If you want to learn how to create product-specific messaging framework template you’re in the right place. 


In my first video, I talked about what is a messaging framework.

In this video I share a specific template with 8 categories, and I walk you through each of those elements.

Watch other videos in this series:

Part 3 – Thought Leadership  

Part 4 – High-Volume Products Framework 

As a B2B Marketing Consultant, Author and Speaker, I focus on helping marketers to build marketing and sales alignment. I also help global companies tailor their marketing to a local audience. In addition to my YouTube Channel, I also write blog posts and own my podcast. Check out blog posts and podcast episodes and subscribe to Apple Podcast.

Want to see how I can help you? Schedule a call with me. Let’s talk.

TRANSCRIPT

Hey, this is Pam Didner. Thank you for tuning in to B2B Marketing and More with me. I want to help you to become a better B2B marketer. And I share my templates, know-how, and experience to help you to think strategically and do your job faster and quicker. And hopefully, by doing that, you can get promoted faster. For today, I want to continue with this messaging framework series I started last week. 

Part one was about a definition of messaging framework and the steps you can take to build one for today, which is part two.

I want to share with you specific templates that you can use to get started and dive in. As you can see on my screen, all right, this is what the messaging framework template looks like, it’s very simple and easy, not difficult. You start with a product or the product family, and I’m just going to read them out loud to ensure that we are on the same page. 

Okay. And then the second category is the target audience, followed by the value proposition. The next one is customer challenges. And after that are messaging, positioning or messaging, pillars, product features, and user benefits. The last category is keywords for content creation. That is it. Very simple. So now let’s talk about each category a little bit more. So you can get a sense of how you can better fill in the blanks. Number one product. 

Many people will ask me, Should we put company names, like the first category? Well, no. If you think about it, when anybody has any issues or challenges, they search for products. They are not searching for a company name to solve their issue. Unless your company is Uber or Google, right? It’s like, suddenly, those company names become action verb. That’s a different story. For the majority of us, our company names are not action verbs.

People looking to solve their challenges and issues are looking for products, not a company.

If I’m thirsty, I want to drink water. Right? I’m not searching like, oh, I want to drink Fuji water. Does that make sense? So focus on the product, the next category. Target audience, right here, focus on what? Just one target audience, you know, make it very crisp, you create messaging framework for this specific target audience, if you put two or three there, it creates confusion, a lot of time and a lot of debates internally. Right? 

So who is this messaging framework for? Mm-hmm. I’m not sure the customer challenges are related to the doctor and nurses at the same time to avoid confusion, especially when you try to dry buying within the internal team, one target audience if possible. The next one is about your propositions for your specific product. What is one statement? What overarching statement can you describe to differentiate your product from your competitors? Salesforce is very easy, you know, the number one CRM solution in the world. 

Okay, another company was also a CRM solution, but they embedded their CRM solution into Gmail. So their differentiator factor is CRM fit for the G Suite? For example, that’s again, you know, what is that overarching statement that you want to describe your product? 

The next one is customer challenges.

Can you identify three distinctive customer challenges that you want to solve and write the customer challenges in the first person? I need something. I encounter something, and I have difficulty with something. If you write it in the first person, your internal stakeholders and agency content creators are reading your document in the first person, creating a sense of resonance with your audience. So I always suggest when you write your customer challenges, write it in the first person. 

The next one is the messaging pillars or the messaging positioning. So you need to write one statement summarising what your products can do to solve that customer’s challenge. For example, the customers’ challenge is: all my data is everywhere. I need a tool that can centralize my data. And then the messaging positioning for your product maybe, you know, connect and integrate your data in a unified central repository? So you write one statement describing what your product will do to solve that specific customer challenge. 

Then the next category is product features. Maybe you have a specific product feature called X e 350. And this X e 350 Is your proprietary platform and has a very easy user interface that people can configure to collect all the data. Now in your product feature category, you should describe what X e 350 is, well, you know, what is a proprietary platform you can configure and collect all different data formats into your central database. Right, so you explain why that typical feature is in the product feature category. Now, you have to translate that into the user benefit. Right?

So the user benefit will be easy configuration for data integration.

Right there. So do you see the difference between the product features and the user benefit? The right one is very easy to understand, and your audience can relate to it. And the other one is the technical benefit is xc, 350, right? It’s a proprietary platform for the configuration of your data integration. When you create the messaging framework, you tend to do a lot of research, like what I did for my clients. 

So after I did tons of research about the products, the competitors, products, and whatnot, I realised that there is a list of keywords that my clients can use. So starting about last year, when I created my messaging framework, I added another category: a list of keywords. It’s based on my research. And while I did the research anywayI might as well just documented the list of keywords, from my perspective, that can be used for content creation. Guess what? The common creators loved it. They take the messaging framework I created as the list of keywords they can use. It’s just less work for them. Right. 

So that was the kind of category I created, like a bonus category, if you will, and you turned out to be incredibly useful.

And the people rave about it. So this is the framework. Any questions? If you send a question to me, I’d love to answer your question. So here are three quick takeaways. Number one, you need to ensure that you have templates to use if you decidecreate a messaging framework. Number two, make sure all the elements are related coherently. Right? Don’t just create one category. And then, the other category, think through how each category is tied together. Number three, review that with your product team sales and the customers to get their feedback, and not just create the stuff in the silos. All right. 

So thank you so much for listening to this specific episode. I hope that you find the content useful. If you do, please subscribe, or share with any colleagues you think can benefit. I would appreciate it. It means a lot to me. And I am going to talk about part three of the messaging framework series next week. And that will be about thought leadership. You should create a thought leadership messaging framework before you draft your thought leadership content. We can talk a little bit more. See you next week.

What can Pam Didner do for you?

Being in the corporate world for 20+ years and having held various positions from accounting and supply chain management, and marketing to sales enablement, she knows how corporations work. She can make you and your team a rock star by identifying areas to shine and do better. She does that through private coaching, keynote speaking, workshop training, and hands-on consulting. Contact her or find her on LinkedIn and Twitter. A quick note: Check out her new 90-Day Revenue Reboot, if you are struggling with marketing.