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 resear ...Read More

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 c ...Read More

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 as ...Read More

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 unders ...Read More