Lesson 11 driving better messaging. So now that you have your message box, what can you do with it? What do you do with these messages? The ingredients for drafting your product story include the following inputs, persona, positioning statement, competitive landscape, and customer journey. Once the message box story is drafted and agreed to the story can be communicated in a variety of formats, including a message map, like what we saw earlier from aspect embryo. The message box can then be easily turned into the official elevator pitch.

You're at a cocktail party and someone asks you about your company or your new product. What do you say? Well, you share your elevator pitch, which is a refined version of your message box. And of course the elements of your message box should be replayed with consistency throughout your marketing landscape. Let's take a look at this simple summary graphic of Marketing vehicles and where they typically fit. At the top of the graphic.

Notice the four primary communication stages awareness preference decision repeat business. You'll notice that we've seen these words before when we were talking about messaging hierarchy. The next level down overlays traditional marketing, communications objectives, and corresponding programs. These can be simplified to fit into two camps, lead generation, and nurturing. For simplification, let's assume that lead generation programs are geared to prospects who don't get nervous, and we don't know who they are. In contrast, nurturing programs are aimed at people who already know us.

They're in our database and may also be our current customers. We'd like to sell more products and services to them. The black boxes include a few typical marketing vehicles that tend to play best for each of the four stages shown here. In other words, if your marketing objective is to create awareness with brand new prospects, you might consider using banner and print ads, signage and pay per click advertising. At the other end of the spectrum, if you want to communicate to people who already know you and are in your database, you might consider an E newsletter client appreciation events and other nurturing promotions. But the key question for us now is what messaging would work best in each of these stages?

Well, let's take a look. If your objective is awareness, try playing the engagement message. Remember, the engagement message is about the customer and their problems or opportunities. When trying to break into a new market or when trying to capture attention and recognition of your services. You first need to show that you understand your target buyers, you need to earn the right to sell to them. Otherwise, all your messaging will just be noise.

Use the engagement message to start dialogue, capture their interest. This is your hook. So if your CEO is presenting at a major conference, don't have him speak about your great products or services. Instead have him speak about the problems his customers face. That's true leadership. And it's a great engagement message tactic.

When aiming to influence your target audience to prefer your products or services over competing brands, you need to establish credibility for yourself, and you need to help your target audience build knowledge, understanding and belief in your claims. This starts with your solution criteria message we've already established we understand the customers problem. Now we need to show them that we know the best way to solve that problem. This is where you can play your solution criteria checklist. Both your engagement message and your solution criteria message are very important in any lead generation programs. I want to make special point of this Because many companies ignore these messages, they jump straight to feature focused messaging, which does not work very well, especially if you have a complex or lengthy sales cycle.

The messaging in your data sheets and product webpages should be laced with your product reinforcement messages. Product reinforcement messages tend to be very well represented in high tech companies. These are feature based messages and product use case messages. They are a very important part of your messaging diet. However, no volume of product reinforcement message can make up for the lack of an engagement or solution criteria messaging. These messages play best when the engagement and solution criteria messages have been played first.

Your value based messages will play best when the prospect is ready to buy your product or service. These are the messages you play to tell them how their life will be better than Before based on purchasing your product or service, if you play the value message too early, your target audience won't care, they won't understand the problem you're trying to solve, it will just be noise. But if you wait to play these testimonials, evidence and proof points until your audience is ready to hear them, your messaging and marketing ROI will be much more effective. At the beginning of this course, I asked you to pull six examples of your marketing materials. Go back and take another look at these. How can you use your completed message box to improve your messaging in these six marketing vehicles?

Here's a clue. The most effective marketing materials make use of the following message box components. Take another look at your examples. What improvements to your messaging might you now make based on what you've learned in this course.