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Myk Pono Follow
Entrepreneur | Marketing & Product Growth | newsletter: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/myxys
Dec 14 37 min read
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Strategic Communication/Messaging Map
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Strategic Communication: How to Develop

Strategic Messaging and Positioning
This article covers the essentials of strategic communication. The goal
is to explain why it is critical that companies understand strategic
messaging and positioning. In addition, we will discuss some practical
and actionable approaches to help you design strategic messaging and
product 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. Its a totally dierent world now,
but the basic principles of positioning and marketing apply to
software companies today just as much as they did 50 years ago to
companies selling things such as bars of soap. As the number of
products in every SaaS category continues to grow ever more rapidly,
positioning and strategic messaging are becoming more important
than ever before.
What exactly is strategic communication, strategic messaging,
and positioning? With so many related buzzwords, its often not
clear how each specific term is used, how it is defined, and what it
stands for. The terms strategic communication and strategic
messaging are used interchangeably throughout this article. Feel free
to use the term you identify with most.
A few years ago when I started looking into the world of messaging, I
was desperate to find a place to start my research journey on this
topic. I hope this article acts as a starting point for anyone wanting to
learn about strategic communication and positioning.
While my previous two articles on lead scoring and on tracking
customer acquisition will probably be outdated in couple of years, if
not as early as next year, I strongly believe that the processes and
strategy for messaging and communication will be resistant to the
ever changing landscape.
Please feel free to share your experiences and any helpful resources
you have on this topic.
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Table of Contents:
PART 1: Why care about strategic messaging and positioning
PART 2: Is your messaging eective?
PART 3: What is strategic messaging?
PART 4: What is positioning?
PART 5: How to design strategic messaging
PART 6: How to implement new messaging in organizations
Summary
. . .
PART 1: Why care about strategic

messaging and positioning
Strategic messaging and positioning are often overlooked by tech
companies. Its dicult to quantify the impact of bad messaging. And
its just as dicult to present any accurate ROI for implementing or
changing the approach of how we talk about a company or product.
Think about Gary Vaynerchuks response to a client who wanted to
know the ROI of social media. He asked her, Whats the ROI of your
mother? (check out the video). And in some respects ROI on
messaging and positioning is as dicult to quantify.
Messaging is a key part of building any great company. Every business
organization has a purpose and vision which leads it to develop
products that solve the pain of specific types of customers (or create
such customers). As Peter Drucker pointed outthere is only one
valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer. 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. Customers never buy just a
product, they evaluate its value/utility and buy your vision.
If an organization existsit communicates. Every company uses
messaging and positioning. Whether or not its eective is another
question. But all organizations communicate their vision and product
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value in one way or another.

Before we discuss how to define, evaluate and design your strategic
messaging, lets look at specific business areas and see how strategic
messaging impacts all internal and external communication in your
organization.
Product/market fit also means message/customer fit
We all know about product/market fit, which is essentially finding
sucient demand for your product in a big or growing market. What
we often forget is getting to product/market fit means getting to
message/customer fit as well. Convincing early customers to buy is
essentially testing not only how a product solves a customers pain,
but also how its value is communicated.
Product/market fit = Message/customer fit
In order to find sucient demand in the market, a company not only
needs to solve a real pain for target customers but it also needs to find
an eective approach to communicate its products value.
Product/market fit does not exist without message/customer fit. The
right message needs to repeatedly reach the right customer in the
right market to validate the startups existence.
Company/market fit might be a better framework for us to use.
Company/market fit is a combination of product/pain (or problem)
fit and message/customer fit. When we only talk about
product/market fit, we often overlook an important component in this
processstrategic messaging.
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Pain/product fit + Customer/message fit = Company/market fit
Company/market fit is dicult to achieve without clear strategic

