An Architecture for Messaging Value, Positioning, Differentiation
Posted by Mark Gibson on Wed, Mar 31, 2010
In the dot.com boom and Outbound Marketing World of just a few years ago, marketing, advertising and branding agencies engaged well funded startups in positioning and branding exercises and at the same time relieved the investors and company of a lot of cash. This sort of top-down branding went hand in hand with lavish launch parties and first-mover takes all mentality that fuelled the dot.com boom and subsequent bust.
Driving eyeballs was what mattered and often the brand message was disconnected from the underlying value of the products and the sales team's ability to articulate it in conversation with buyers.
It is difficult to imagine spending lavish sums on branding, positioning and advertising in today's Inbound Marketing, lean-startup World, where every dollar spent is closely scrutinized and analyzed for ROI, and where it is recognized that B2B brands are built over time, based on customer success.
What matters in messaging is connecting your brand and positioning message with the most visceral value-creation proposition for each interested group of buyers in your prospect universe. Al Ries in the book "Positioning" suggests rather than try and create something new and different in the mind of the buyer, we need to manipulate what is already there and retie the connections that already exist.
A methodology for messaging value is built from the bottom-up, based on connecting value-creation to buyer-needs rather than trying to shoe-horn a top-down view of the World into the reality of selling products/services...we have tried both approaches and bottom-up works best.
1. Start by building Buyer-Relevant Messaging templates. In startups selling to the early market or trying to re-segment an existing market where no buying category exists, these templates along with the positioning statement are critical marketing deliverables for the sales team as they will help salespeople position capabilities and engage buyers in conversations around their problems vs. the product features. You can view an archived Webinar of this process here in a joint Webinar with HubSpot.
- Identify your buyer-persona's and their roles, goals, issues and problems that your products/services can address
- Next, map your relevant capabilities that can help buyer persona's solve their problems
- Then create buyer relevant messaging templates that capture best practices diagnostic questions and buyer vision questions to qualify interest;– so that even rookie sales people working in channels can have relevant conversations with buyers about their issues.
- Integrate proof points that are relevant for each discrete template
- Create solution summaries for each template; these are rifle-shots vs. shotgun messages that will resonate with each targeted buyer persona.
2. When the templates are complete, extract the individual value-creation capabilities that are unique to your solution and by a process of elimination, condense the capabilities into the core value-creation "win-themes" and abstract the meta-level positioning pillars to create the Messaging Architecture.
3. With the Messaging Architecture in place, the Big Idea, Tag-line and Elevator pitch are easily derived.
4. Ensure that your Website Architecture captures top keywords based on your core "Win-themes" from your Messaging Architecture and use them as "anchor text" to drive traffic to relevant pages on your Website.
5. Flow the solution summaries into the Website in the form of targeted blog-posts and email campaigns that drive traffic to the site using keywords as "anchor text" in blog posts and emails.
6. Create a "Mission Statement" that helps employees connect their daily toil with company vision, revenue, profit and customer satisfaction goals.
7. Create a positioning statement that identifies the market segment you wish to occupy in the mind of the buyer and why your product/service is different and valuable. In a startup attempting to re-segment an existing market, this statement will be used countless times in sales and marketing messaging, it should be well thought out and not change every week.
Advanced Marketing Concepts Ltd. understands the problems 
of introducing new products and services and can help companies implement effective marketing messaging, inbound marketing strategy and sales performance disciplines and process for success. For more information, click on the image.