Target Customer Profiles

5.4. Identify Value Categories for Each Target Customer Profile

At this point, your value map should include the business function of your target customers including their titles and role in the buying process. The next step is to summarize your feedback from the discovery interviews and pick the most important value categories. Categorize all the feedback you collected during discovery interviews and identify the main value categories.

Great quality is not a value.

Amazing customer service is not a value.

Cheap price is not a value.

Easy integration is not a value.

There is no need to describe the value category yet, just identify it. Carefully go over the notes accumulated in the discovery process and prioritize. What does a particular target customer care about? What does he/she want to get out of your solution? What do your customers need?

Here is an example of value categories for each target customer:

Economic Buyer: CMO / CDO / Line of Business

Value 1: Revenue / Engagement / Retention

Value 2: Customer Satisfaction

Value 3: Product Roadmap Decision

2. End-user / Decision Maker: Engineering

Value 1: Faster Development Cycles

Value 2: App Quality and Performance

3. Influencer / Tech Evaluator: IT Operations

Value 1: Visibility

Value 2: Mean-time-to-resolution

5.5. Summarize Details Under Each Value Category

At this stage, we need to get into the details of each value proposition. Start filling out your strategic value messaging map with value statements. Describe the value of your product from your customer’s standpoint. Your customer doesn’t care about your “state of the art”, “patent pending”, “award-winning”, “best-in-class” technology, or your amazing new feature — explain what will they get out of using your product. What is it in for me?

Keep your tone and style conversational.

One helpful technique is having an actual role-playing conversation. Imagine you are sitting at a bar and someone asked you what you do for a living. The conversation will go into more details (let’s assume you started with “why”):

- Why should I buy your product?

- Well, you will improve user engagement in your app by correlating behavior and operation metrics.

- Cool, but how do you do it?

- Most of the engagement loss is due to app crashes and performance issues, including network coverage.

You can actually imagine this conversation happening. It includes short statements and it leads to a clear first impression of what the company does and how.

It usually takes several interactions to write value statements that are brief, simple, and descriptive. You should write 25–40 different variations of the same value statement. Try to use different words and phrases, synonyms, and other techniques to evaluate as many options as possible. Most of the options won’t work and it will be easy to spot them, but this exercise is used to get your creative juices flowing.

Assign every product feature to a value.

Assigning every product feature to a particular value is a very insightful exercise. Ideally, you improve your product to bring more value to your customers. It is often forgotten in organizations why this capability is important and who benefits from it the most.

Bullet Points help you deconstruct value statements.

Value bullet points help you unpack value statements and show exactly what we mean by each value. While we can only have a very limited number of value categories, we can have many variations of how we describe the value. For example, you can say “minimize revenue at risk by proactively monitoring transaction success” or “increase revenue by proactively monitoring and optimizing transaction success”.

NOTE: While it is difficult to do a valid A/B test to help you develop strategic messaging, there are some instances where A/B testing can be very helpful. For example, testing small words and synonyms. You can run a simple Google AdWords campaign to test which works better in terms of clicks:

Minimize revenue at risk

Decrease revenue loss

Proof points and Metrics help customers measure the progress towards perceived value.

Proof points help organizations understand how and what customers will be measuring to analyze the benefit of the product. During initial conversations with prospects, sales reps should diagnose the current state of affairs. If you understand how your prospects measure their goals you can be more precise in analyzing and presenting some basic ideas. For example, ask your prospects early on about how much downtime their app currently experiences and then follow up with a question about whether the customer is aware of how much revenue is lost during this time. Then make sure you are armed with metrics you can use to compare this prospect to clients you already have in the same industry or similar size company.

Understanding how customers track success will help you in content marketing because it depends on your target customer profile or industry vertical. You can highlight different metrics in whitepapers, case studies, or paid acquisition campaigns to show how your product delivers value.

Below is an example of the value messaging map filled out with target customer information and one top value for each group.

5.6. Design Top Tier Messaging

There’s enough information on designing top tier messaging such as product descriptions, slogans, and positioning statements that you could write a whole book about it. I’m not going to cover the whole topic in this article, but let me highlight a few important items.

