Unleashing the power of strategic communication requires a deep understanding of messaging and positioning. Let's delve into the art of crafting compelling narratives, aligning them with your brand's identity, and positioning them to resonate with your target audience.
Discovery
The goal of the discovery process is to create a detailed target customer profile by collecting as much information about your current customers and prospects as you can.
- Interview sales reps, product owners, and customer success managers
- Shadowing a sales call with a prospect is the best way to get close to your target customer. Shadowing sales calls with prospects should be a must for every new employee onboarding process regardless of their title.
How to Design Strategic Messaging
The design process for strategic messaging can be broken down into a series of discovery-validation feedback loops
- First, you have to pick a set of tools that will be used consistently throughout this process
- Next, you will need to select a target customer profile and a strategic messaging framework
- Only when your value statements are finished can you move on to designing higher-level messaging such as positioning statement, 25-word description, and tagline
Pick Target Customer & Messaging Framework
Before you start with discovery interviews, you need to choose a framework that you will consistently use during the interviews.
- Target Customer Profile Card
- A strategic messaging map that fits SaaS companies with multiple target customers in the buying process.
How to implement new messaging in organizations
After a couple of rounds of reviews and feedback, your organization should come up with a final strategic messaging map
- Every single person in your organization needs to know your core message
- Align your content marketing strategy with your new strategic messaging
- Strategic messaging speaks in your buyer’s language
- Two key elements that lead to effective content
- Who is the audience?
- What do they care about
- Track your content performance and adjust accordingly
Review / Get Feedback / Iterate
Your first full strategic messaging map is likely to be far from perfect. It is time to gather sufficient, high-quality feedback from your team and outside stakeholders.
- At the review stage, go back to your customers, prospects, industry experts, advisors, and investors, and present them with your new strategic communication map.
Part 1: Why Care About Strategic Messaging and Positioning
Messaging is a key part of building any great company
- Every company has a purpose and vision which leads them to develop products that solve the pain of specific types of customers
- The process of creating a customer is a process of communicating your vision and values to the right set of customers in the market
- Strategic messaging facilitates this communication
- Product/market fit also means message/customer fit
- Convincing early customers to buy is essentially testing not only how a product solves a customer’s pain, but also how its value is communicated
- Fundraising and investor decks
- A successful investor deck is a strategic message packaged in an interesting story
Is your messaging effective?
Effective messaging is always simple and consistent
- Look at how consistently your organization talks about your products and compare that with how your current customers talk about your product
- Internal evaluation
- If your internal evaluation was enough to convince your team to review your messaging, you probably don’t need to do an external evaluation.
- External evaluation of your strategic messaging can be done in two ways
- Customer interviews
- Survey your customers
- Interview a few customers and compare how they perceive your product and your company
The Biggest Strategic Messaging Mistakes
Messages should be consistent
- Brevity and simplicity leads to clarity
- Define, don’t assume
- Avoid superlatives and buzzwords
- Don’t change the message too often, preferably never
- Position your strategic message for the long term
Latest Article: Strategic Communication
The goal is to explain why it is critical that companies understand strategic messaging and positioning.
- Classic marketing concepts and strategies that often get forgotten and seem impractical today are very relevant when it comes to tech companies and software products
- Strategic communication and positioning are becoming more important than ever before as the number of products in every SaaS category continues to grow.
Summary
Designing strategic messaging is worth the effort, even though it’s impossible to provide an exact ROI
- Simple and concise messages resonate with your prospects and lead to less friction in the sales process
- Strategic messaging drives effective content strategy since it helps your organization focus on target audiences and their values
Articles:
Positioning and Messaging Framework (slide 9)
- Articulate to resonate: crafting and communicating messages that matter
- Slogans vs. taglines
- What is your brand’s battlecry?
- Want a better pitch? Master the “Move.”
- Your Company Messaging Isn’t Working: 5 Guesses Why by Andy Raskin
How To Create A Comprehensive Customer Profile
Record interviews right after they occur
- Fill out a questionnaire form and record any ideas that are unusual or that you think are weird
- Present these ideas and try to validate them in the next interview
- When multiple target customer personas are involved in the buying process, you will need to include all of them in your strategic messaging map
How To Create Effective Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): Goals, Pains, Metrics
Categorize all the feedback you collected during discovery interviews and identify the main value categories.
- What does a particular target customer care about? What does he/she want to get out of your solution? What do your customers need?
What is Positioning?
Positioning is a simplified concept that translates an oversimplified message to penetrate your prospect’s mind and build certain perceptions about your product.
- The way you describe and position your product should be dictated by your customers and prospects, and not by product features or internal expertise.
- Different techniques for positioning include against a competitor, a market leader, a follower, product attribute/benefits, users, etc.
What is strategic messaging?
Strategic messaging is a value-based communication framework that companies employ in all interactions with stakeholders
- The goal of marketing is to control perception and changing behavior, and strategic messaging is an essential part of this
- It communicates product value to the customer by describing the solution to a problem
- A vision starts with “why”
- How is explained through your value proposition, problem description, and positioning
- What is described through product and service descriptions, features, case studies
Summarize Details Under Each Value Category
Describe the value of your product from your customer’s standpoint
- What will they get out of using your product?
- Assign every product feature to a value
- Bullet Points help you deconstruct value statements
- Proof points and metrics help customers measure the progress towards perceived value
Design Top-Telling Messaging
Write at least 25-40 variations of a one-sentence description.
- Tagline/headline: 5-word description that defines a category or a catchphrase
- Example: Intercom
- Customer Messaging Platform
- Description statement: 25-word summary of company values, target customers, and problem
Acknowledgments
Gil Allouche
