5 Lessons: Building a Messaging Framework

Building a B2B product message strategy is both logic and art.  It feels functional and necessitates a focus on features and benefits but ultimately drives a brand’s narrative. We’ve worked on a few messaging strategies recently for a range of products and wanted to share a few common pitfalls for those developing their own.

1. Speak to the customer’s needs.  

With breakthrough technologies or business models there is an inclination to want to promote the product disruption story.  Newsflash: your buyer does not care.  They want value, ROI and to succeed at their job. Using a breakthrough product is water cooler talk about ease of use.  Shift the narrative to speak to your customer’s needs and how the product will help them achieve their individual goals vs. promoting the industry break-through story.  

 2. Know your buyer.

What does your target audience care about in getting their job done?  What are their personal success metrics?  What personality traits drive them?  How do they want information delivered to them?  Do they need crisp, outcome-oriented messaging or do they need lots of practical detail?  Who will they ultimately need to convince internally to buy your product and have you armed them to make that case?  Understanding how your buyer thinks about his or her own success is critical to crafting a story that resonates.

3. Your product benefits must link to the master brand.

Even with a new break-through product, it should feel nested in the foundation of your parent brand.  It should feel like a product that only your company could have served up. Care should be taken to ensure feature sets are built directly from the core brand and line up with product pillars. This is not incrementalism.  It’s an opportunity to build a short set of distinctive messages that moves the buyer to action. 

4. Keep it short. 

Resist the urge to repeat “and”. Edit down. Messaging is about identifying the highest level of benefit. Refer back to your buyer personas and be clear on whether you are meeting their hierarchy of needs. There is always time to verbalize anecdotes but use only a few written talking points to get in the door.  Time is precious and your goal is to arrest attention with impact, not volume.

5. Spend the time to develop a simple strategy.

There is a very common urge amongst all of us to think big and do it quickly.  Intuitive messaging takes time to develop and ring true at a gut level in all scenarios.  Your messaging strategy needs to be bulletproof, feel obvious and work for every group that will use it. The obvious is glorious when you hit it but it can take time to get there.  Use your resources and you will.