The Messaging Drift Problem

This post originally appeared in my Substack newsletter, The Work Behind the Work. Subscribe here.

Have your company’s website open in one browser window. Have the sales presentation open in another. Bring up the latest social media posts in a third. And then, have the current email follow-up series in a fourth.

Go through them, one after the other. Does the company sound the same in all four of those places?

If you’re really thinking about it, it likely doesn’t. Perhaps the website starts with one benefit you offer, and the sales presentation begins with a different one. Perhaps social media uses a more relaxed style of speech than the website. Perhaps the email series talks about product advantages that were right last year, but aren’t now. Perhaps the slogan on the trade show display from the last three months doesn’t quite agree with the slogan on the latest fact sheets.

None of these differences is significant. None of them came about because somebody chose to alter the message. They came about little by little – one item at a time, one effort at a time, one quarter at a time – until the company’s voice changed enough that a potential customer seeing it in multiple places gets a somewhat different story each time.

This is messaging drift. It is among the most frequent, most harmful, and most unseen issues in marketing.

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

How drift occurs

Messaging drift usually isn’t from a poor decision. It is from several small, sensible decisions made over time.

A new campaign starts, and the team slightly changes the benefit you offer to suit the people they’re trying to reach. The change is small, and it works, so the new wording stays. Half a year later, another campaign changes it again. Now there are two versions of the benefit floating around, and nobody is certain which one is current.

A new person joins the sales team and makes their own version of the presentation because the official one isn’t quite what they want. Their version goes well, so other people on the sales team start using it. Now the sales team is giving a somewhat different story thanthe one marketing is publishing.

The social media team develops a more conversational tone because that’s what does well on their sites. That’s all right – changing to fit the channel is smart. But over time, the difference between the social voice and the website voice grows until they feel like different companies.

The leaders make a strategic change – a new market, a new position, a new priority. Marketing updates the website and the new campaign materials. But the email series, the older blog posts, the always-current fact sheets, and the partner materials don’t change. Now half the company’s contacts show the new direction, and the other half show the old one.

Each of these times is, on its own, reasonable. Nobody did anything wrong. But the overall result is a company that speaks with several voices, and a group of people who receive a blurred message instead of a clear one.

Why messaging drift is a problem

The effect of messaging drift isn’t obvious – it’s a reason it’s so often missed. It doesn’t lead to one big, obvious problem, but to a gradual loss of being clear.

Potential customers get mixed up. As buyers usually encounter your company in several places – and most B2B sales work that way – not having the same message everywhere makes it hard for them to process. They aren’t certain what your product does, who it’s for, or what sets it apart. They may not even know they’re mixed up, but this shows as being unsure. They won’t be as likely to recall you, move ahead, or go with a rival whose message was more straightforward.

The sales staff makes things up as they go. When the formal message doesn’t seem right – because it’s old, doesn’t match, or is too vague – salespeople make up their own. It isn’t because they’re lazy, but because they’re adapting. However, this means each salesperson is telling a somewhat different story, and there’s no check on what prospects are being told.

People in the company get out of step. When different groups are using different messages, it’s harder to work together across departments. The product people think marketing is saying one thing, marketing thinks sales is saying something else, and customer success is giving a third version. Everyone is working hard, but not from the same base.

The brand's value goes down. A brand isn’t simply a logo and colours. It’s what people slowly build up in their minds from every contact with your company. When those contacts aren’t the same, the impression is weaker. Not wrong, exactly – just less clear, less to be remembered, less different. With time, this weakness builds up just as surely as clarity does.

How to find drift before it gets worse

The answer to messaging drift isn’t a complete rebrand or a company-wide message change. It’s getting into the habit of regularly checking – easy, cheap, and worth far more than many teams realise.

Do a messaging check every three months. This doesn’t need to be a large project. Spend two hours and open your five to ten most-used materials: the website home page, the main sales presentation, the email follow-up series, the social media profile descriptions, the latest campaign materials, and any materials for partners or customers. Read them one after the other. Note every place where the words, the benefit offered, the manner of speaking, or the product description are different. You’ll nearly always find drift, and most of it can be put right quickly once it’s been found.

Keep one definite source. Every company should have one piece of writing – a messaging guide, a brand outline, a statement of where the brand stands, whatever you want to call it – which shows the now-current, approved version of the brand’s basic message. The main value offered. A description of the people you’re aiming at. How the product is placed in the market. Rules for the brand’s voice. Proof of what is said. This writing doesn’t need to be long. It needs to be up to date, easy to access, and treated as the standard against which everything new is checked.

Put someone in charge. Messaging drift happens because no one’s job is to stop it. If keeping the message the same across channels is everyone’s job, it’s, in effect, no one’s job. Someone – a brand manager, a content leader, a marketing director – needs to be in charge of the check cycle and have the authority to flag and correct drift when they find it.

Bring the old materials up to date. When the message changes – on purpose, as part of a planned change – the new direction needs to be put into the existing materials, not just used for new ones. This is the step that is most often left out, and it’s what causes drift most of the time. If the website says one thing and the email series still says the old thing, you don’t have a new message. You have a contradiction.

The discipline of consistency

Being consistent in what you say isn’t very exciting – it doesn’t even seem like planning, really. Checking a sales presentation against what’s on your website’s main page isn’t as stimulating as beginning a fresh campaign.

Yet consistency is how campaigns succeed; it’s what lets people recognise your brand. And it’s what guarantees that someone who sees your advert, goes to your site, gets your email, and then speaks to your sales people, is getting the same sensible account at each stage.

The brands that appear naturally easy to understand – the ones where any contact with the company supports the same central notion – aren’t easy to understand by chance. They are easy to understand because someone is doing the dull work of spotting changes and putting them right, every three months, item by item.

Your brand won’t fail completely and suddenly. It will change little by little. And by the time you observe that, your audience has done so already. The only solution is to continue to take notice.