Tim Matthews's Blog, page 9

The Six Components of a Message Platform

Given the glut of information buyers face every day, a successful marketing campaign needs to say something interesting, relevant, and meaningful. And, it needs to say it over and over again.

Marketers refer to the collection of carefully chosen words and phrases that they use to describe their offering as a message platform. The message platform is the master document on which a lot of other writing will be based. All communication should conform to the message platform.

There are many ways to format a message platform, and content may vary from company to company. Regardless of the specifics, however, a proper message platform should contain at least the following six elements:

Buyer priorities and needs – This element summarizes your buyers’ top priorities or needs. Market segmentation and buyer profiles will yield this information, and it should be limited to the “short list” of what your buyers care most about. An acute knowledge of needs and priorities will help writers and other marketers better understand your buyers and the context in which they make decisions.
Positioning statement – a positioning statement is a short statement that demonstrates the value of what you offer, how it differs from competing products and services, and how it has a meaningful impact on your audience. The positioning statement can cover an entire company, a product line, or an individual product.
Key messages – Recall that the positioning statement is intended to help internal audiences understand your desired position in the marketplace. Obviously, however, you also need to convey this message to the external marketplace. To accomplish this task, marketers create key messages, which are short statements that phrase your product’s value in terms the buyer will understand.
Proof points – Proof points are the supporting evidence that validate and give credibility to the key messages. Whereas key messages are complete sentences, proof points are bullets. Each key message should be supported by two to three proof points. Well-crafted proof points will make your messaging more powerful and help cut through the cynicism and inattentiveness toward marketing messages that “data smog” has fostered.
Value proposition – The “value prop” is what—hopefully—your salespeople will be repeating every time they meet a new prospect. It describes what you have, the customers for whom it is intended, and what benefits they will gain from using it. Although this sounds straightforward, think of all the times a salesperson has tried to explain to you what he or she is selling. Five minutes into the monologue, you still have no idea what the product is or why you should buy it. Somewhere, a marketing person did not do his or her job of arming the field staff with a value proposition.
Copy blocks – Copy blocks are fleshed-out messages, in full sentences, that can be dropped into marketing assets, whether direct mail, e-mail, advertising, or some other medium. The best practice is to provide short, medium, and long versions, usually twenty-five-, fifty-, and hundred-word blocks that describe your company and its offerings.

The figure below shows how all the pieces of the message platform fit together, starting with buyer priorities and needs on the more strategic end, and finishing with completed copy blocks that can be used as is on the delivery end.

13 Questions to Jump-start Your Buyer Persona Research

Interviews are critical to developing a good buyer persona. Actually speaking with the buyers can uncover insights that would never come to light otherwise. Simply creating a persona via research, using demographics, is a waste of time. You need to understand how they think, not just who they are.

Many marketers never take this step. Contacting real buyers is a difficult and challenging task. And what do you ask them? Here are 13 questions to get you started, followed by a format for compiling your findings. You don’t have to ask all of these, or in this order. The most important thing is to let the buyer talk, and for you to listen.

Role and Responsibility

What is your role? What responsibilities do you have?
What department are you in? What does your reporting structure look like?
What is the biggest challenge to getting your job done?

Key Initiatives and Objectives

What are your key initiatives? How do they relate to your business?
What are the major hurdles to your accomplishing them?
How does your organization measure success?

Buying Process and Decision Criteria

What made you decide to buy a product like ours? What factors drove that decision?
Take me back to the day you decided to start looking for products like ours. When was that, and how did it happen?
What was it that finally convinced you to buy our product?
Who else got involved in the decision and why?

Wild Cards

If you could change one thing about your job, what would it be?
How do you think your role compares with those of your peers?
What advice would you give to college graduates looking to land a job like yours?

The questions you ask can take any form you think will give you the background and insight you are looking for. You will likely not get through all of them in an interview. Asking open-ended questions and listening carefully are essential to getting beyond merely courteous answers. You should probe and ask deeper second-level questions to get to the heart of the matter. Most important, just get the subject talking, telling his or her story.

