Six steps to generating a great marketing message
Tom Evans
Who is our audience?
Must resonate with target audience
- note: shouldn't resonate with all market segments
Target market segments
- identify who needs your product, should have been done during product conception
Key personas - buyers, influencers, users
- what do they care about
- what language do they use
- typical profile/characteristics
-- backgrounds, education, income, etc
What are we selling?
Relate to a known category or class of products
-- if you say "I'm going to create a new category" it is hard, and expensive, but you need to know what you are selling here
What it does
- problems your product solves best for that persona
- identify features that solve problems
Why should our customers care?
Need, pain, goal, challenge, ideals
Personal & business
--how do pain points affect the personal side of life (having to work on the weekend because XYZ keeps breaking)
What do they need to know to make a decision
How will they evaluate & use your design
Why us?
Value Proposition
- customer
- benefits & value your customer will realize from purchase and use of your product
Sources of Value
- how do you deliver the value?
Differentiation
- what makes your product stand out
- meaningful value to the customer
- sources are the same of value
* comment: use user feedback to prove your value, because everyone says they have a value. Also, focusing down to key values is difficult
* example of validate value, insurance - all say they have the lowest prices with quotes from competitors, but those are from people that have switched
Create your messages
Per target buyer persona
In customers language/avoid meaningless words (next gen, streamline, etc)
Clear value to customers
2-4 messages per persona
- can in some cases do more, but need to make them easy to remember, and prioritize the most important
Compare to competitors
Validate with customers
Support with evidence!
Messages should be created, then passed off to marketing to find creative ways to propose/display the message. We should not get creative, just get clear at this phase.
Question: how do you deal with corporate changing the message format because it is getting stale? Often times itisnt stale, they just think it is
Question: would you hold off on investing in a product if you didn't get the response you were looking for? Essentially yes.
Jennifer Kirkland