messaging. Getting to the right message is as important as getting to
the right product. The main reason why it makes more sense to talk
about company/market fit rather than product/market fit is that it is
not just the product that satisfies market needs and customer pains.
The right organizational structure and vision are also needed to fit a
particular need in the market.
To paraphrase Peter Drucker, it is not about searching for the right
organization, its about management needing to learn to look for,
develop, and test the organization so that it fits the task. There is no
right or wrong way to organize a business. But there is a right
organization for specific problems or market needs.
LEARN MORE: Check out this very detailed post by Steven Sinofsky on
corporate organizations.
Fundraising and investor decks
Strategic messaging is an essential part of your fundraising eorts.
Your investor deck can describe a problem, vision, value proposition,
positioning, target customer, and market opportunity. And to be
successful in planting your message you have to create an interesting
and easy-to-follow story. A successful investor deck is a strategic
message packaged in an interesting story.
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There are already a few great resources on creating a pitch deck, so

lets not spend much time on this topic here.
LEARN MORE: Check out this TechCrunch article, Lessons From A
Study of Perfect Pitch Decks. If youre interested in learning more about
eective pitches, Andy Raskin has written many interesting articles on
this topicThe Greatest Sales Deck Ive Ever Seen.
Sales
My earlier article, How to Design Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring, and
Drip Email Campaigns, points out that identifying a prospects PAIN
and FIT is a critical step in the sales process. FIT corresponds to the
target customer profile. And PAIN (or problem) is how prospects
perceive product value. Both target customer profiles and values are
irreplaceable parts of strategic messaging.
Selling a product to multiple stakeholders involved in the decisionmaking process complicates and prolongs sales cycles. Each target
customer involved has dierent pains and values they are trying to get
from your product. Therefore, where there are multiple stakeholders,
strategic messaging is even more critical, since dierent messages
need to address the dierent personas in the buying process.
Your prospect will already have perceptions about your product and
its value even before your qualification call or demo. This judgement
will be made based on your websites content and your
communication materials including ads, PR, blog articles, and cold
sales emails. If expectations are wrong, or the product value is
misinterpreted, it will take your sales team much longer to change
this perception.
The further the prospects perceived value is from the actual value
you want to convey, the more likely the deal is to be lost. It takes
eort to form a perception about product and it takes an even larger
mental eort to change perceptions once theyre formed. Thats why it
is so dicult to convince people once they have an opinion.
Additional facts arent very helpful in changing peoples beliefs and
perceptions once theyve been formed.
Looking at this idea from the sales perspective, do you see how
dicult the sale can become if a prospects perceptions have been
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formed inaccurately?
Companies with great sales organizations all have clear sales
playbooks. Sales playbooks describe in detail such things as sales
pitches, competitive landscapes and how to address dierentiation
questions, target customer profiles, typical product oerings and
descriptions, and customer success stories. Strategic messaging
impacts every single weapon in your sales teams arsenal.
Coherent and consistent communications in the sales organization
depends on the eectiveness of your strategic messaging.
Marketing
The goal of marketing is to control perception and to change
behavior. This is a simple and accurate definition of marketing. All
marketing activities and every aspect of marketing falls under the
goals of controlling perception, changing behavior, or both. Try to
think of a marketing activity that doesnt fit this goal. And ask
yourself: can you truly change someones behavior without changing
their perception?
Here are a couple of examples. Awareness content enlightens
prospects and customers on industry trends and important issues. The
goal is to control the perception of what your target audience should
pay attention to. Running paid acquisition campaigns initiate an
action by a prospect which leads to conversionbehavioral change.
Buying and using a product requires a change in behavior.
Strategic messaging is how companies control perception in the
marketplace. It is the responsibility of the marketing team to ensure
that the message a company uses is consistent across all marketing
channels as well as across all assets and communications.
Recruiting
Recruiting is about selling your vision and your values as an
organization. The founders and CEO should never stop recruiting, and
need to dedicate a significant portion of their time to their recruiting
eorts. Recruiting is nothing more than selling your company to a
prospect. Strategic messaging will help you organize your vision and
your values so you have a simple message and story that sparks
interest in those who share your values and who are inspired by your
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vision.
It is hard to imagine anything that has more impact on your
organization than messaging, and how you communicate internally
with your team, externally with the marketplace and your target
audience. We have only discussed a few critical examples, but this list
can be expanded. Now, how do we know if our current messaging is
eective or needs a revamp?
PART 2: Is your messaging effective?

