Getting your message right is crucial for successful media interviews.
You want something that sounds natural, is easily remembered, sparks curiosity, triggers emotion and ultimately influences and persuades your audience.
At the same time, it must be truthful, short and simple.
And it needs to withstand scrutiny.
That’s a long list. How do you craft a message that does all those things?
Well, message development is the focus of our next live masterclass for members of The Media Team Academy.
Journalist Victoria Smith will explore all aspects of creating impactful and engaging messages, and landing them in a credible way.
This includes the importance of audience identification, whether one key message is enough, identifying examples and stories to support your message, and understanding the potential pushbacks against your message.
Victoria will also look at the pros and cons of messaging house.
Many of you will have heard of messaging house.
It is a structured, disciplined and well-established approach to creating messages used by businesses, public sector organisations and charities.
The process is essentially the reverse of building a real house.
You begin by creating the key message – the roof of the messaging house.
This is followed by the walls, which are the supporting messages.
And then come the foundations, which are the evidence and examples that ensure those messages are more than just rhetoric.
The great thing about this model is it is versatile. It works just as well for a media interview as it does for preparing for a presentation or your internal communication work.
But let’s focus on its advantages for media interviews.
Simplicity
The strength of messaging house is its visual simplicity.
It may look like a house drawn by a child. But it is an easy way to guide your spokespeople through the importance of one key, overarching message, having supportive messages, and backing it up with examples, evidence and case studies.
Consistent messages
Get that right, and it should result in a consistent message, whether you have one media spokesperson or several people with recent media training who are ready to face journalists.
Sounds good, doesn’t it?
But this house may not be as structurally sound as you thought.
Corporate
A crucial issue with this model is that it is overly corporate. Messaging houses tend to be signed off at the top of a business or organisation.
Consequently, they are often filled with corporate language and boardroom speak that is not media-friendly.
When spokespeople revert to corporate language, they struggle to build a connection with the audience and sound robotic and scripted – cast your mind back to Theresa May and her attempt to shoehorn “strong and stable” into every media appearance.
And when a media interview lacks conviction, the great opportunity it presents is wasted.
So, what should you do?
Well, you need to get your messaging house in order.
On our message development and testing training courses, we discuss the importance of comms teams taking that overarching corporate messaging house and creating a new one for spokespeople for media interviews.
You need to spend quality time thinking about what you want your spokesperson to say, how they should say it, and what you want the audience to do or how you want them to feel after hearing the interview.
That will mean refining those messages and using more media-friendly language.
On our media training courses, we often suggest using the language you would use if you were talking to a friend in a pub or café.
But perhaps the most effective approach is to loosen the messaging noose and trust, empower and encourage your spokespeople to use their own words to get your message across. And support it with personal anecdotes and examples.
This approach brings messages to life and helps ensure they resonate with your audience.
Do you want more on message development and testing?
Well, during the exclusive masterclass for members of The Media Team Academy, Victoria will also look at good and bad messaging examples in interviews and explore crisis messaging.
If you are a member of The Media Team Academy, check your inbox for the invite to the masterclass on July 27.
If you’re not yet a member, you can’t get access. But we can sort that for you – drop us a line at hello@mediafirst.co.uk or give us a call on 0118 9180530 and ask to speak to someone about signing up to The Media Team Academy.
Media First are media and communications training specialists with over 35 years of experience. We have a team of trainers, each with decades of experience working as journalists, presenters, communications coaches and media trainers.
Click here to find out more about our message development and testing training.
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