Tagline/headline is a 5-word description that defines your category or a catchphrase. For example:

Metadata.io — Demand Generation on Autopilot

Marketo — Best-in-class Marketing Automation Software

Intercom — Customer Messaging Platform

A 25-word description statement is a one-sentence description of your company. This sentence will appear first on the “About Us” section, it can be present in full or partially on your homepage, and it will be a part of your company description across social media profiles and in your PR.

Many companies also have a longer version 50-word description. It usually consists of 1–3 sentences and provides little more information about company values, target customers, and the problem it solves.

Using the same strategy you used when designing your value statements is helpful here. Write at least 25–40 different variations of a one-sentence description. Thinking around the variation of this formula will help you:

Company {does} (value) to {help} (target customers) with (problem).

Examples:

Marketo provides the leading engagement marketing software and solutions designed to help marketers [TARGET CUSTOMER] develop long-term relationships with their customers — from acquisition to advocacy [VALUE].

Zendesk builds software for better customer relationships [PROBLEM]. It empowers organizations to improve customer engagement and better understand their customers [VALUE].

Intercom is the first to bring messaging products for sales, marketing & customer service to one platform [VALUE], helping businesses avoid the stiff, spammy status quo [PROBLEM] and have real conversations that build real connections.

5.7. 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. While you are likely to encounter people jockeying for their perspective to be included, it is important to have a clear vision and the confidence to defend difficult choices. Again, I would suggest one-on-one conversations instead of group discussions. If you are leading this strategic messaging initiative you have to design a good story and work your new messaging into it.

During your discovery interviews, you should have received many ideas on how to develop your messaging. At the review stage, go back to your customers, prospects, industry experts, advisors, and investors, and present them with your new strategic communication map.

Books have been written, seminars exist, and hours of information can be found on the topic of developing a story that resonates with the audience. It is out of the scope for this article but you can find a few amazing books and resources in the reference section at the end of this article.

NOTE: Outside consultants can be extremely helpful for companies that are going through the process of designing strategic messaging. There are several reasons for this. 1. They can evaluate current messaging with fresh eyes. 2. They aren’t tied to internal politics. 3. They are less affected by any internal product or cultural biases.

Strategic messaging can’t be designed in a couple of days. It takes time to interview internal and external stakeholders, to understand your target audience, its pains, values, and perceptions. I can’t stress enough how crucial this discovery process is in designing your messaging. Every piece of feedback is an opportunity to look at your company and product from a unique perspective. The wider the range of ideas you collect, the better and more thoughtful your strategic messaging will become. Not every idea can be satisfied with your strategic messaging map, but you will certainly benefit from analyzing and evaluating as many different perspectives as possible.

PART 6: 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. From executives and their assistants to junior tech support people. It is a good idea to include messaging as a part of your new hire onboarding process.

The new core message will drive many activities across your organization, most importantly in the sales and marketing departments.

Update your sales playbook, sales scripts, and sales enablement content.

Designing Value Diagnostic questions is just one example of how strategic messaging will enable your sales team to ask the right set of questions early on in the sales process. Back to the example, we used previously, since engineering cares about Agility (Faster Development Cycles), what questions can we ask a prospect to understand if this is a pain they can relate to? For example, in the table below each value category corresponds with a specific question that can help your sales team identify what value a prospect cares about most:

Strategic Messaging & Sales Playbook

Align your content marketing strategy with your new strategic messaging.

Strategic messaging speaks in your buyer’s language and provides two key elements that lead to effective content: 1) who is the audience? 2) what do they care about? The notes you have collected during customer interviews should be a great source of content ideas. Some companies are struggling to come up with topics to write about and this almost always signals that the team needs to get closer to their customers and prospects.

The example of the company that we use in this article has three persona profiles involved in its sales cycle and for each persona, we discovered 2–3 values. When your team brainstorms content topics, ensure that every topic falls under a specific value and specific target customer. It doesn’t have to be perfect, some topics will overlap. But this approach will keep your content strategy organized and your team will be aware of how often each value is covered and what target audience is involved. Before any content is written, look at your table to see who you are writing for (audience) and what theme (value) you are highlighting.

