What are some exercises that help you move from the research collected (market, buyer persona, jobs to be done, etc.) to writing messaging?

The first thing here is to make sure the research you are doing is done with the end goal in mind. Meaning, think of how you are going to deliver this messaging, what is your final framework and format. If you are using a traditional value proposition framework for example, it might look something like this at a very high level

• You audience
• Their biggest challenge
• Your solution/offering
• How you solve their problem (solution/benefit statements)
• Your core differentiators

So when you do your research, make sure you are collecting data for each part of your messaging framework. The harder part is actually coming up with the right variations to test.

For example, when we did our quant surveys, we wrote several questions to test messaging for each of the sections (outlined above) in our unique value proposition. Once we got the data back, we looked at what rose to the top and it made our job significantly easier. You also want to look at all the research, find patterns and themes that start to surface, and then boil it down to the most essential message from there. I like to start with the value proposition, before I dive into developing an elevator pitch - because the elevator pitch should be a synthesis of everything above, but just written in a more customer-facing, conversational format.

Research can be complicated, but honestly we have teams here to help so i feel fortunate. For anyone interested in some templates we created to run concept testing for our messaging, I am happy to share them, just reach out to me directly.

I’m not sure there really are exercises. Once we have research, then we can plug it into our positioning template and answer a bunch of questions within that template (i.e. “what is the shift in the market/world that the buyer is experiencing?). Once all of those questions are answered, then it’s relatively seamless to come-up with a narrative based on that pre-work, and thus messaging. The important point is that any messaging — given it’s designed to be broadly applicable — still carries the core of your positioning work. If you have a creative team on-staff or even just an individual who’s great at thinking outside of the box as them to take a look at your positioning and this about how it could be transformed to address the widest cross-section of your audience. Having another perspective can be really valuable here to test concepts and push ideas forward that ultimately help you write great messaging.

For me personally, I like to use a messaging framework to help consolidate my thoughts based on the research I’ve done. There are a lot of good messaging frameworks you can utilize but the one I start with is typically the one that answers the questions ‘for’, ‘who’, ‘provides’, ‘unlike’, and ‘only’. It helps me frame up the most important elements of the message. The next thing I do is go solicit feedback from people smarter than me. My final step is to test how simple and clear it is to understand. To do that I test it on my partner (who is not in tech) and kids to see if they can understand what it is and the value it provides. It’s a great way to ensure you aren’t using too many buzzwords or tech-speak.

One of the more challenging areas when it comes to writing messaging is consolidating the research and trying to make sense of all the information you have. I find it useful to collect my data in a working document to make it easier to reference as I start to write my messaging. The first step I'll take is to review all of the data and information I have to see what common threads I can pull. Are there specific pain points I want to address? I'll often start by thinking about the pain and the associated behavior that's taking place to better understand how my product might solve for that pain. Understanding that underlying pain and associated behavior makes it easier to translate the key benefits of your product's features to a message that will resonate.

I'll then review the other research I have, like market data, interviews or customer stories to find the proof points needed to support my messaging. Having it all in one document makes it easier to go back and reference different data to see if I'm sufficiently providing adequate support for my messages.