What is a Messaging Framework?

How to Create an Effective Messaging Framework

Developing an effective messaging framework involves several key steps, many of which take place before a marketer begins to build out a messaging framework. But by doing your due diligence and research prior to crafting the framework, you ensure a solid foundation upon which the message can be built.

1. CONDUCT BACKGROUND RESEARCH

Your research can come from various sources. But your ultimate objective is to understand your place at the macro (the competitive landscape) and micro (customer perspective) level. The best places to start collecting insights are:

• Industry analyst reports – Get a general sense of the key players in your space and how they’re winning.
• Competitor websites and social channels – Learn how competitors talk about themselves and their solutions on their website and other digital channels.
• Sales conversations – Have sales reps collect and document customer feedback in a more formalized way.
• Review sites – Peer-to-peer business review sites like G2 help to provide a comprehensive and unbiased view of how different solutions and products in your space are being perceived by the industry.
• AI generative tools – ChatGPT, Gemini, and other similar generative AI tools can help bring you up to speed quickly on both the competitive landscape and your target personas.

Evaluate the Competitive Landscape

As you get a lay of the land at the macro level, here’s what you should be able to identify for the messaging framework:

• Which competitors currently dominate the landscape.
• What they offer and what they say about that offering.
• Whom they target, by persona and/or industry, for their offering.
• Whether their success is due to a good message or a strong reputation.

The last bullet raises an important point. You may find in your research that the top competitors in your space don’t have great messaging or have messaging that sounds just like everyone else’s. Yet, they are still successful.

Some solutions are only successful because they come from an established market leader. However, market leadership doesn’t guarantee great messaging. In fact, we find that many B2B tech Fortune 500 companies have messaging that’s littered with cryptic value props, tired buzzwords, and gratuitous jargon and acronyms that inspire little more than an eye roll from buyers.

Smaller and newer companies don’t have the luxury of a prominent reputation to fall back on. What they lack in experience or brand awareness they must make up for in specificity and differentiation.

As a way to keep track of your top competitors big and small, you may consider creating a spreadsheet or database that assesses them on the points in the list above.

Understand Your Target Personas

After you’ve analyzed the competitive landscape, the next step is to better understand your target personas. Who are the people who will be buying your solution? What are their pain points, their motivators, and their jobs to be done (JTBD)?

As you think about how your messaging framework can speak to your target personas, keep in mind that they need to be the hero in your solution story — not you. Sure, your product or service enables them to alleviate a pain point, address a JTBD, or achieve a business objective. But every customer, even in B2B, has #MainCharacterEnergy. Your organization and all the products and services it provides are just the supporting cast.

It may sound like we’re conflating business with personal priorities here. But the efficacy of your solution in addressing their needs very well could impact their job and, in turn, their life. For example, according to the B2B Elements of Value pyramid, B2B buyers are less concerned with values at the base of the pyramid that are more functional. Instead, they care more about the elements of a purchase that will get their individual needs met, such as reputational assurance and reduced anxiety.

How Your Buyers Feel in Their Journey

To further illustrate, business management expert David H. Maister talks about the emotional side of the buyer’s journey in his book “Managing the Professional Services Firm.” Here are all the feelings a buyer experiences, according to him:

1. I’m feeling INSECURE. I’m not sure I know how to detect which of the finalists is the genius, and which is just good. I’ve exhausted my abilities to make technical distinctions.
2. I’m feeling THREATENED. This is my area of responsibility, and even though intellectually I know I need an outside expert/solution, it’s not comfortable to put my affairs in the hands of others.
3. I’m taking a PERSONAL RISK. By putting my affairs in the hands of someone else, I risk losing control.
4. I’m IMPATIENT. I didn’t call in someone at the first sign of symptoms (or opportunity). I’ve been thinking about this for a while.
5. I’m WORRIED. By the very fact of suggesting improvements or changes, these people are going to be implying that I haven’t been doing it right up till now. Are these people going to be on my side?
6. I’m EXPOSED. Whoever I hire, I’m going to have to reveal some proprietary secrets, not all of which are flattering. I will have to undress.
7. I’m feeling IGNORANT, and don’t like the feeling. I don’t know if I’ve got a simple problem or a complex one. I’m not sure I can trust this vendor to be honest about that: it’s in their interest to convince me it’s complex.
8. I’m SKEPTICAL. I’ve been burned before by these kinds of vendors. You get a lot of promises: How do I know whose promise I should buy?
9. I’m CONCERNED that this vendor either can’t or won’t take the time to understand what makes my situation special. They’ll try to sell me what they’ve got rather than what I need.
10. I’m SUSPICIOUS. Will this vendor be those typical professionals who are hard to get hold of, who are patronizing, who leave you out of the loop, who befuddle you with jargon, who don’t explain what they’re doing or why? In short, will these people deal with me in the way I want to be dealt with?

