A Simple Marketing Messaging Framework

Last month’s post Pixar’s 22 Rules for Storytelling –Applied to Software Marketing generated some interest, mostly emails asking me how to use a simple marketing messaging framework vs. the laundry list of rules to follow from my Pixar analogy.

There are many ways to go about this, but here is one of my favorites that is a simple messaging framework that fosters discussion quickly and hits all of the high points:

1. FOR: Know thy audience for your message (and product) – This is the most important starting point by which many messaging initiatives fail before they even get off the ground. Many make the mistake of generically stating their audience as “CIO”, when realistically their sales guys will never get to the CIO. If you are not ready to message down to the decision maker level, start with the market category or characteristics of the company you want to target (industry, profile etc.)

2. WHO NEED TO: What is the challenge and forcing function to buy? This is not a feature list. Companies do not buy features and “cool” they buy products that solve their business problems and justify the investment and have an ROI

3. THE: Insert the name of your product here

4. IS A: Use the most coherent single sentence describing the class and type of product

5. THAT: Express the benefit statement up front

6. UNLIKE: Differentiation. How is this different from the competition or other ways of solving the problem

7. IT PROVIDES: Describe now WHAT it does not HOW. So no mention of “features” but the capabilities which translate to benefits results

Here is an example of pulling it all together (with xxx for your customization. you can successively refine and use this for targeted personas as well):

1.FOR: Companies in the xxx industry that have or will have a total of xxx of data or more

2. WHO NEED TO: Retain and access the data on demand for business or regulatory purposes

3. THE: xxxx

4. IS A: xxxx architected for Big Data from the ground up

5. THAT: Allows companies to securely keep and access as much data as they want, for as long as they want at the lowest TCO

6. UNLIKE: Traditional xxx that are xxx or xxx that are xxx, that are complex to manage, maintain and expensive to deploy and scale

7. IT PROVIDES: The most cost-effective way of xxxx, enforcing xxx, providing business analysts and data scientists with xxxx

 

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