After you have conducted half a dozen interviews, you probably will have accumulated enough material to build a profile. How many interviews you conduct, and if you segment by market or geography, are decisions you will need to make based on the nature of your business.

The buyer persona should be compiled into a short document that other members of the sales and marketing teams can reference. Content—insights—is more important than format, but a good B2B persona should contain the following:

Profile – A brief description of the person—what the person’s title or role is, whom he or she reports to, typical career path, age range, and other useful details. Some people choose to name their personas for easy reference and to get to “know” them as a person. In my experience, I have found that this strategy more often than not causes cynicism on the part of those outside the process. A common mistake is to spend too much time on this piece of the persona, and not enough on the items below, which are where the real insights come from.
Role and responsibility – What is this person’s job, and what is he or she responsible for? Understanding this completely, even in areas that don’t directly pertain to your product, can offer critical insights. For example, a nurse might make a recommendation to a doctor on a new piece of equipment, unofficially, and have some influence.
Career aspirations – Who does this person want to be when he or she grows up? Perhaps your product can help this person get there. This can be the most powerful insight you gain from the interview. People always act on their personal motives.
Purchasing process – Where does this person find information about products like yours (you should be advertising there), and how does he or she buy products like yours (make sure you have the right channel)?
Blockers – What makes this person’s job difficult (time in the day, people, process), and what rivalries might exist with others? It is amazing what you will find out, and removing these blockers with your product or process can help ramp up your revenue.

Have other questions you have used? I would love to hear them.

Five Easy New Year’s Resolutions for Marketing Teams

For as many years as I can remember, I’ve used the quiet period between Christmas and New Year’s to reflect on the year that’s passed, as well as on what lies ahead. Invariably, I’m surprised at the volume of work done by my team. Those Q1 programs seem like so long ago…

Roman god Janus looking past and future.

Yet for all of the accomplishments, there are the unrealized goals. I often rue how we’ve strayed from good marketing practice in some way. Not being close to the customer. Taking our eye off the competition. Not rigorously measuring and testing everything we write. Getting all that work done sometimes takes us away from common sense basics. Marketing fundamentals are often shouldered aside by the bigger initiatives, just as life takes over and personal resolutions fade away. Not too different from failing to eat right and exercise often, keys to the most common New Year’s resolution, losing weight.

Good habits make for better marketing. I think of the veteran sports pros that know there are no shortcuts even after their tenth season. Run the laps. Do the stretches. Practice the free kicks. But not everyone has the discipline, which is why so many well intentioned resolutions fail. What to do?

One idea is to create a quick-win New Year’s resolution for your department. Think of it as a “January resolution.” By making it small and completing in January, your team can enter the year a little bit smarter and more energized. Here are five easy January resolutions.

Be the Buyer Day – I’ve written about this before. It can be a lot of fun. Spend a day acting like someone buying your product, both from your company and your top two competitors. Do the product research. Fill out the forms. Sign up for the demos. Call the published sales phone numbers. This exercise takes no prep and you can find out how you stack up.

Go through All of Your Collateral – That’s right, all of it. Okay, you can break it up and assign a certain number to each team member. This isn’t the most fun exercise, so you may to spice it up with food, drink, or interesting prizes (best typo spot?). But someone needs to periodically go through your growing catalog of content and make sure it’s good enough for your customers. If you don’t can at least one asset, I don’t think you took a hard enough look.

Interview Two Customers – Every year I think, I should talk to more customers. Most marketers don’t talk to enough. It’s amazing what you learn. Strange objections. Misunderstandings. The importance of certain words in your copy. A question you never heard before. Find two customers, call and thank them for their business, and see how things are going.

Rank Your Blog Posts – Do you know your top ten blog posts for the last year? If you don’t, how will you know what to write next year?  Call a meeting and just go over your top ten blog posts – most read, most shared, most commented on – and figure out what made them so.

