Do you focus your messaging on capabilities or benefits and why?

Maybe a cop out answer but - I think it has to be both!

Prior to Vanta, I worked at Google where the adage for good marketing was: "Know the user, know the magic, connect the two." I use this line of thinking all the time in my messaging work:

Know the user: what are their challenges (really, not just in general terms like "they are busy!")? What are their ambitions and goals? What would motivate them to evaluate a solution in your space?

Know the magic: What are the key capabilities that your offering provides? How are they unique to anything else on the market?

Connect the two: Why do these unique capabilities help solve the uniques challenges your customer faces? The goal is to get specific and actionable, so you are not landing on messaging that says "Our customers are busy, so our product does [x] to save them time".

Good messaging will explore the link between what only your product can do with what your customer truly needs. It should make your reader feel like "wow, these people get me. I want to learn more."

I focus on use cases, the jobs that buyers/users of my platform execute daily, and highlight the product feature that removes barriers preventing them from achieving their goals.

Use case messaging is the art of storytelling in words that your personas use every day to demonstrate you understand their problems, just like telling a child who had a bad day at school a bedtime story where they are the hero overcoming dragons that represent the mean teacher or school bully.

Every marketer knows “The Hero's Journey," which is why structuring it as a use case and using persona-specific language are crucial ways to differentiate your messaging. Your tone must be conversational, with just the right amount of jargon sprinkled throughout your messaging to make it sound specific and tailored to your target persona.

Here's a framework and completed example:

1. When: [Persona]

2. Are:  [Job to be Done}

3. But: [Problem]

4. [Your product name]:  [Capabilitiy Statement]

5. So: [Positive outcome your product creates, in the persona’s language]*

When Revenue Operations Leaders are forecasting but can't identify or explain why the forecasted pipeline has decreased, they use visual indicators in Outreach to identify changes to pipeline value at the segment, team, and rep level. This allows them to spot gaps in pipeline coverage and quickly act to pull new deals in and hit their quarterly forecast.