Month: October 2026

In a previous article, John looked at the who, what, when, and why of B2B messaging workshops. If you thought that all sounded like a useful, but time and effort-intensive exercise, you’d be right. But it doesn’t always have to be.

Here, we’ll take a look at the mini messaging exercise, and why sometimes a small nudge is enough to refresh messaging and get you back to a place of content and branding consistency.

The trouble with traditional messaging workshops

Traditional messaging workshops normally happen when you need to make a radical change to the way you communicate with an audience. For example, new products, moving into new markets or regions, or completely pivoting the way your business operates are all viable triggers for rethinking your messaging.

The problem is it’s a massive undertaking. Just ask your friendly neighbourhood executive to join a day-long messaging workshop and see how quickly they find an urgent appointment they forgot about.

Developing new messaging requires input from several stakeholders, long meetings for them to debate different approaches, and likely an external facilitator to run those meetings, take notes, and turn them into usable messaging. That’s a lot to coordinate.

It demands a level of engagement and resources that turn a necessary exercise into a cumbersome activity that’s easy to put off until absolutely necessary. And if a brand puts off messaging work, it’s easy for messaging to drift over time, leading to inconsistent content that limits results.

What is a mini messaging exercise?

Enter the mini messaging exercise: where you take stock of your existing messaging and make small adjustments without needing to get a dozen people in a room together to hash it out from square one.

It’s designed for those situations where your messaging needs a nudge rather than a complete overhaul. For example, it might happen when you start working with new creatives, or just at regular intervals to ensure everyone remains aligned. Or it might just be a natural trigger as your messaging starts to become out of date.

The key is a smaller scale approach helps correct messaging drift without using a huge amount of time and resources.

Does that mean you don’t need a workshop for a mini messaging exercise?

That depends.

You still need a way to gather perspectives from across the business. But you and your executives will be relieved to know it doesn’t have to be the traditional act of sitting people down in the boardroom for a half-day meeting.

It could mean a standardised list of questions around your audience, market trends, and products that a representative from each relevant team answers over email. Or it could mean a short call with the relevant stakeholders – either one-by-one, or in a traditional conference call format – so everyone can bat their ideas back and forth.

Whatever you choose to do, make sure you don’t bog the exercise down in anything too onerous or long-winded. The reason a lot of messaging drift happens is because people are scared to refresh messaging regularly due to the burden of planning and executing large-scale workshops. Anything that removes that burden is a plus.

Who should be involved in mini messaging?

Like its more comprehensive older sibling, a mini messaging exercise needs a few key voices in the room to offer a complete picture of what messaging will work best for your audience.

You want representatives from:

• Marketing – to capture ideas and start connecting them to overall marketing strategy
• Sales – to understand your audience, their most common questions and obstacles, and how they might relate to your current messaging
• Product teams – to feed in necessary technical information about your products and services

If you can get these three perspectives, that’s really all you need to check if, and how, your messaging needs to shift. Again, be careful not to include too many voices in the room, especially if you’re trying to get everyone to share ideas simultaneously. The more calendars you need to coordinate, the harder it is to get your messaging off the ground.

What does a messaging document look like after you do a mini messaging exercise?

Messaging documents can take many forms, as each one must be tailored to the brand behind it and its needs.

For the mini messaging exercise, it’s easier to define what it doesn’t look like; it’s not pages and pages of carefully designed branding guidelines and examples. Often, something leaner is easier to produce (and more likely to actually get used) in cases where you’re making small adjustments or correcting messaging drift.

While there are a few evergreen components you need in any messaging document (like value propositions, proof points, and some details about your audience), the rest will depend on your needs:

• Finding your prospects have lots of questions or concerns about your product? Consider adding an FAQ or objection handling section.
• Seeing a lot of confusion around how businesses can integrate your solution into their operations? Include toolkits or practical guidance.
• Need to make sure your messaging will be applied and used correctly? Include example content to show a real application of your adjusted messaging.

Whatever goes in needs to be practical and targeted to solve the issues that prompted you to review your messaging in the first place.

How often should you look at your messaging?

Mini messaging exercises shouldn’t be prompted by big changes in your industry or business. That sort of thing normally leads to larger messaging reworks. Instead, mini messaging is best done on a regular cadence.