Bring in Two New Ideas – Yes, just two. Schedule a meeting and get some industry speakers, or just a friend of yours who’s a VP of marketing of another company, to come in and talk about their best practices. Start the year off with some creative new ideas and get some fresh juices in your organization.

January was named for the Roman god Janus, who had two faces, one looking forward and one looking backward. Make sure you spend December looking backward, reflecting on what you could have done better, and set a small “January resolution” to get your team off on the right foot in the new year.

These are just a few ideas. There are plenty more. If you come up with some good ones, I’d like to hear about them and how they went.

This post also appeared in LinkedIn Pulse.

Marketingspeak: What’s a ‘Buying Center’?

In B2B sales, there is rarely just one person – or persona – involved in the buying process.  The buying center is a formalization of that concept.  Many people with different roles and priorities participate in purchasing decisions. Unlike consumer buying, where the consumer, either alone or with assistance or influence from acknowledged opinion leaders, makes his or her own purchase decisions, in business buying a group often determines which products or services the business purchases.

A typical business buying center includes a variety of participants:

Initiators – people who begin the purchase process by defining a need.  These individuals are sometimes called the “champions,” and they serve as coaches to the sales team throughout the process
Decision makers – people who make the final decisions
Gatekeepers – people who control the flow of information and access to individuals in an organization
Influencers – people who have input into the purchase decision
Purchasing agent – the person who actually creates the purchase order
Budget owner – the person whose budget is paying for the purchase; there can be multiple owners if several departments are funding the purchase
 Users – people who ultimately use the product or service

In many situations, people play more than one role in business purchasing decisions. Depending on an organization’s structure and the importance of the decision being made, a buying center can include few or many layers of management.  Sometimes, buying centers are formal committees created to make a purchase decision.  Some members of a buying center will participate throughout the decision-making process, whereas others will be involved only briefly.   Technical staff may evaluate potential products for purchase and influence the decision, but then leave the actual purchase to the decision makers, budget owner and purchasing agent.

Every company has a different buying process and therefore a different buying center.  But, eventually, a pattern will emerge.  Ensuring that your marketing efforts take into account all of the players in the buying center is very important.  For example, ads may need to reach not only users but also budget owners.  As another example, your sales team may need to have different conversations with different members of the buying center.  In general, the fewer the people in the buying center, the faster the sales cycle.  Aligning your product so that the decision maker, budget owner, and user are the same can also be a very effective strategy.   The CEO might be the initiator, decision maker, budget owner and user of a new private jet.

Marketingspeak: What’s a Tsotchke and How Do You Pronounce It?

If you have ever been to a trade show, you have probably collected tsotchke, more commonly known as giveaways or swag.

The term is the Yiddish word for “toy” or “trinket,” and commonly pronounced “chach-ka” or “chach-kee” but no one in marketing is ever really sure how to say this word.

Or spell it.

Here are just some of the accepted spellings: tshotshke, tshatshke, tchachke, tchotchka, tchatchka, tchachke, tsotchke, chotski, and chochke.

How to Format a Press Release

How can you be reasonably certain that your press releases will contain the requisite information in an appropriate format? The answer is that there is a standard structure for press releases. Your organization will still need to create news and find an interesting angle, but using the standard format assures you have everything the media will need. In this section, we examine the basic elements of the standard release structure.

Identifier – When creating a release, you should place the words “PRESS RELEASE,” in all caps, bolded, at the top of the first page. Though this might seem obvious, how is an editor or reporter to know what the document you or your agency sent them is? Significantly, organizations also release a standard PR document called a media alert to invite or alert media representatives to an upcoming event, such as a press conference. A media alert contains many of the same elements as a press release, so people can confuse the two. The “PRESS RELEASE” label clearly distinguishes your news from a media alert. (Media alerts are covered below.)

Timing – Press releases typically state “For Immediate Release” at the top left, bolded. This statement informs editors that the story is publicly available—on the wire or via your website—and that they can report it. If your story will be released at a future date, then the press release should say “For Release on [fill in your date].” Organizations use this approach when they give releases to the media in advance of the public release date—a common practice that we will discuss later in this chapter. If you want to make the point more strongly, you can substitute “Embargoed until [fill in your date].” Even if you do label a release as embargoed, it is best to have a conversation beforehand with the journalists to ensure they understand and will honor the embargo.

