity.

Circumventing Your Own Outcomes Anxiety

In my experience, extra fluffy language is motivated by insecurity about the real value of what is being produced, and it shows in the piece. It’s also the first indication that you might have outcomes anxiety.

So, the next time you sit down to write, and your first paragraph is hogwash—or when you’re in a meeting, and everyone’s talking about peeling the onion on customer buy-in—try these tips:

Ground yourself in the practical. What is the point of this piece? What do we want this campaign to accomplish? Whenever you find yourself tempted to overcomplicate things—when you’re wrestling with how to deliver 18 assets in a logical order—it’s a sure sign that you need to go back to basics. Ask simple questions. People will thank you.

Insist on a plan. One of the best healthcare writers I know routinely frustrated the teams she worked with by refusing to write before a plan was in place. And not just any old plan, with a wishy-washy “we’ll use this later, definitely” rationale, but a good plan, with strong strategy, clear tactics, audience definition, a timeline, the whole shebang. Paradoxically, your outcomes will be better when you spend more time on the inputs, as that planning process eliminates the creep of outcome anxiety from infecting your work.

Kindly do the needful. At a former company, I had a lovely coworker from Bulgaria whose English was refreshingly creative. When she sent me an article to edit, she’d close with this line: “Kindly do the needful.” When you catch yourself beginning the anxiety spiral, try to focus simply on the task at hand. Do the needful. And then do the next needful. And so on.

Reclaim your joy. When we stop worrying about uncontrollable outcomes, we remember why we enjoy the work we do…and then we do it better. When I stop wondering whether a client will like what I write, I suddenly realize that I’m enjoying myself, and that I actually like to write. Who knew! Give yourself permission not to focus on the deadline, the reception, or the ultimate outcome. For thirty minutes at a time, focus on the fun.