The symptoms of ineective messaging arent easy to spot.
Organizations collect and analyze almost every imaginable metric, but
how do you know your messaging is working? It is impossible to say
that your sales process is prolonged by X% because prospects are too
confused about your oerings. But there is a qualitative way to
analyze your current messaging.
One of the main attributes of strategic messaging is consistency.
Eective messaging is always simple and consistent. The best way to
evaluate your current messaging is to look at how consistently your
organization talks about your products and compare that with how
your current customers talk about your product.
Eective Messaging = Simple + Consistent
Does everyone in your organization communicate the same product
value?
Do your customers and prospects understand the value and utility that
your product provides?
Here are just a few questions that you can ask your team, and then
compare the answers. The simple exercise that we are about to
discuss can be done quickly and the insights will help you understand
the health of your messaging, so you can spot small issues before they
grow into large problems.
Start evaluating your strategic messaging inside your company.
Internal Evaluation
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This quick, 20-minute exercise will help you understand how your
own team talks about your company and product. Get all your sales
reps, marketing, and product people (ideally, encourage all of your
organization participate) in one conference room, and ask them to
write answers to the following questions:
1 sentence company pitch (What we do?)
1 sentence problem pitch (What problem are we solving?)
1 sentence competitive pitch (How are we dierent from our
competitors?)
13 bullet points of values we provide for customers (Why should
customers should buy from us?)
These are very basic questions that everyone in your organization
should know the answers to. To make it even more interesting, you
can also ask your team about the company visionWhy we do what
we do?
This exercise shouldnt take more than 20 minutes. If the answers you
receive from the internal survey are fairly consistent, the next step
will be to talk to your customers. The problem is that you might have
a very consistent, but still ineective message. Your message might be
consistent and still not resonate with your customers. This is why the
next step is to understand the value and utility of your product by
interviewing your current customers.
The answers you receive in the internal survey from dierent teams
and even from members of the same team are often so dierent it will
convince your organization to take messaging seriously.
When conducting one-on-one interviews with salespeople at one
company, I was shocked at how dierent the product pitch and
company description was from one interview to another. I interviewed
one sales rep and then heard a polar opposite pitch from the next
sales rep. In this extreme case, almost every sales rep had their own
sales decks. I then shadowed their live sales calls with customers to
compare what they said during interviews and how they presented to
prospects. Some sales pitches were so far apart that if you didnt know
the company name, you would think the pitches were for dierent
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products.
But lets imagine your internal message is reasonably consistent, then
the next step in evaluation is to interview a few customers and
compare how they perceive your product and your company.
Remember, strategic messaging and positioning is all about the
perception in your customers mind. So your messaging could be
simple and consistent but still doesnt match the perception in the
mind of a customer.
External Evaluation
External evaluation of your strategic messaging can be done in two
ways: 1) customer interviews; 2) with a survey. Surveys are quicker
and easier, but interviews are more valuable. If your internal
evaluation was enough to convince your team to review your
messaging, you probably dont need to do an external evaluation.
You will talk to your customers and prospects when you start
designing your new messaging. It would be very inecient to
interview your customers once for evaluation and again when you are
designing the new messaging.
To understand how customers perceive your product, ask questions
like these:
Why did you buy our product?
What problems were you looking to solve?
How do you use our product?
What do you like most about our product? What do you like
least?
During interviews, the customer may respond that he/she likes or
dislikes the product because of one feature it has. Always follow up
with Why? questions. It is never about the feature of the product, it
is about how this feature impacts their daily work and what value and
utility it provides.
Now compare what message your organization communicates and
how customers perceive your product. Most companies are very
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shocked to find out how far apart their internal messaging is from
their customer perception.
Even though its dicult to calculate the ROI of eective strategic
messaging, its important to realize that messaging has more of an
impact than almost anything else in business. In the following
sections, well learn more about strategic messaging and positioning.
Well also find out why they are essential to your business and how to
design your own strategic messaging.
PART 3: What is strategic messaging?