Contact information – The contact information informs the reporters and editors who supplied the story and whom they should contact if they have questions. This information should be right justified and placed above your headline, with the word “Contact” in bold situated directly above it. Include the contact’s name, company, phone number, and e-mail address. If you use an agency, the contact may be someone from the agency. In some cases, press releases include both the agency and issuing company’s press contact information. Generally, the company contact should not be your spokesperson. Rather, you should list either the PR manager or the marketing person responsible for the announcement, because you may not want the press to contact the spokesperson before he or she has been properly prepared.

Headline – Just as in a newspaper or magazine, the release should contain a headline that grabs the editors’ attention and spurs them to continue reading. Moreover, because the release will live on long after the story appears on your website, the headline should also draw in the average reader. Headlines are typically printed in bold type, sometimes in a larger font than the rest of the release.

Subhead – The subhead gives you a chance to flesh out your angle and further hook the reader. It may offer additional details, substantiate a claim, or underscore an achievement. Subheads should be printed in a smaller font than the headline, and they are sometimes italicized to distinguish them from the headline.

Dateline – In the United States, the dateline should include the city, state, and date of the press release, followed by either two dashes or an em dash. For example, a release would start “San Francisco, CA, October 31, 2013 –.” If an announcement is made at an industry event, it is common practice to include the city and state where the event is taking place. Outside of the United States, common practice is to use city and country, and sometimes simply the city if it is well-known.

The lead – The first paragraph is known as the lead paragraph, or simply the lead. In the United States it is sometimes spelled “lede,” supposedly to distinguish it from the heavy metal lead type used by typesetters, though there is much debate about the reason for this spelling. The lead should capture the entire story as if the rest of the press release were not there. It essentially serves two key purposes. First, it draws the editor, reporter, or reader further into the story. Second, in the case of what is known as a news lead, it provides journalists with the five Ws and the H: who, what, when, where, why, and how. Journalists are trained to include this information in the leads to their news stories, so you will be giving them exactly what they need. The press release is, after all, packaged news and a tool you use to inform editors and reporters. A feature lead is written in a similar style to the lead of a feature article in a magazine or newspaper, and it may set the scene or tug on emotions. It serves to draw the editor in, but it does not need to contain the hard news elements of the news lead.

Here are two fashion industry examples pulled from PR Newswire, one a news lead and one a feature lead:

BURLINGTON, Vt., Nov. 15, 2012 /PRNewswire/ – Burton Snowboards and Mountain Dew today announce the arrival of the new 2013 Green Mountain Project outerwear collection, which utilizes sustainable fabric made from recycled plastic bottles, now available in stores worldwide.

In this news lead, Burton Snowboards and Mountain Dew (who) are announcing that their new product, 2013 Green Mountain Project outerwear (what), is today (when) available in stores worldwide (where), and that the line is made from sustainable fabric (why).

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif., Nov. 27, 2012 /PRNewswire/ – At 24, many young women are just starting to figure out where they’re going in life. But 24-year-old Evelyn Fox has never been one to follow the crowd. Instead, the trendsetter is helming her own successful high-end fashion company, Crystal Heels™ (http://crystalheels.com) – and it all started with a pair of Louboutins, a couple thousand Swarovski crystals, and a heady mix of creativity and passion.

This feature lead is written in the style of a feature article and is very different from the news lead above. There is no hard news, but it does draw you into Evelyn Fox’s story.

The body – The body is the continuation of the story. After you have provided the details for hard news or set the stage with a feature lead, you should continue with additional details or explanations. The body should also contain quotes from an executive at your organization, a partner if you are announcing a joint venture or project, a customer, and/or an industry expert. It can also include headings if they make the press release easier to read. A common section in product announcement press releases is the “Pricing and Availability” heading, followed by details of when a product will actually ship, where it can be bought, and how much it costs.