Your buyers are professionals, yes, but they are human above all else. Great solution messaging keeps customers at the forefront.

It may sound simple. But this is where most organizations, even the market leaders, miss the mark. They may do a good job of explaining what their solution is and how it works. But in order to hook customers and get leadership buy-in, they need to start with why their solution matters. The why tells the customer how the solution fits into their story and brings the individual and inspirational value that they are ultimately seeking.

What Happens When Companies Don’t Put Customers First

Here are the common pitfalls we see with companies that don’t prioritize customers in their messaging:

• They focus on features and capabilities over desired outcomes. One of our clients had a well-known flagship incident response product that they wanted to bundle with other offerings into a platform solution. Historically, this company had a product-led focus that emphasized features and capabilities. Yet, they lacked an understanding of their customers. They were still able to find success for the flagship product because its purpose was straightforward enough. But without a clear understanding of customer needs, pain points, JTBD, and how customers were currently supplementing their product with other competing offerings, they didn’t know how to market the platform in a meaningful way.
•  They lead with the wrong value proposition. One of our clients had been successful among B2C audiences and wanted to adapt their messaging to break into the B2B market. The problem was that — since they were so successful in B2C — they thought they could use the same tagline for B2C and B2B audiences, with the only difference being to add “at scale” for B2B. We conducted message testing for them and found that this approach wouldn’t work for a few reasons:
  • The tagline used a buzzword that B2C audiences would be more forgiving of but repelled B2B buyers.
  • Scalability is table stakes in a B2B tech solution, so to use “[any value prop] at scale” as a tagline fell flat among respondents.
  • In general, the tagline didn’t cover the full scope of what their platform offered.
• They target the wrong people. Many companies don’t have a clear understanding of how organizations explore, purchase, implement, and supplement solutions like theirs. They may be appealing to the wrong people in the purchasing group or not appealing to those in the purchasing group at all. One of our clients wanted to target marketing and IT leaders for their Martech platform. However, our research revealed that it wouldn’t make sense to target IT. Although this persona was the gatekeeper and enabler for solutions like theirs, IT already felt that they managed too many Martech tools and would be looking for more reasons to veto a new solution than to approve.
•  They don’t make customers feel special. Even when companies have a lot of experience with a particular type of customer, they need to avoid presumptuous messaging. We saw this issue with one of our client’s competitors. This competitor, a big player in the MSP space, has decades of experience serving hundreds of thousands of customers. Touting their expertise, their appeal quickly slipped into arrogance. In their website messaging, they said something to the effect of, “We’ve worked with so many companies like yours, we already know your environment.” Every organization is unique in its structure, its challenges, its goals, and its infrastructure journey. Good messaging should respect and reflect that.

2. BUILD THE MESSAGING FRAMEWORK

Once you have a thorough understanding of the competitive space, who your target personas are, and what these audiences value, it’s time to start crafting your messaging framework.

Messaging Framework Best Practices

Let’s start with some general parameters of what you should and shouldn’t include in your messaging.

Here are best practices we’ve compiled from our client messaging projects over the years.