Strategic messaging is a value-based communication framework that
companies employ in all interactions with stakeholdersemployees,
prospects, customers, partners and investors. Strategic messaging
communicates product value to the customer by describing the
solution to a problem.
As discussed earlier, the goal of marketing is all about controlling
perception and changing behavior. Strategic messaging is an essential
part of this goal.
The Goal of Marketing = Controlling Perception + Changing
Behavior
Strategic messaging is an extension of your companys vision. A vision
starts with why. Simon Sinek popularized in his book, Start with
Why, the idea is that to be successful, companies have to start with
why. Why does the organization exist? Why-driven vision leads to
the next question of how. How does the organization do what it
does? And finally, only after an organization is clear on why and
how does it answer the question of what. What exactly does the
organization do and what products and services does it provide?
LEARN MORE: To refresh this idea of The Golden Circle watch this TED
talk by Simon Sinek.
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The Golden Circle by SimonSinek
Now, lets apply this framework to strategic messaging. Why

communicates the vision for your organization and manifests itself in
taglines, slogan, vision statements, and in short descriptions of a
company. How is explained through your value proposition,
problem description, and positioning through the eyes of your target
customers. What is described through your product and service
descriptions, features, case studies and other product and marketingrelated content.
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The Golden Circle of Strategic Communication
Eective messaging is similar to a fine story, it puts less emphasis on

what happens than on to whom it happens and why and how it
happens. (8) Strategic communication (or strategic messaging) covers
why, how, and what a company does.
Designing strategic messaging starting with why creates a deep
emotional connection with your audiences. Our feelings and emotions
precede our judgement and reaction.
Every form of communication from the message on your homepage to
the About section on your press releases, sales decks, paid
acquisition campaigns and content strategy should align with your
strategic messaging framework.
3.1. The Biggest Strategic Messaging Mistakes or Why

Most Companies Are Failing in Designing Strategic
Messaging
Before we jump into a specific real world example of how to create a
strategic messaging map, lets first highlight what makes eective
strategic messaging: why certain messages are eective and others
arent.
Messages should be consistent
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Consistency reduces opportunities for miscommunication. Consistent

messages are more likely to become memorable. Consistency improves
message eectiveness, thats why advertising worksit consistently
repeats a simple message over and over again.
Brevity and simplicity leads to clarity
Avoid fancy words and use more conventional language. There is a
place for longer product copy or longer content, but strategic
messaging is not that place.
Our consciousness consists of the thoughts, feelings, and sensations
that we are aware of at any given moment, and it represents a very
limited view of reality. We cant consciously pay attention to every
detail, so the brain takes all the words and implied meanings and
summarizes them into a momentary thought.
When too much information is communicated, our unconscious
process arbitrarily chooses which words seem most relevant in the
moment. Most of us believe its best to give more detailed
descriptions, not realizing that the audience can only focus on four
tiny chunks of information and for a very brief period of time.
Irrelevant speech disrupts patterns and interferes with judgement and
learning. (5)
Define, dont assume
Dont assume that your audience understands terms that you use in
your communication. Companies live in bubbles, employees use the
same terms and very often the meaning changes from one company
to another. Define terms that you use internally, and when necessary
define them for outbound communication. Even simple terms such as
analytics can have multiple meanings and interpretations.
Startups often make the mistake of creating positioning and
messaging based only on their internal expertise and product
features. This approach entices founders to describe their products
using industry jargon, complicated technical details, or buzzwords.
Often we dont know the dierence between AI and machine learning,
but these words are often used as if everybody understands them.
And how about cloud-based and big data? Do your customers
actually know what they mean?
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Avoid superlatives and buzzwords

You would think that in 2016, companies would realize how big of a
turn-o superlative words arestate of the art, best in class,
world class, leadingbut many dont.
Dont change the message too often, preferably never
This is related to consistency. You cant release a new strategic
messaging framework every 6 or even 12 months. Its okay to test new
messaging ideas in the field, but anything that impacts the brand as a
whole needs to be done incredibly carefully. Perception about your
product and company arent easy to change. Position your strategic
message for the long term.
You know the vision but customers hold the perceptions.
PART 4: What is positioning?

