How to Create a Messaging Framework [With Template]

In my last blog post, we talked about positioning, its building blocks, and how it's different than messaging. Let’s switch gears and talk about how to build messaging that is relevant to the people you're trying to reach, differentiated from how competitors talk, and creates clarity and intent as you look to define and own your category.

Those are the four most important outcomes of messaging, by the way. Messaging should:

Be Relevant: is it germane to your target audience's day job and the things that keep them up at night?
Be Differentiated: does it sound different from how competitors talk, or does it look the same and make unsubstantiated first/only/best claims that make prospects skeptical?
Create Clarity: is it easy for your target audience to understand why they should care?
Drive Intent: is it compelling to prospects and does it make them actually want to buy and use your stuff?

Your messaging should make the problems you solve, the value you provide, and how you're different crystal clear. You want prospects to react to your messaging by saying "Oh yeah, I get it" (create clarity), and "Wow, I need that" (drive intent).

Now, there are literally hundreds (maybe thousands?) of messaging frameworks out there. One common approach is a feature-benefit matrix. Another approach I've seen a lot of marketers use is a "message house" that looks something like this:

From my experience, messaging frameworks like these may look cool on a PowerPoint slide, but aren't all that useful. And they often start collecting dust once they're rolled out to marketing and sales teams. Why?

They fail the reusability test. A single "umbrella statement" followed by a set of pithy supporting messages doesn't teach your sales team how to confidently talk about your product. It doesn't give your marketing team enough substance to draft off of your expertise as they build downstream content.
Customers don't live in our world; we live in theirs. Feature-Benefit matrices create bad habits by encouraging PMMs to lead with what their product does vs. what customers care about.

I've skinned my knees plenty of times rolling out messaging that looks like this, only to watch it go unused, not resonate with customers, or require tons of bespoke content creation because my messaging source of truth sucked.

Here are some guiding principles that I require my teams to put to practice as we create messaging, and an example messaging framework template that I've had the most success using.

Guiding Principles

Take an outside-In approach

I’m a big believer that product marketers need to take an outside-in approach to developing messaging, not the other way around. That means leading with your customers’ problems, their needs, and using that as framing for how you describe the promised land and your solution.

Too many marketers jump to the features too fast, and too many sales pitch decks lead with the obligatory autobiography and "About Us" slides. Buyers care a lot less about your company vitals than they do about the problem they’re experiencing and whether you have a vision to help them solve it. You increase your odds of establishing credibility and getting prospects to buy in to your vision for solving it if you demonstrate empathy and show that you understand their world.

Use words your customers use

When it comes to messaging, I have a zero jargon/fluff policy with my teams. I'm a fan of conversational tone and writing messaging exactly like you'd say it out loud in a customer conversation.

You should use actual words and terminology your customers use in the messaging you create and not make stuff up, unless you're intentionally trying to brand a new term, phrase or category. The messaging you write should sound like something you’d actually say out loud in front of a customer, and sound like something a customer might say if they were having a conversation with you.

I'm also generally not a fan of initialisms, acronyms or jargon-ey terms that aren't broadly understood by "the uninitiated". You only get so many at-bats with coined terms before you confuse customers, so when in doubt, use conversational tone and default to approachable language that creates clarity for the masses.

Come in at the right altitude

Your messaging needs to strike the balance between being technically credible for the prospective customers you are trying to reach, while simplified enough for those customers, your sales team, and your marketing team to "get it".

Too many times, I see messaging get way too in the weeds on "the what" and "the how", with no synthesis on "the why" – specifically why customers should care and the value to them.

Other times, I see product marketers over-rotate in the opposite direction, with messaging that becomes too reductive and over-simplified to the point that it loses credibility with prospects. From my experience, this is usually either due to lack of domain expertise from the PMM, or due to feedback from senior execs or other reviewers who don't know the domain as well, causing the message to get watered down.

The goal of messaging shouldn't be to to "explain it like you're talking to a 5-year old" – unless you're writing messaging for a toy manufacturer or a children's TV program. A 5-year old is not the target audience for your messaging – your prospect is. Write it for the person you're trying to reach.

It's OK for messaging to be technical if you're selling technical products to technical buyers. That doesn't mean you shouldn't synthesize "the why" – it means that translation should come in at a lower altitude than platitudes like "so you can increase revenue", "grow your business", or "cut costs". For example, imagine you're selling tooling to software developers that helps them build and ship code faster with less re-work. Rather than framing the "noble why" as "so you can increase revenue and grow your business", wouldn't a more specific and compelling way to get at the value be "so you can spend more time building and shipping cool stuff and less time firefighting and sitting in war rooms."?

