Your marketing messages need to work as hard as you do. Jeanne Tiscareno, principal at Chase Marketing Company, reveals a messaging framework your organisation can replicate
Great marketing goes beyond having a consistent brand voice and visual identity. Brands marketed in ways that evoke product value are more likely to trigger a positive customer response, build recognition, and improve loyalty.
That’s where a messaging framework comes in. This vital document gives your marketing and sales teams a consistent blueprint for communicating with customers. It encompasses a fully developed, well defined value proposition unique to your business and permeates all interactions with each customer type you target.
Creating a winning messaging framework can be summed up in three steps:
1. Know yourself
You hope to woo each customer into placing enough trust in you and your organisation to buy your product or service. Having a clear understanding of what you offer, as well as your current and intended place in your market, will help you take a solid stance.
What do you offer? Be rigorously clear on what you’re extending to the market. Know your business category and your niche(s). Dig deep to uncover how your products or services offer value within each space. Most companies sell more than just ‘a product’ – they sell aspirations, solutions to underlying problems, or answers to unmet needs.
Invest time identifying your organisation’s focus and direction, especially as related to your offerings. Define its goals and the obstacles you must overcome to reach them. This vital step primes your messaging framework for longevity and flexibility.
How do you fit against the competition? List your top competitors. What are their strengths and weaknesses, and how do your offerings compare? Where do you differ in value, and how important are these differences to customers?
Gather all this information into a document or table for later reference in the messaging framework process.
2. Know your customers
Customers come in all shapes and sizes. Your job is to understand what makes them tick. Segmenting customers makes it easier to compare and study them. For example, you can organise them by:
• Business type. Are your customers split among government agencies, educational institutions, not-for-profits, commercial enterprises and individual consumers? Each has its own buying needs and approaches to consider.
• Company size. What percentage of your buyers are individuals or Fortune 500 companies? Global, nationwide, or local businesses? Your message may need to vary for each type.
• Job title or role in the purchase path. Who is involved in (and influencing) the purchasing decision? Most companies have multiple layers to reach – e.g. VPs who want a new product to meet a broader business goal, CFOs who control the spending for it, and staff who ultimately use it (and who may be lobbying for said product). Each party may have an important voice and will respond to a different aspect of your value proposition.
Working from this information, build an ‘audience profile chart’ that includes the following for each customer type: a description, assumptions, challenges, what matters most, and what you can offer them.
3. Know what you want to say
Use all the information from the first two steps to shape and inform your company’s value proposition. This can often be captured in ‘value pillars’ – one to four promises you can mix and match to support specific target markets.
To identify your value pillars, ask these kinds of questions for each customer type: What do we want to be known for and why? Would our customers choose us over our competitors? What are the top three benefits for each target market and what is most important to each target? What emotional and functional benefits do we offer? What outcome do we desire from customers?
With customer promises in hand, it’s finally time to build the messaging framework, your roadmap for speaking about your product or service consistently across the company. Here’s a proven way to organise one:
1. Overarching positioning statement. Develop one to two sentences stating your promise (value) to all customers.
2. Target customers. Itemise the first- and second-tier market segments and/or job titles to approach.
3. Two to four value pillars (selling points).
Give each pillar its own column with four rows to capture the following:
• A one- to three-word value label e.g. ‘Improves business performance.’
• A brief benefit statement that summarises each message pillar and can be used directly in marketing.
• A bullet list of supporting benefits – the specific elements and data points that support your declared value proposition.
• The target customers who would respond best to that value pillar (overlap among pillars is common).
With the value proposition for each audience carefully articulated in a messaging framework, you can begin crafting detailed marketing content to reach each market. Distribute the framework to everyone who produces external communications in your organisation, and tell them to refer to it often for value-based content prioritisation, ‘blessed’ wording, and benefits descriptions.