Out of all the pieces that constitute How a company explains its
vision and value, positioning is often a forgotten strategy in the tech
industry.
Al Ries, the father of brand positioning, in his book Positioning:
The Battle for Your Mind describes the basic approach of positioning
as not a process of creating something new and dierent, but a way of
manipulating whats already in the mind, to retie the connection that
already exists. The goal is to position the product in the mind of the
prospect. (1)
This is the main reason why startup founders often present their
ventures as Uber for X or Airbnb for Y. Our attention span is short
and investors are no exception to this rule. It is critical for founders to
explain their ventures quickly so that investors and prospects
understand what the company does and whether they are interested
in learning more.
The best approach in over-communicated society is

the oversimplified message.AlRies
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Positioning does not explain all the details of what a product does and
especially how. In fact, positioning is not even about your product, it
is about the perception of the prospect, customer, or investor
regarding your product. This is a critical point: the answers to a
positioning problem are outside of your product and even your
company; they are in your prospects mind. In other words, the way
you describe and position your product should be dictated by your
customers and prospects, and not by product features or internal
expertise.
Lets look back at our example. Investors are very familiar with Ubers
business model, so when a founder describes their venture as Uber
for laundry, it quickly resonates with investors. They make a clear
connection by applying Ubers business model to the applicable
business, in this case, to a laundry business. Uber is already
positioned in the mind of investors; therefore, connecting a new idea
to an existing perception allows the receiver of the message to
understand the new concept with limited use of mental energy.
Positioning is a simplified concept that translates an oversimplified
message to penetrate your prospects mind and build certain
perceptions about your product.
Positioning techniques are widely used in politics. In every race,
opponents take positions on the opposite side of the issue or on the
opposite side of the solution. Lets look at the example of pro-choice
vs. pro-life positions. Which position is better framed? Pro-choice
implies the opposite position of against choice or anti-choice. Pro-life
implies the opposite position of against life or anti-life. Since our
perception views life as more important and more valuable than
choice, we subconsciously perceive the pro-life position as the
stronger argument.
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Salesforcenot software!
One of the most successful examples of positioning in tech was

accomplished by Salesforce. Salesforcenot software! This absolutely
brilliant idea by Marc Benio led to complete domination in
enterprise software marketing for the last 16 years. And the concept is
still working well to this day.
Slack is another great example of positioning. Slack positioned itself
from the beginning as an anti-email app instead of just another
enterprise communications tool. Stewart Butterfield, the founder of
Slack, doesnt actually believe Slack will replace email but his
beautiful positioning strategy has forced people in tech to talk about
Slack and take sides. You know your positioning works when major
publications are writing headlines such as How E-Mail Killer Slack
Will Change the Future of Work.
There are dierent techniques for positioning: against a competitor, a
market leader, a follower, product attribute/benefits, users, etc. In
some cases, you can create perception of the product by focusing on
just one word or phrase. To fully explain positioning, wed need at
least another article and more likely a book. Meanwhile, check the
reference section for great books and resources on the topic of
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positioning.
PART 5: How to design strategic messaging

Lets assume for the purpose of brevity that youve thought about and
developed the why vision statement for your organization. After
that, 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 you will be using consistently
throughout this process. You will need to select a target customer
profile and a strategic messaging framework. The target customer
framework will ensure that you record initial discovery interviews in a
consistent and structured way. Well discuss this in more detail later.
Based on your initial discovery interviews, you will develop detailed
target customer profiles with a set of values that correspond with
each target customer profile involved in the buying process. The rest
of the process involves careful fine tuning of your value statements by
validating your assumptions with another round of interviews. Only
when your value statements are finished can you move on to
designing higher level messaging such as your positioning statement,
25-word description and tagline.
5.1. 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. The
framework is just an Excel table or Word doc that you will use to
summarize every interview.
In my article on lead scoring and lead nurturing, I described how FIT
and PAIN framework applies to the target customer profile. So lets
break down what constitutes FIT/PAIN characteristics of the target
customer.
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Target Customer ProfileCard
There are a few value messaging maps you can find online. There is
no right or wrong framework. You should aim to find the one that fits
your company purpose best or you can modify an existing one. I took
a few ideas and created my own version of a value messaging map
that fits SaaS companies with multiple target customers in the buying
process.
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The Golden Circle of Strategic Communication
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This is what a final strategic messaging map looks like. The order in
which you fill it out is important, so we will come back to that later.
In the meantime, lets define each item in the strategic messaging
map (see table below):
Strategic Messaging Definitions
5.2. 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. Create a list of questions for each
person you are planning to interview to ensure quality feedback.
Interview sales reps
Pick the top 510 sales reps to interview. The number will depend on
the size of your organization. Sales reps will do almost anything to
close deals and great sales people are very aware of the problems that
prospects have.
Ask them to identify a target customer
Ask about the easiest deals theyve closed
Ask about the biggest deals theyve closed
Ask about the toughest deal theyve closed
Ask about a recently lost prospect and the reasons
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Ask them to state the pain that most customers have