Boilerplate – The boilerplate is a description of your company or organization that is designed to be used over and over without change. It supplies the editor with additional information about the newsmaker. The boilerplate should be preceded by the words “About [your company name],” and it should be limited to a single paragraph of no more than roughly a hundred words. The boilerplate should also include the URL for your organization’s website. Twitter handles are becoming increasingly common in boilerplates.

Ending – To indicate the end of the release, type “END” or “###,” centered below the boilerplate.

Standard press release format

Photos, images, videos, B-roll – Because the press release is meant to be a packaged news story, don’t forget to include all of the elements that a magazine, website, newspaper, or television reporter might need to complete the story. These elements include photographs of the new executive whose appointment you just announced, images or technical diagrams of the new product you just announced, and videos that illustrate how the product works. You can even consider a B-roll—supplemental or alternate footage intercut with the main shot in a televised interview or news segment. B-roll can be anything pertinent to your organization, such as footage of your manufacturing assembly line, your automobiles on the test track, consumers using your smartphone or computer, your bond trading floor, or any number of other examples. The easiest way to supply these elements is to provide a URL to a web page containing all of the relevant materials.

Social media links – If you want readers of your online press release—on your website, for example—to share it with others and generally promote it, you can include links in the release that let them do so. A number of social media companies provide tools that enable you to embed these capabilities directly into your press release.

Although a press release should include all of these elements, it should never exceed five hundred words. Like a news story, the release should place most of the news up top, supported by the details in the paragraphs following the headline and lead. It should be composed in a basic font, double-spaced with wide margins and page numbers. Using company letterhead is a nice touch, but it is not required.

In terms of style, pick a news style guide, such as the Associated Press Stylebook or The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage. Use plainspoken language. Most importantly, avoid hyperbole and puffery, because they detract from the legitimacy of your news.

It is possible that you will obtain coverage if you don’t use this structure, but your odds are greater if you present your news in a format that is familiar to editors and reporters. In addition, adopting the preferred format will make your organization appear more professional and worthy of attention.

Notes

How to Create a Buyer Persona

To create a successful marketing campaign, you need to become familiar with both the composition and the size of your market. Knowing your market, however, is not the same as knowing your buyers. It is one thing to know which country buyers live in, which industry they operate in—even their age. But, what does that tell you about what they think and what motivates them to buy?

In B2B scenarios, marketers are guilty of targeting companies and departments within companies without truly understanding who the actual buyers are. Even when B2B marketers know the titles of their target customers, what else do they really know about them? How do these customers view products such as yours? How do they buy? Do they even have the authority to buy? Are there any other obstacles in the way?

In B2C marketing, knowing the age, gender, and hometown of your buyer tells you only so much. Even knowing their interests may be enough to segment them adequately. For example, consider all the cohort of female twentysomethings in your area who like to read. Beyond this single common characteristic, they could be completely different individuals. If you are trying to sell them an e-reader, like Amazon’s Kindle, knowing what they read, how often they read, and if they travel would be very useful. High-income voracious readers looking to lighten their load on business trips would be a good persona to target.

How can marketers acquire a better understanding of prospective buyers and their behaviors? One effective strategy is to create a composite profile, or archetype, known as the buyer persona. The buyer persona clarifies who the buyers really are, what motivates them, how they think and talk, and what issues they face in their jobs, for B2B, and everyday lives, for B2C. Marketing that takes these factors into account will be more effective.

The best way to start the process for a B2B market—assuming you are working for an established business with existing customers—is to interview a few salespeople to find out whom they typically sell to. If you sell via retail to consumers, then you may need to talk to the sales associates on the floor. If you are a new company, or if you are bringing out a new product with a different buyer, you will need to make some assumptions based on your knowledge of the market. You can also analyze competing or similar products to obtain insight into the behaviors of the people who purchase them. In each scenario, you are looking to identify the profile that most often buys your product. Knowing more about these individuals will make your marketing more effective in many ways—buying the right lists, creating meaningful tools, speaking their language, and teaching new salespeople the traits of their prospective customers.