Every year or so, assess whether your current messaging is fit for purpose. Depending on your industry, that timeline might get shorter or longer – an AI startup will experience messaging drift much more often than a company in a more mature industry.

The reality is these checkups may lead to nothing. You may decide everything is right and well, and no action is needed. But if you do spot signs that your messaging is falling behind, then it’s time to consider whether a small tweak can get it where it needs to be.

Do you need an external facilitator or agency for mini messaging?

All messaging work has to fit the size and scope of the organisation behind it. Mini messaging is no different in that respect.

In some cases, where you just need to make small tweaks to get new collaborators aligned, you may just want to conduct a mini messaging exercise internally. If it grows beyond that scope to encompass messaging shifts responding to market trends, it may be worth bringing in a third party for the usual reasons: external perspectives and facilitating potentially challenging conversations about the core of your brand’s identity.

Even if you’re not conducting a large-scale workshop, having an external voice in the room – and support for turning those conversations into a usable messaging document or framework – can be a big help.

Messaging work isn’t a set menu, it’s a scale

My loosely-defined idea of the mini messaging exercise isn’t designed to rip up the messaging rulebook. It’s trying to demonstrate that all this work operates on a scale, and at certain points on that scale, the work can get a little lighter, less taxing, and more agile as a result.

Rather than a big-bang messaging workshop, regularly making small touches to your messaging can keep your content fresher, more unified, and more performant.

If you’re not sure exactly where your messaging work needs to sit on this scale, feel free to get in touch with us. That way, you can talk it through with people who’ve worked on messaging jobs large and small, and we can point you in the right direction based on your needs.

Get in touch

 

Words matter. What you say to your customers and prospects, and how you say it, is the stitching that holds marketing campaigns together. But today, the value of that writing is increasingly being questioned.

Marketers face what on the surface is a difficult choice; one that’s been the primary topic of conversation for years now: To AI or not to AI? Is the cost saving and simplicity of AI-generated content worth the gamble? Does a shortcut ever pay dividends? Or are brands risking their reputations for short-term efficiency gains?

There are lots of reasons why the answer to this seems obvious to me. I’ve been in the copywriting industry for fifteen years, and we have a full team of writers with years and years of experience whose value and talent I see every day. But I do understand that value might not be clear to everyone until they work with us, or those like us.

The truth is, while AI can spit out grammatically correct sentences, paragraphs, and full pieces of work, a lot of the value good writers bring to marketing campaigns isn’t about writing at all. It’s about understanding, communicating, strategizing, spotting gaps, conducting interviews with SMEs, recognising the value in what they say, and applying years of experience to elevate the ambitions of the marketers they work with.

With that in mind, I thought it would be good to shine a light on some of the sometimes-unnoticed value a good copywriter will bring to your project.

A good copywriter can help you strategize

Often, marketers bring copywriters in when the writing is ready to begin. Makes sense, right? But, bearing in mind those writers have experience with hundreds projects, in most cases across many different clients, there’s actually a lot of value they can add in the earlier stages of a campaign.

This can range from general advice around content types to more strategic considerations. In fact, more copywriters are offering content strategy as part of their packages these days. This can be defined in different ways, and not everyone will offer everything (you may want to be wary if they say they do). But at Radix, we offer a range of services that can help you produce more valuable content later down the line:

• Content audits: So, you have your budget, but you’re not sure where it would be best spent. One of the most effective ways to figure this out is to conduct an audit of your existing content. What do you have? What’s working and performing well? What isn’t? And, most importantly, where do the gaps lie? This process is a great way of helping you prioritise content production and fill any engagement gaps that might be missing.
• Messaging workshops: All good content starts with a good messaging document and an alignment over who you want to talk to, what you want to say, and, vitally, how you say it. A messaging workshop is vital for building the foundations your content will rest on. Interestingly, while some organisations revisit this practice when major changes occur, two of our writers recently espoused the benefits of more regular tweaks rather than wholesale refreshes. You can listen to that conversation here.
• Ideas generation: Writers are inherently creative thinkers. So, if you’re at the stage of a project where you know what the campaign is, you know who the audience is, but you’re not sure how to execute, it’s a great time to let a writer loose with ideas. A good content ideation document will provide a wide range of ideas to choose from, covering everything from social copy to videos, ebooks, infographics, and beyond. It should also provide some key concepts, such as tag lines and angles if those aren’t already present in the brief. With that document in front of you, you should be able to select the right combination of assets to support your campaign in line with your budgets.