Ask what questions they ask prospects to identify their pain
Ask what customers they have the best relationship with (these
are the customers you will be interviewing later)
Tip: make sure that you interview sales reps one-on-one. You want to
avoid groupthink and prevent group leaders influencing the rest of
the team.
Interview the product owner and a few customer success
managers
Interviewing sales reps is a must, but interviewing the product
manager and customer success manager can give you a dierent
perspective. Focus on questions that help you understand how
customers talk about the product and how your team talks about the
product with customers. Keep questions open-ended and record
responses.
Listen to the prospect (shadow sales calls)
Shadowing a sales call with a prospect is the best way to get close to
your target customer. Prospects have had few interactions with your
company and product and their original perception about the product
arent yet changed or influenced. The questions prospects will ask and
objections that they will voice are important indicators of how they
perceive your company and product. Also take note of the words they
use. One of the easiest ways to improve messaging is to simply use the
same words your ideal prospects are using. If you do this, you are sure
to focus in on the most important points.
The feedback you will receive from shadowing sales calls with
prospects will often dier from what sales reps communicated during
the one-on-one interviews.
NOTE: I strongly believe that shadowing sales calls with prospects should
be a must for every new employee onboarding process, regardless of their
title. There is no better way to learn about your product and how
customers perceive the product than shadowing a real sales call with
prospects.
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Interview the last 510 lost prospects

Ask your sales reps to give you a list of 20 prospects that fit your
target customer profile but for some reason the deal was lost. Send a
quick and personal email to the lost customers asking to interview
them for 1015 mins to understand what played a major role in them
going the other way. Give them a $20 Amazon or Starbucks gift card
for taking the time to talk with you.
The goal for interviewing lost customers is to understand the main
reasons why they didnt buy. Maybe they are not quite the right fit.
Maybe the pain that your product solves isnt big enough for them.
Maybe they thought the price was too high. Maybe a competitor
product fits their needs better. Ask them about their buying process
and who was involved in the decision-making. Ask lost customers to
share the one thing that was a deal breaker.
Interview the newest 510 customers
Since these companies just became your customers, the interactions
that they had with your team and your product during the buying
process is still fresh in their memory. Ask recently won customers the
same same questions you asked your lost prospects:
What they thought about your product
What problem they wanted to solve?
What are the biggest challenges they are facing?
NOTE: One of the most important questions to ask is the one about their
biggest challenges. During the discovery process, ask this question to your
prospects, recent customers, renewed customers (someone who has been
a customer for over a year). If your product is not solving one of your
target customers top 1 to 3 pains, then your product doesnt provide
significant value. It is a nice-to-have rather than a must-have. If there
are ever any changes to their budget or the economy, then your product
will be on their short-list for cancellation.
Interview customers that have been using your product for more
than 1 year
If your company is lucky enough to have been in business for at least
a year, you should have customers who have renewed and those that
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have churned. Interview a couple of them with a focus on