Interviews are critical to developing a good buyer persona. Actually speaking with the buyers can uncover insights that would never come to light otherwise. Yet, many marketers never take this step. Why not? One obvious reason is that contacting real buyers is a difficult and challenging task. You need to find buyers who are willing to talk, as well as sales reps who are comfortable allowing their marketing people to speak directly to their customers. Another challenge is the potential embarrassment associated with asking questions that the buyer assumes you should know. (So, why did you buy our product?) You need to make a concerted effort to overcome these challenges. Rest assured, the results are worth it.

One vital rule in conducting effective interviews is to make certain that you are speaking to the actual buyer. This might sound obvious, but not all sales reps know who these individuals are. Especially at larger accounts, where one salesperson may be in charge of the relationship for his or her company, he or she may deal only with the top person, and this person may not be the decision-making buyer.

Interviews should be conducted by the marketing team without the sales rep present (if possible). You don’t want a sales rep jumping in and answering questions you put to the buyer. Interviewing buyers over the phone and face-to-face are both fine. It is always better, however, to have a dedicated note taker present so that the interviewer can focus on developing rapport with the buyers. Here are some sample questions for B2B buyers, organized by theme:

Role and Responsibility

What is your role? What responsibilities do you have?
What department are you in? What does your reporting structure look like?
What is the biggest challenge to getting your job done?

Key Initiatives and Objectives

What are your key initiatives? How do they relate to your business?
What are the major hurdles to your accomplishing them?
How does your organization measure success?

Buying Process and Decision Criteria

What made you decide to buy a product like ours? What factors drove that decision?
Take me back to the day you decided to start looking for products like ours. When was that, and how did it happen?
What was it that finally convinced you to buy our product?
Who else got involved in the decision and why?

Wild Cards

If you could change one thing about your job, what would it be?
How do you think your role compares with those of your peers?
What advice would you give to college graduates looking to land a job like yours?

The questions you ask can take any form you think will give you the background and insight you are looking for. You will likely not get through all of them in an interview. Asking open-ended questions and listening carefully are essential to getting beyond merely courteous answers. You should probe and ask deeper second-level questions to get to the heart of the matter. Most important, just get the subject talking, telling his or her story. After you have conducted half a dozen interviews, you probably will have accumulated enough material to build a profile. How many interviews you conduct, and if you segment by market or geography, are decisions you will need to make based on the nature of your business.

The buyer persona should be compiled into a short document that other members of the sales and marketing teams can reference. Content—insights—is more important than format, but a good B2B persona should contain the following:

Profile – A brief description of the person—what the person’s title or role is, whom he or she reports to, typical career path, age range, and other useful details. Some people choose to name their personas for easy reference and to get to “know” them as a person. In my experience, I have found that this strategy more often than not causes cynicism on the part of those outside the process. A common mistake is to spend too much time on this piece of the persona, and not enough on the items below, which are where the real insights come from.
Role and responsibility – What is this person’s job, and what is he or she responsible for? Understanding this completely, even in areas that don’t directly pertain to your product, can offer critical insights. For example, a nurse might make a recommendation to a doctor on a new piece of equipment, unofficially, and have some influence.
Career aspirations – Who does this person want to be when he or she grows up? Perhaps your product can help this person get there. This can be the most powerful insight you gain from the interview. People always act on their personal motives.
Purchasing process – Where does this person find information about products like yours (you should be advertising there), and how does he or she buy products like yours (make sure you have the right channel)?
Blockers – What makes this person’s job difficult (time in the day, people, process), and what rivalries might exist with others? It is amazing what you will find out, and removing these blockers with your product or process can help ramp up your revenue.