Messaging Dos	Messaging Don’ts
Aim high on the B2B elements of value. Even in B2B, buyers have personal motivations reducing anxiety and inspiring hope. Make your like solution meaningful by hitting those higher-level values. For example, if you have an automation solution that minimizes grunt work, don’t just focus on the time savings benefit. Talk about what buyers can do with that time, i.e., how it enables them to achieve their vision.	Don’t make table stakes and lower-tier values your raison d’être. Compliance, scalability, cost reduction, and even innovation — these are all lower-tier values. Yet, so many B2B tech companies fall back on them. For example, Gemini shows that the word “innovation” appears 110 times on aws.com and 173 times on azure.com. Of course, some of these values are worth a nod in your messaging, but they shouldn’t be the centerpiece of your solution story.
Use plain, direct language that focuses on business outcomes. Most personas want a solution’s high-level messaging to focus on business outcomes over the technology itself. Even for highly technical audiences like developers, they often need the C-suite to sign off on their purchases. So, providing clear and straightforward messaging that focuses on the business value of your solution can help to streamline the purchase process.	Don’t overuse jargon and acronyms. Excessive use of jargon, acronyms, and buzzwords makes your messaging sound like everyone else’s and tends to create more ambiguity than clarity for buyers. To hold yourself and your colleagues accountable, consider this funny suggestion from one of our clients: anytime someone talks or writes about “digital transformation,” they have to add money to a swear jar.
Call out your target audience in your messaging. Don’t leave your buyers guessing whether or not your solution is for them. Tell it to them straight. Say upfront, “This solution helps [target persona] achieve [specific business objective].”	Don’t message to everyone. People pleasing is a bad messaging strategy.Don’t sell a B2B solution “for every problem solver in search of a solution—and every innovator with a dream” When you aim for everyone, you neglect the people who matter most.
Present pain points judiciously. Solutions exist to solve a problem. But leaning into the problem too heavily may come off as scare tactics. Balance the copy by presenting the pain point briefly and objectively for context. Then, move into the positive of what companies stand to gain from the solution.	Don’t amplify negativity more than necessary. There’s a fine line between making audiences feel understood in their challenges and making them feel pressured and defensive. Find a way to state the truth in a way buyers will accept.

What Should be Included in a Messaging Framework?

We’ve talked a lot about why a messaging framework matters and what you need to do to build one. But, what does a messaging framework actually look like?

At its most basic form, the framework has three to five messaging pillars — each of which include a headline, a value proposition, and proof points — and then one topline message that serves as the overarching solution statement.

Messaging Pillars

The messaging pillars are the essential elements of your solution story. Each one includes:

• A HEADLINE– Think of this like a tagline, a snappy distillation of the value prop you cover in the body of the pillar.
• A VALUE PROPOSITION– This is the meat of your pillar where you describe how your solution solves a unique pain point for your target audience to achieve a specific business goal.
• PROOF POINT(S)- This is the evidence you use to reinforce your value prop. It can come in the form of an industry stat to highlight a pain point, a success metric from one of your case studies, or any other proof that: (a) the problem you’re addressing is real and relevant, and/or (b) you’re the right organization to solve it.

Here’s an example of what a messaging pillar looks like, as published on our client’s website:

HEADLINE:  Maximize Accounts Payable Efficiency with a Platform That Learns

VALUE PROPOSITION: Never deal with an invoice exception again. The Transcepta Platform delivers an intelligent and intuitive AP Automation solution that evolves as it learns more about your organization, processes, and workflows. Every invoice feeds the platform more data, ensuring each new invoice is more likely than the last to arrive in your ERP ready to pay. That way, AP teams can get ahead, optimize cash flow, and earn more early payment discounts.

PROOF POINTS FOR THE TRANSCEPTA PLATFORM:

• 94% reduction in invoice exceptions
• $1.5 million in annual savings for AP processing
• 90% reduction in resources required to process invoices

Topline Message

The topline message is like the elevator pitch of your solution. It’s the roof above the messaging pillars. We recommend having different variations of the topline message: a short version (25 words), a medium version (50 words), and a long version (100 words). That way, those disseminating the message can adapt it as needed to keep it high-level or go in-depth for customers.

The topline message has the same elements as the pillars, with the main exception being that it includes more than one value proposition in the body. It should be a fusion of the most important messaging pillars and is thus the final piece of the main framework.