understanding why they use your product, how often, and what they
like most about it.
Interview industry experts/analysts
If you are a larger organization and your product fits in a
well-established industry you would benefit from reaching out to
Forrester and Gartner researchers. Interview researchers and analysts
but take their knowledge with a pinch of salt. Most of the large
research companies only release one or two reports a year on any
particular industry. The market changes faster than that, and by the
time a report is released it is outdated. Also, big research firms mostly
concentrate on getting feedback from large organizations, so the
findings in the report will be skewed toward large players.
It is important to point out that if you do consult with researchers or
analysts that you avoid the temptation to create a message based
solely on their findings or knowledge. Many teams fall into the trap of
creating analyst-speak messaging as an (apparently) easy solution,
but this is a big mistake because such messaging very rarely resonate
with buyers.
Another way to conduct a few interviews outside of your organization
is to find a company and person that fits your target customer profile
but who isnt a customer but is considered an industry expert. Find a
way to have a 1015 min discussion with at least a few industry
experts that have something to do with your company or product.
Review competitive messaging and 3rd party resources
You should have a short list of competitors against whom you want to
position your product. Review their messaging and record in detail
how they talk about their product and company. Quora is an
incredible and very underrated resource for enterprise companies. If
your product is more technical, check out Stackoverflow. Find a place
or a community for your target customer and review topics and
discussions. Note which questions are most popular in the community.
What if you are an early stage startup?
Reading thus far you might be thinking wait, but what if I dont have
a sales team yet? What if I dont have customers that I can interview
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yet alone customers that have been around for a year?. What can a
small, early stage startup do to design strategic communication? The
answer to this is: focus on interviewing your prospects. Make a list of
companies and people who might be interested in your product or
idea. Do whatever it takes to interview them. Pay attention not only
to the challenges they describe but also the terms they use. Carefully
record your conversation. Position your conversations as discovery,
where you truly want to know about them and their challenges, and
not as sales pitches. Even if you have a product, refrain from sales
pitches it can turn o your interviewees. The goal is to learn about
your target customers and figure out strategic messaging and not to
sell them on your product at this time.
Also, keep your eyes and ears open; you might come across someone
in your target audience who can be a great mentor or advisor to your
team. You cant overestimate how helpful an advisor who fits your
target customer profile can be early on.
Summary:
Carrying out initial discovery interviews is probably the most
time-consuming step in creating a strategic messaging map, but it is
the most important one. Your strategic message needs to connect with
your target audience (prospects and customers) and there is no better
way to find out how to do this than to ask them directly. It is critical
to keep a detailed record of your interviews so you can identify
certain patterns. The next step after your interviews are completed is
to start filling out your target customer profile and the values that
correspond with each profile.
5.3. Build Target CustomerProfile

You should have plenty of notes from your discovery interview. It is
now time to look for common themes. Look into overlapping feedback
from your interviews. Always put customer and prospect responses
above answers from your team.
I find it very helpful to record interviews right after they occur. Also, I
fill out my questionnaire form and then I record any ideas that are
unusual or that I think are weird. Sometimes these ideas are just
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random opinions but some of them might hold great insight. The
dicult part is that at the beginning you cant easily say which is
which. So record them and try to validate them in the next interview.
During your next interview present an idea and get feedback. To some
degree this is a listening exercise.
Example: during one interview I did with a sales rep, he shared that
most customers do not understand analytics when its used to
describe part of our product. This was an interesting insight because
analytics was an essential word in communication with customers.
The company never asked their prospects if they even understood
what analytics meant. So during my next interview with another
sales rep, I asked whether customers ever proactively asked him to
explain the analytics feature or whether the term analytics caused any
confusion. As it turns out, this was a critical insight and if we wanted
to use analytics in the strategic messaging, we had to frame what
we meant by it.
When multiple target customer personas are involved in the buying
process, you will need to include all of them in your strategic
messaging map. Complete your Target Customer Profile for each
persona involved in the buying process.
Target CustomerProfiles
5.4. Identify Value Categories for Each Target

CustomerProfile
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.
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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
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5.5. Summarize Details Under Each ValueCategory