How to Build a Marketing Message Platform

The average customer receives hundreds, if not thousands, of messages every day. In every medium, from home to work and back again, companies are trying to sell something. So, if you think customers are waiting around waiting to hear what you have to say, think again. This is not a new problem. Even in 1997, when the web was nascent and Twitter, Facebook, and the iPhone were not yet born, consumers were overwhelmed:

Consumers today are surrounded by advertising. There are various estimates, but most range from hundreds to low thousands per day. David Shenk, in his book Data Smog, states that the average American encountered 560 daily advertising messages in 1971. By 1997, that number had increased to over 3000 per day. The average consumer today sees more ads in one day than his predecessor of fifty years ago.

Given this glut of information, a successful marketing campaign needs to say something interesting, relevant, and meaningful. And, it needs to say it over and over again. Remember: frequency, consistency, and simplicity. Marketers refer to the collection of carefully chosen words and phrases that they use to describe their offering as a message platform. For a message platform to be convincing, each element should be concise and compelling. Keep in mind that the words and phrases in your message platform will be used by other members of your marketing team—from PR to advertising to the web team to social media—when they write about your product, whether for a launch, a campaign, or any other activity. The message platform is the master document on which a lot of other writing will be based. All communication should conform to the message platform.

There are many ways to format a message platform, and content may vary from company to company. Regardless of the specifics, however, a proper message platform should contain at least the following six elements:

Buyer priorities and needs – This element summarizes your buyers’ top priorities or needs. Market segmentation and buyer profiles will yield this information, and it should be limited to the “short list” of what your buyers care most about. An acute knowledge of needs and priorities will help writers and other marketers better understand your buyers and the context in which they make decisions.
Positioning statement – a positioning statement is a short statement that demonstrates the value of what you offer, how it differs from competing products and services, and how it has a meaningful impact on your audience. The positioning statement can cover an entire company, a product line, or an individual product.
Key messages – Recall that the positioning statement is intended to help internal audiences understand your desired position in the marketplace. Obviously, however, you also need to convey this message to the external marketplace. To accomplish this task, marketers create key messages, which are short statements that phrase your product’s value in terms the buyer will understand.
Proof points – Proof points are the supporting evidence that validate and give credibility to the key messages. Whereas key messages are complete sentences, proof points are bullets. Each key message should be supported by two to three proof points. Well-crafted proof points will make your messaging more powerful and help cut through the cynicism and inattentiveness toward marketing messages that “data smog” has fostered.
Value proposition – The “value prop” is what—hopefully—your salespeople will be repeating every time they meet a new prospect. It describes what you have, the customers for whom it is intended, and what benefits they will gain from using it. Although this sounds straightforward, think of all the times a salesperson has tried to explain to you what he or she is selling. Five minutes into the monologue, you still have no idea what the product is or why you should buy it. Somewhere, a marketing person did not do his or her job of arming the field staff with a value proposition.
Copy blocks – Copy blocks are fleshed-out messages, in full sentences, that can be dropped into marketing assets, whether direct mail, e-mail, advertising, or some other medium. The best practice is to provide short, medium, and long versions, usually twenty-five-, fifty-, and hundred-word blocks that describe your company and its offerings.

The figure below shows how all the pieces of the message platform fit together, starting with buyer priorities and needs on the more strategic end, and finishing with completed copy blocks that can be used as is on the delivery end.

Message platform components

A critical element of an effective message platform is differentiation. The most common reaction that customers—consumer or business—have to a sales pitch is to associate the product or service with something they already have. After they have done this, they want to know how your product is different from—and better than—the product they already use. This is where differentiation comes in. If the answer to this question is not in your positioning statement and key messages, and is not backed up with proof points, then you need to go back to the drawing board.

As you’ve probably concluded by now, testing the message platform is critical. It is imperative that you get feedback from people outside the group that developed the messaging to confirm that your messages are credible and differentiated and that your product’s value is clear. Depending on your resources and access to participants, testing can range from presenting the message to a few friendly customers, partners, and salespeople to showing draft messaging to industry analysts, trusted customers, and, in some cases, focus groups for feedback. There is really no right way to conduct testing. Whatever method you employ, however, you should follow a consistent format for presenting the messaging and collecting feedback. This strategy will ensure that you are getting the best possible input. As you collect feedback, keep a lookout for ideas on wording and insight into how buyers perceive your organization and what value they see in what you do. You can use this feedback to improve your messaging.

