Key messages are the North Star in public relations—they guide storytelling, shape narrative, and anchor campaigns. Key messages encapsulate the most important aspects of your company, cause, or candidate— they are what you want your audiences to understand, remember, and act on. A good message framework gives PR pros a solid foundation on which to build all communications, ensuring consistency and maintaining focus. But you can't just craft your messages and put them on the shelf to collect dust. Messaging must be constantly adapted, tested, and practiced to steer you toward your goal successfully.

Test Them

Launching messaging without testing is like lobbing the proverbial pasta against the wall and hoping something will stick. Using formative research to develop your framework increases the chance of reaching and connecting with audiences – the first time. Evaluative research provides practitioners with proof of what works and points to places that need to be refined to optimize your messaging strategy.

Adapt Them

Messaging must evolve with the changing landscape, reflecting the nuances of time, context, and audience knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes. This flexibility ensures that your overarching story remains consistent while allowing you to frame or emphasize messages differently to resonate with diverse groups over time.

Practice Them

And once you know what works, practice makes perfect. Spokespeople should never wing it—regular practice and message coaching will help them confidently deliver key messages with authenticity, clarity, and consistency.

The mighty message is one of the most powerful tools practitioners can employ to ensure cohesive, compelling narratives that cut through the noise and keep communication efforts laser-focused and impactful. But like any tool, they require constant sharpening to remain effective.

With more than 740 million active users in 2020, LinkedIn is the largest online professional network. If that alone isn't reason enough to join, the social media platform was recently found to be the most trusted social network, according to Insider.

We've seen an increase in the number of organizations and clients looking to establish themselves as thought-leaders on LinkedIn. The truth is that a thoughtful and best-practice-based page on LinkedIn is critical to building a trusted, engaging, and professional online presence. If you want to lead the pack—like many of your peers—there has never been a better time to take advantage of the platform's growing resources and establish yourself as an industry expert. You will, however, need to make sure you are doing it right if you want to reap the potential benefits.

If you're a thought-leader looking to create or optimize a LinkedIn profile, here are a few best-practice-based tips for success from our agency's social media experts.

Public relations (PR) like any other industry today is changing rapidly due to the digitalization and scope of digital marketing. That’s what many organizations miss when planning their strategies. PR is not direct marketing, but it helps to build the reputation and public image of the organization or an individual. In the era of digitization where new technologies are raising with every new dawn, it is a need for businesses to have a trustworthy, reliable, and visionary PR solution provider to accelerate their growth.

Laura Gross, a determined leader in the PR industry is transforming organizations with creative, scalable, and smart PR solutions through Scott Circle Communications (SCC).

Scott Circle Communications President Laura Gross offers executive positioning takeaways from Kathy Hochul's press debut via PR News.