Be concise, but not at the expense of clarity

In my career, I’ve written and seen a lot of bad messaging frameworks which try to distill a POV into single phrases and message houses like I described earlier. That may make it easy to read, but it’s not going to achieve the goal you want. The whole point of a messaging framework is to scale your expertise. You want to take what’s in your head as a product marketer, and enable your peers across marketing or in sales to tell the story the way you would tell it.

When your messaging framework becomes too minimalistic, or over-rotates toward short phrases that look like ad copy, the narrative gets lost and you increase the likelihood that sales and marketing folks are going to off-road when they start pitching to customers or creating downstream content.

When done right, the content in a messaging framework gets copy/pasted liberally and becomes foundational for your sales messaging, your web copy, your thought leadership assets, and your press releases. Consistency is important. And a well-written messaging framework becomes a scale enabler for downstream content.

With these principles in mind, let's talk about the messaging framework template itself.

Messaging Framework Template

I'm going to share the 9 main things I’ve found are most important to have in a good messaging framework.

It starts with defining your target audience, both the ideal customer profile and the buyer and user personas. By ideal customer profile, what are the characteristics of companies and teams that make a good fit for your product? For your personas, what responsibilities do they have, what do they care about, how do they measure success, and how can you reach them?

Next, you want to describe the market context and problem. Name a big change in the world, and identify the problem it causes. Remember, the company that frames the problem the best is often the company that wins.

Then, describe the effect of the problem. What happens if customers don’t solve it, and why is it important to solve now? This is where you start to generate intent in your buyers.

Next, de-position the status quo by showing why traditional approaches to solving the problem fall short. I've spent a good chunk of my career working either at startups trying to create new categories, or for market challengers trying to ascend to leadership positions in an existing category by executing a reframe. So this is one of the most important sections of the messaging framework. If you can't unsettle your prospect by showing them why a new way is needed, it will be hard to convince them to change.

Next, describe the need. How do we describe the promised land and the ideal state in a way that directly addresses that market problem?

At this point, you shouldn't have talked about your company or your products at all. The sections above are all about your customer.

But now's the point where it's appropriate to shift gears and introduce your product as the solution to the need – as the paved road to the promised land.

You then want to connect your solution with the benefits of solving the problem, and clarify the use cases or scenarios/workflows in which a customer would use your product to solve the problem. I’ve created messaging frameworks without a dedicated section for use cases (or jobs to be done), and more often than not, found it useful to provide context on how customers would use your product to solve the problem.

Next, you want to lay out what differentiates you from alternatives and why customers should choose your product.

Lastly, bring in customer examples and proof points to validate your approach.

Here's the messaging framework template summed up:

Target Audience	What is your ideal customer profile? Who are the buyer and user personas?
Market Context & Problem	What is the market context (i.e. name a big change)? What problem do these buyers and users face?
Effect	What is the impact of this problem? Why is it important to solve now?
De-position the Status Quo	What are the alternatives, and why does the status quo or traditional approaches to solving the problem fall short?
Need	What is ideal state, or promised land?
Our Solution	How do we describe our product as the solution to this problem?
Benefits	What is the value of solving this problem? What are the benefits of our approach?
Use Cases	In what scenarios or workflows would customers use our solution?
Differentiation	How are we unique? Why should buyers and users choose our solution vs. alternatives?
Validation	What are proof points that validate our approach?

And here’s an example of how this comes together in a blank template. This format helps ensure the messaging you create establishes credibility and resonates with customers.

Takeaways

A good template won't mask over bad messaging. But the right template can lead to more compelling, polished messaging, for three reasons:

Customer-centricity - by starting with your customer's world and their problems, the messaging framework template above forces PMMs to get out of the comfort zone of talking about product features and encourages outside-in thinking.
Efficiency - as your team grows and you have multiple product marketers for different products, buyers or use cases, it's more efficient to have everyone using the same format for messaging. Templates help PMMs know what's expected of them as they're creating messaging, and focus their creativity and effort on the actual words they write, not re-inventing the format in which they're written.
Consistency - particularly as you scale out a team and have stakeholders across other groups relying on messaging from many different PMMs, it's helpful to be able to expect a consistent set of deliverables in a consistent format from each product marketer. This enables stakeholders in sales, marketing, enablement and customer success teams to work faster, and creates consistency for those teams when you have several go-to-market initiatives in flight.