Finally, because the message platform is intended to be consumed by other marketing and sales personnel, a well-designed platform will contain variants of the key messages and value propositions—the copy blocks noted above. Because you need to achieve consistency of message, you should create short, medium, and long versions, and they should be easy to cut and paste from the documents. As the creator, you will benefit from these efforts when you are not asked to write a hundred words for every press release, award submission, and third-party website. And success? When you overhear a salesperson from across the country parroting your words to a nodding customer, you know you’ve got a winner.

References

How to Calculate the Market Size for Your Product

Clearly, identifying the viable markets and market segments for your products and/or services is essential to your company’s success. Regardless of the markets in which you operate, however, it is essential that you have an accurate knowledge of their size.

It’s probably safe to assume that everyone wants to do business in a large and fast-growing market. However, it is possible to make money in a niche or a nascent market. You can also be successful if you introduce a revolutionary product that is just the tonic for customers who are fleeing a declining market. The point is, you can make money in all types of markets.

How can you determine how large your target market is? There are several standard metrics you can use to measure markets.

Total available market (TAM) – This is the total size of the market. It is also referred to as total addressable market.
Served available market (SAM) – Also known as served addressable market, the SAM is the total size of the market that is currently being served, or sold to. It is a portion of the TAM, and therefore it is always smaller. For example, according to the research firm IDC, 659.8 million smartphones were shipped in 2012, up 33.5 percent from the 494.2 million units shipped in 2011. Assuming all of these are sold, then the SAM is 659.8 million, plus the smartphones previously sold, minus the number taken out of service. A big number, but nothing compared with a potential TAM in the billions if every adult in the world owned one.
Share of market (SOM) – More commonly referred to as market share, this is the percentage of the market that a given company owns.
Market growth – This is the rate by which the TAM is growing. It is typically calculated on an annual basis and expressed as compound annual growth rate (CAGR, pronounced “ka-grr”).

Market sizing graph – composite TAM, SAM, SOM, and CAGR

You can obtain many of these numbers from analysts who follow your industry or product. If you are selling something new, you may need to extrapolate or combine research to create an approximation, or “comp,” of your market.

A bit of advice to those of you who create marketing plans: Never walk into the boardroom with only the TAM. From personal experience, I can tell you this is one of the fastest ways to get thrown out of said boardroom. You need to understand the market dynamics—what your competitors are doing, price pressures, the strength of your brand—better than that. Also, never say the following: “This market is so big; if we captured only one percent of it, we’d all be rich.” I know more than one venture capitalist who stops listening to your pitch at that point. No one goes into business to get a 1 percent share, and presenting this argument suggests that you don’t have a very sound strategy.

An accurate knowledge of market size is critical to understanding the dynamics of a market—current or new—and assessing whether there is room for growth. Good markets are typically large and have a gap between the TAM and the SAM. This gap represents sales opportunity for your business. Opportunity also arises when the vendor with the largest SOM is vulnerable and your company feels it can take away market share based on an advantage in your product, price, or distribution. Another strategy for stealing market share is aggressive promotion. One of the best examples of this strategy is the market share gained by online insurance companies such as GEICO and Progressive. With essentially the same product, offered for a bit less via direct sales as opposed to agents, aggressive promotion via television advertising enabled these companies to dramatically increase their market share. As of 2011, GEICO is the third largest auto insurance provider in the United States, and is growing at 7 percent, while the CAGR for the overall auto insurance market is only 1 percent. GEICO is stealing market share.

The best way to size markets is to perform both a top-down and a bottom-up analysis. Find analyst reports that provide the TAM, growth rate, and market share, if they are available. Then, balance that top-down approach with your own bottom-up calculations based on your price, manufacturing capacity, and sales reach.

References

International Data Corporation. “Worldwide Smartphone 2012–2016 Forecast and Analysis,” March 2012.

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