Economic buyers and decision-makers have greater importance in the buying process than influencers. Therefore, estimate the proportion of content created for each persona. In the example in the table below, it would be reasonable to decide that 50% of all content needs to target the CMO/CDO (economic buyer), 30% of the content is related to Engineering, and 20% of the content is created for IT Operations.

As for value categories, keep track of how often you create content for each value. For example, the CMO persona has 3 value categories that the company needs content. Balance it out by using a content breakdown ratio such as 3:2:1; for every 3 stories that are related to revenue value, you should create 2 stories that cover customer satisfaction and one that is related to product roadmap value.

There is no exact science on how to break down your content coverage for each buying persona and for each value category. Just remember that more content should be targeted to the target customer that has a higher influence on the buying decision. And don’t forget that a higher influence on the buying decision doesn’t always mean a higher position in the organization. At the same time, some values are more important, so adjust your content marketing strategy accordingly.

The table below shows how topics can be sorted based on the audience and value category.

Strategic Messaging & Content Strategy

TIP: When you track your content performance, put it in the context of target audiences and value categories. Over time, you will see that some values perform better and you can optimize and adjust your content topics and calendar accordingly.

Now that you have your strategic messaging map, you can better adapt your content to match your target personas and their related values. By doing this, your content will be more valuable to them, and the decision-makers will be able to more easily understand your product’s value.

Every aspect of your internal and external communication should change with your new strategic messaging. We’ve only discussed a couple of examples related to marketing and sales in this article, but all communications including marketing campaigns, PR, and webinars should go through the strategic messaging filter.

Summary

Hopefully, this article has helped you realize that strategic messaging/communication has a tremendous impact on the success of your company and product. The easiest way to check the health of your messaging is to compare how different members of your team describe your product and company.

Designing strategic messaging is definitely worth the effort, even though it’s impossible to provide an exact ROI of strategic messaging. 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. These are just a couple of examples of how messaging impacts the communication process between a company, its customers, and the marketplace. That’s why many top tech companies dedicate their time to developing the right message.

While your core “why” vision statement starts from the values of your organization, the “how” and “what” is driven by understanding your target customers. Interviews during the discovery process are not only an essential part of the strategic messaging design but also can uncover insights into the daily life of your target customers, industry trends, and product ideas.

This article is not meant to be a comprehensive source on the complicated topic of strategic messaging. Since many aspects of messaging aren’t covered here, please refer to the reference section for books, articles, and people that can help you think about different aspects of strategic messaging in more detail. Please share any additional resources that you find helpful.

Acknowledgments

Gil Allouche, Founder and CEO of Metadata.io, for sharing his ideas on strategic messaging when we first discussed this topic a couple of years ago.

Tom Wentworth, CMO at RapidMiner, for mentoring and with whom I’ve had multiple conversations on many aspects of marketing.

David Skok, General Partner at Matrix Partners, whose writing on startups and marketing has inspired many entrepreneurs and for providing feedback to this article.

Andy Raskin, Strategic Messaging Consultant, for sharing his experiences and pointing out great resources.

Greg Spector, PR & Communications Consultant, for discussing with me his approach to PR.

References

Some ideas were taken from this list of resources and some original ideas shared in the article were influenced by it.

Books:

Articles:

Product positioning in Five Easy Steps

Articulate to resonate: crafting and communicating messages that matter

Slogans vs. Taglines: What Is Your Brand’s Battlecry? by Laura Ries.

Want a Better Pitch? Master the “Move.” by Andy Raskin

What I Learned Positioning 40 Companies by Andy Raskin

Your Company Messaging Isn’t Working: 5 Guesses Why by Andy Raskin

Positioning and Messaging Framework (slide 9)

Product positioning

Getting to a Messaging Framework and Value Prop by Tiffany Spencer

Startup Best Practices 15 — Start With The Why by Tom Tunguz