A good copywriter brings the gift of wider contextual knowledge

Fifteen years as a copywriter has made me more knowledgeable, but perhaps not in the areas you’d expect. I already knew where to put a comma and how to structure a story, but since joining Radix, I’ve become an expert on a range of topics, from data and analytics workloads and the role of AI in data science to the common pain points of retailers, fintechs, and HR departments.

Experienced writers will have had countless conversations with experts in various fields, which means they come equipped with an understanding of audiences, challenges, industries, and technologies. And they’re also accustomed to picking up new ideas quickly. These powers can help them fill in gaps in briefs, understand the wider implications of things, and have truly meaningful conversations with your SMEs. All things AI isn’t capable of as it slavishly follows your prompts without any real care for the outcome.

That last point can be so critical for getting the most value from your in-house experts. When writers have accrued a bank of industry knowledge, they don’t just understand what an SME is telling them, they can also direct the conversation to areas that they know will add value to the work. This is especially important when you consider SMEs are subject matter experts. They’re not marketing experts. Quite often, they’ll answer questions without the bigger picture or end goal in mind, which is where an expert writer, who understands the subject matter and the marketing ask, can be worth their weight in gold.

Understanding intention and communicating ideas

One of the most important differences between a human writer and an LLM is that a human writer can explain the why.

Put simply, an LLM doesn’t really know what it’s doing. It skims the internet or source documents for information and turns it into sentences and paragraphs based on likelihoods. But that’s not writing. It structures things the way most things are structured, but it can never understand why they’re structured that way, so it can never understand when to change the structure. A writer knows structure because they studied it. They probably went to university to do so, and read books like Into the Woods, The Hero’s Journey, and Aristotle’s Rhetoric. They didn’t just read those texts in the way AI ingests them; they understood them. And because they have this knowledge, they’re capable of something fundamentally human, metacognition.

This will have a huge impact on your marketing project. A writer won’t just take a brief; they’ll feed back on it, highlighting opportunities for improvement and added value. They won’t just produce a first draft; they’ll craft an outline, complete with comments sharing their thought process, which helps bring everyone together on the same page.

They’ll do the same thing when it comes to stakeholder feedback. While an LLM will respond to edit requests by simply regenerating a chunk of text from scratch, a writer who understands the piece they wrote will understand why something should change and how to change it. As part of the job is to share expertise with clients, they’ll also know when to push back on feedback with an explanation of why a specific change could make the piece less effective. They can also find a compromise between what you’re asking and what you need. And spot problems you might not have seen yourself.

Your goals are our goals

There’s probably a more nuanced way to say this, but an LLM doesn’t give a shit if it does a good job or not. In fact, it can’t even tell if it has. We’ve all seen ChatGPT offer one of those weirdly remorseless apologies for doing or saying something completely incorrect: “Ah, you got me there, I did in fact share false information.” That’s probably not something you want leaking into your content. As a rule of thumb, regardless of what service you’re procuring, it’s best to hire someone who cares at least some amount.

Copywriters have skin in the game. They’re incentivised to actually help you achieve your marketing goals. that’s how they build better long-term relationships with clients, boost and maintain their reputation, and win more work. In the end, your success or satisfaction is what will pay the bills. For an LLM, a good result is that the user stops prompting it and is therefore happy with the latest output. Job done. Was that output good or accurate? Who knows? And who cares when there are no repercussions?

As a relationship builds, your needs become second nature

Finally, perhaps the most important benefit can be found in not just finding a copywriter, but finding a copywriting partner.

We’ve worked with some of our clients for many years, and the benefits of that increase over time. Briefing is easier, because we already understand the fundamentals. We also have a really firm handle on what the marketers we support do and don’t like. And we understand the company’s culture, tone of voice, and audiences to the point that we don’t just write to them expertly, but can point out where something we’re asked to do is misaligned with those factors.

One of the biggest advantages our long-term clients experience is the strong relationships we develop with SMEs. Sometimes, persuading experts with packed diaries to participate in marketing can be an uphill struggle. But once they meet our team and see their thoughts in print, that all changes. You can read about that, and about the value of one of our long-term partnerships, here.