Additional Elements

The messaging pillars and topline message are the core components of the framework. But you can also customize it with other elements. For instance, we’ve had some clients want us to incorporate things that you might see in a sales playbook or a battle card. Here are some examples of additional elements you can add to your messaging framework:

• Customer pain points, qualifying questions, and value statements – Prep your sales team with talking points for the most common types of customer interactions. You could even make this like a rude Q&A.Here’s a hypothetical example of what this could look like for a boutique managed services provider (MSP), let’s call them ButiqMSP (note: this is not a recommended name), that specializes in the financial services sector, is based in Australia, and only serves the Australian market.

Target Customer Pain Point	Target Customer Scenario	How ButiqMSP Can Help	Qualifying Questions for Sales
Regional and industry regulations for data management	Due to changing regulations, my organization needs to move our data to a facility in a different location. I need a vendor who specializes in my industry and is an expert in Australia’s and privacy laws who can help us devise a strategy to make the move quickly to avoid fines.compliance	ButiqMSP’s team of expert DataOps engineers operates exclusively in Australia and specializes in your industry to build a strategy that will produce fast, effective results for better compliance.	Do you have confidence that your automated deployments are industry and geographically compliant? Is “compliant by default” baked into your DevOps processes?

• Segment-specific messaging – You can have various sets of messaging pillars organized by persona, industry, JTBD, company size, etc. For example, say your primary target persona is a LoB leader. Your main messaging framework should first be written to them. However, IT leaders are oftentimes a secondary persona that also need to be addressed. In this case, tweaks will need to be made to those pillars so that they resonate better with an IT leader’s JTBD and address their core needs when speaking with them.
• Exclusionary statements – By defining what you don’t do and audiences you don’t serve, you help sales vet prospects more effectively to focus on the right people and boost conversion rates. For example, at Cascade Insights, we make it very clear on our main market research page that we only serve B2B tech – we do not serve B2C companies, nor do we serve any B2B companies outside of the technology industry.
• Differentiation statements – Identify how you’re different from competitors with differentiation statements that you can use for a battle card.

You can combine and organize these elements any way you want. But here’s a simple yet effective way to lay it out, with examples from our hypothetical ButiqMSP:

For	For Financial services organizations that are based in Australia.
Who	Have highly niche or complex issues that require creative, custom infrastructure solutions.
Provides	Bespoke hybrid multicloud services delivered by a talented team of experts who will fully immerse themselves in the client’s organization to learn about their infrastructure and devise the best strategy to achieve their unique business goals.
Unlike	Unlike The cookie-cutter solutions that come from big MSPs.
Only	For organizations already working in a hybrid multi-cloud environment, especially those using infrastructure as code (IaC)
Not	For first-time cloud migrators and any non-Australian, non-finserv organization

These are only a few examples of how you can customize your messaging framework. You can make it more robust for internal education purposes, or streamline it for immediate activation in customer-facing assets. The point is your organizational needs and the information at your disposal determine what your messaging framework should look like.

3. TEST AND REFINE YOUR MESSAGING

To ensure your success, you’ll want to test out your messaging framework prior to activating it. You can do that via a research effort, which may include either a series of in-depth interviews (IDIs) or focus groups.

After developing your initial messaging pillars, put them to the test by asking your key personas how they feel about each one. This may be in the setting of a focus group consisting of a small group of people, or through several one-on-one interviews where you can explore each messaging pillar in-depth.

The suggestions and sentiments of your respondents will help to give you invaluable insights that help you to revise the framework and, really, all of your marketing efforts. With their feedback, you can make refinements for a better iteration of the messaging to serve it up to the market confidently and entice buyers.

You can continue to refine your messaging framework as needed when you roll it out. Start with a soft launch, testing it among smaller audience segments or specific communication channels to see if these factors impact performance.

4. ACTIVATE YOUR MESSAGING

Once you finalize the messaging framework, it’s time to communicate and train your organization on how to apply it at scale. Conduct training sessions or workshops to educate employees and team members on the framework’s principles. You’ll need to act as the go-to person to provide ongoing support.

Finally, remember that developing an effective messaging framework is not a one-time task. It requires regular review, updates, and adaptations to reflect changes in your organization, industry, and target personas. Stay flexible and responsive to ensure your messaging framework remains relevant and impactful over time.