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 customers
standpoint. Your customer doesnt care about your state of the art,
patent pending, award-winning, best-in-class technology or your
amazing new featureexplain 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 (lets 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?
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- 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 2540 dierent
variations of the same value statement. Try to use dierent words and
phrases, synonyms, and other techniques to evaluate as many options
as possible. Most of the options wont 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 customer. 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 dicult 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.
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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 aairs. 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 dierent 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
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Theres enough information on designing top tier messaging such as

product descriptions, slogans, and positioning statements that you
could write a whole book about it. Im 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 catch phrase. For example:
Metadata.ioDemand Generation on Autopilot
MarketoBest-in-class Marketing Automation Software
IntercomCustomer Messaging Platform
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 13 sentences and provides a litle 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 2540 dierent 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 customersfrom 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].
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Intercom is the first to bring messaging products for sales, marketing

& customer service to one platform [VALUE], helping businesses
avoid the sti, 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 sucient, 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
clear vision and the confidence to defend dicult 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 arent tied to internal politics. 3. They are less aected
by any internal product or cultural biases.
Strategic messaging cant 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 cant 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 by your
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strategic messaging map, but you will certainly benefit from analyzing
and evaluating as many dierent 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 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:
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Strategic Messaging & SalesPlaybook
Align your content marketing strategy with your new strategic

messaging.
Strategic messaging speaks in your buyers language and provides two
key elements that lead to eective 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 23 values. When your team brainstorms content topics,
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ensure that every topic falls under a specific value and specific target
customer. It doesnt 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 content is related to
Engineering, and 20% of 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 for. 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
dont forget that a higher influence on the buying decision doesnt
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 audience
and value category.
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Strategic Messaging & ContentStrategy
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
products value.
Every aspect of your internal and external communication should
change with your new strategic messaging. Weve 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 dierent members of your team
describe your product and company.
Designing strategic messaging is definitely worth the eort, even
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though its 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 eective
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. Thats 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 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 arent covered here, please refer to the reference section
for books, articles, and people that can help you think about dierent
aspects of strategic messaging in more detail. Please share any
additional resources that you find helpful.
Announcement
Im opening weekly oce hours (2 hours per week, 30min per call) for
any startup team (or individual) who wants to share its challenges,
generate ideas, and get advice on marketing and growth or just to
bounce ideas around. Startups and entrepreneurship are hard, maybe I
can help? If you are interested in connecting, send me an email telling me
who you are, what you are working on, and what problem or challenge
you are facing and want to discuss.
Acknowledgements
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.
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Tom Wentworth, CMO at RapidMiner, for mentoring and with whom

Ive 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:
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries & Jack Trout
The Startup Owners Manual by Steve Blank & Bob Dorf
The Essential Drucker by Peter F. Drucker
Start With Why by Simon Sinek
Words Can Change Your Brain by Andrew Newberg & Mark R.
Waldman
Cracking the CODE by Thom Hartmann
Made to Stick by Chip Heath & Dan Heath
Story by Robert McKee
Brand Thinking by Debbie Millman
The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon & Brent Adamson
Ogilvy On Advertising by David Ogilvy
Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior
by Leonard Mlodinow
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Articles:
Product positioning in Five Easy Steps
Articulate to resonate: crafting and communicating messages that
matter
Slogans vs. Taglines: What Is Your Brands 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 Isnt Working: 5 Guesses Why by Andy
Raskin
Positioning and Messaging Framework (slide 9)
Product positioning
Getting to a Messaging Framework and Value Prop by Tiany Spencer
Startup Best Practices 15Start With The Why by Tom Tunguz
. . .
UPDATE #1 (12/15/16): I just came across post, Startup Best Practices

15Start With The Why, by Tom Tunguz, where he highlights similar
ideas about strategic messaging. I found it after this article was written
and published, adding link to the list of references.
. . .
If you like this article please recommend

andshare.
Follow me on Twitter, Medium, connect on Linkedin or send me
email with comments and questions: myk@myxys.com. Subscribe to
my newsletter.
How To Design Lead Nurturing,

Lead Scoring, and Drip Email
Campaigns (Guide)
In my previous article, How To Track
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Customer Acquisitions: Customer

Lifecycle, Sales Funnel, and Content
Strategy, I
medium.com
How To Track Customer

Acquisitions:
Customer Lifecycle, Sales Funnel,
and Content Strategy
medium.com
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