As an online business owner, one of the most important parts of your marketing strategy is your messaging. What you say to your ideal clients and customers (and how you say it) is just as key to your overall success as where you say it, which makes sense when you think about the fact that how we connect and communicate with other humans is through storytelling.

Unfortunately, the “messaging” part of marketing is often overlooked, in part because it requires time and effort. It’s easy to set up an account on the social media platform of your choice or throw some money at paid-for ads, but it’s harder to actually dig into and strategize what you’ll spend your time saying to your audience once they’re sitting in the room.

This is one of the most common mistakes online business owners and entrepreneurs make when it comes to their marketing: they spend A LOT of effort (and time and money) bringing in new leads to their business but they forget to take a minute to think about how they will convert those leads into actual clients or customers.

Which is where your messaging comes in.

So, what do you need to be hitting on in your messaging to see more results, more revenue, and more impact from your marketing efforts?

Here are three key things to lockdown so you see better results from your messaging.

1. Cultivate a strong brand identity.

In order to stand out from the crowd with your messaging (and let’s be honest: in the online business world, it’s BUSY), you need to first cultivate a strong brand identity. This means digging into and defining your core messaging aspects like your why, your mission, your values, and your beliefs. It also means shaping your story and putting into words what makes you different from all the other [insert what you do here] out there.

These are the things that make you and your brand truly unique. By clarifying them, you’ll ensure that your brand identity and personality are completely aligned with who you are (which means your messaging will draw in your dream ideal clients who are actively searching for someone like you).

2. Optimize your offerings.

Your offer is more than just the thing you’re selling. It’s how you change your client or customer’s life. But in order to convert the browsers into buyers, you need to make sure that the messaging and copy around your offer is telling them everything they need to hear to be ready to buy.

This means diving into things like understanding where your ideal clients are right now so you can make sure that your offer is exactly what they want and need, seeing what others in your niche are offering so you can position your offer as different (and better), and then clarifying the core aspects of your offer from a messaging perspective. If you can understand exactly who it is for and what big transformation it will bring them, you’ll be able to create the kind of messaging and copy you need to see great conversion rates and results from your funnels.

3. Create a scale-worthy strategy.

In order to achieve anything in life or business, you first need to have a plan. When it comes to your messaging and marketing, I call this creating a scale-worthy strategy. This is where getting clarity on things like how to share your vision with your team, what kind of content you need to be sharing to prime your audience, and what your big goal map for your business actually looks like comes into play.

When you have a strategy like this, it means sustainably scaling your business will be so much easier, and it means you can finally stop spinning your wheels thinking you need to be doing all the things and being everywhere in order to achieve your goals. A simplified strategy that is focused on building your authority, creating real connections with your audience, and crafting impactful messaging is way more effective than throwing spaghetti at the wall or copying what your competitors are doing (top tip: do not do this. You want to stand out in your industry so that means zigging when everyone else in your niche is zagging).

So there you have it, three things you can start working on today that will allow you to create the kind of messaging strategy that will bring better results from your marketing and get you closer to your business goals.

About the author: Ciara Gigleux is CEO and chief copywriter at The Copy Atelier, a boutique copywriting agency for online business owners and CEOs that specializes in pairing conversion copywriting with a high-impact strategy for maximum results. She’s also the host of The Copy Coach podcast. She is (slightly) obsessed with all things messaging, marketing, and copywriting, and the main mission of her business and podcast is to help entrepreneurs use their copy and messaging to cut through the noise, stand out online and maximize their results, revenue and impact. Find her on Instagram and Clubhouse @ciaragigleux.