Updated: 4 June 2026
Any time someone writes or speaks for your brand, the words and messages they choose act as a direct reflection of your values, voice, and position in the market. That’s why it’s so important that those people are all singing from the same hymn sheet, whether they’re internal stakeholders or external partners.
So how do you bring everyone together?
Almost any time you encounter consistent and impactful marketing out in the wild, it’s because that work was put in long before the first words hit the page. If your marketing is based on clear, documented, and easily sharable messaging, and that messaging is available to everyone who needs it, then it’s easy to ensure alignment. And that’s the vital foundation a messaging workshop can help you create.
If you’re new to the idea, here’s a quick FAQ to get you started.
Q: Who should be involved in the workshop?
Inconsistent marketing often comes from misaligned opinions, and that’s actually pretty normal. You’re bound to have more than one person with views on what you should communicate to the market. And those views might vary significantly depending on their roles and priorities. The good thing about a workshop is that it brings all those people together in one room to share their views and reach a consensus.
Different people bring different – but equally valid – perspectives to a messaging workshop. A product manager will have a good idea of what’s interesting about the product. A salesperson or consultant will have great insight into the problems customers need help with. A marketing person may have the best knowledge of what competitors offer and how to stand apart from them. Each of these people will have a valuable contribution, but a consensus is often harder to reach if too many people are involved in a conversation. So, try and make sure each of these groups is represented without making life harder for yourself by inviting entire departments.
Q: Do we really need someone to run a workshop for us?
There’s nothing to stop you from running a messaging workshop internally, but the risk is that a lack of an external perspective can have you believing that what you want to say is the same thing as what your customers want (and need) to hear.
What the workshop needs is someone external to perform four functions:
- Facilitate the session and tease out information that will form the messages
- Mediate any differences of opinion
- Challenge any messaging that seems self-serving rather than customer-focused
- Provide a balanced, external perspective
When Radix runs a messaging workshop, those are the roles we play: facilitator, mediator, constructive critic, and impartial observer.
Q: What happens before the workshop?
Agencies and consultancies run messaging workshops differently, but here’s a rough guide to how Radix does it.
Leading up to the workshop, we’ll arrange a call to understand what you want to achieve and how you plan to use the resulting messaging. A workshop for a specific product may have a completely different goal from a workshop to reposition a brand, for example.
We’ll ask who you plan to invite to the session and what roles they’ll play. And we’ll ask who your main competitors are and whether you have customers we can interview, so we can gain insight into how your market perceives your brand, product, or service.
We’ll also ask about logistics, such as how much time everyone can commit – our standard workshop session is four hours, but we can make it longer or shorter – and which time zones the attendees will be in.
That gives us enough information to create and share an agenda for the workshop and start on our pre-workshop research.
For competitor research, we’ll analyse competitors’ websites to help us collectively determine any differentiators and USPs we can use during the workshop.
For customer research, we’ll ask you to set up short interviews with three or four of your business’s current customers. We’ll talk to those customers about why they chose you, their experience working with you or your product, and where they think your strengths and weaknesses lie.
We’ll present our findings from both of these exercises during the workshop.
Q: What happens in the workshop itself?
Our view is that you’re not creating messages in a vacuum; you want messages that resonate with your target audience.
So we’ll spend time exploring the following:
- Who your target audience is, and what problems they’re trying to overcome.
- Whether there are diverse audience personas who might respond to different messaging.
- The different options your prospects have on the table, and what might spur them to choose your product or service.
- What you’re selling, what it does, and how it’s better than your competitors’ offerings.
We’ll also press you for proof points: what evidence you have to back up what you’re saying.
Throughout these discussions, we’ll capture everyone’s comments to inform the first draft of your messaging framework.
Q: What’s a messaging framework?
This is the output of the workshop: a document that sets out your key messages for your brand or specific products or services.
The format of the document will vary depending on the scope of your messaging project, but typically it might include the following:
- An introduction: What the document is for, how it can be used, and by whom.
- A description of your target persona(s): The people who buy from you, what their responsibilities and motivations are, their buying triggers, and what they’re looking for in a solution or provider.
- Your value proposition: A succinct summary of the value your brand, product, or service offers to its primary audience.
- Key messages: The main things you want the audience to know (or feel) about your brand, product, or service. We can supply these as copy blocks you can paste directly into marketing, sales, and PR materials.
- Supporting messages: Secondary messaging to support the key messages, also as copy blocks.
- Proof points: Evidence that shows what you’re saying is true, rather than just telling. Things like customer testimonials, analyst quotes, and certifications.
- Strapline options: Often used as part of the brand mark, the strapline is a concise, memorable expression of your value proposition. We’ll give you at least three options to choose from.
- Elevator pitches: Hardworking pieces of copy that can be used in slide decks, “About Us” pages, press releases, and LinkedIn profiles to explain succinctly what the brand, product, or service is about. We provide 25-word, 50-word, and 100-word versions for use in different contexts.
Q: How do we finalise the messaging?
With so many contributors, it’s rare for everyone to be delighted with the first draft of the messaging. That’s why we allow for two rounds of edits to the messaging framework, to make sure everything you and your stakeholders want to say comes across.
We give you the time you need to review the first draft. Then we can address your feedback, or hop on a call if we think that will be a quicker route to getting things just right. You could bring your stakeholders to that meeting or collate their feedback in advance. Either way, we’ll take it all on board, ask you any additional questions, and produce a second draft.
The second draft should be very close to the final version. If it’s not quite there, we’ll apply another round of amends to get it ready for you to share with your marketing, sales, and PR teams. We’ll then deliver that final document as a PDF, Word, or PowerPoint – whichever works best for you.
Q: Sounds wonderful – but how much is all this going to cost?
Aha, the million-dollar (not literally, you’ll be relieved to read) question. We find that messaging projects tend to vary in scope, so we don’t have a standard price for one. one. But if you contact our team, we’ll talk you through your options.
And if you’d like to discuss a messaging project with us directly, call us on +44 (0)1326 373592 or email [email protected].
