All right, so great job, you've created a persona, you've socialized it, you've now got your persona represented on a single sheet of paper that reflects your target market. Now, what do you do with it? That's where Step nine comes in Step nine is about applying it. Because just creating a persona is not good enough. Now you have to actually put it to use, and you can put it to use immediately, because it's going to directly affect your positioning and your messaging. Here's how.

So when you've now got this persona on your slide that you've distributed and shared, you're going to want to share it broadly posted, refer to it, update it, use it every single day. And here's specifically three elements that get derived value immediately from your persona and these form essentially your integrated marketing plan. We've talked about the persona at length about understanding and empathizing with your target. A positioning statement is where you Understand your value and the differentiation you bring to market as compared to the nearest competitive alternative, the messaging or what I call the message box, which is an excellent exercise on helping you communicate the right words to express your value and your relevance to the market. I'm going to show you the template for that in just a second. And then ultimately developing a marketing blueprint to ensure that your focused market strategy can be executed in the right way.

You might think of blueprints as literally a flowchart of activities and offers that unfold to tell your story. Let's look at these one at a time. So we've already spent time looking at the persona. But one thing that I want to pull out very explicitly is that there are clues in the persona exactly to what wording you should use in telling your story and positioning your product. I've circled some of these in red, this was for the globetrotter example, and that some of the words that drop pulled off the page, were very relevant to this particular company. These words ended up getting woven into the positioning and messaging.

So the upshot of this when you develop your persona is to look for these specific words and as many words as you can use that are the same words that consumer uses your persona uses. The tighter the connection you'll have with them you want to play in their words, you want to reflect their words, not your jargon. So what we do next is develop a positioning statement. So let me define for you what a positioning statement is. It's a tool used by marketers to gain internal agreement and clarity around the specific value being offered to a specific target audience segment. This is the cornerstone of an integrated marketing plan, and what a position looks like like is this now, there are many variations of positioning statement.

I've tend to use this one for many years. And it's a seemingly simple fill in the blanks, identifying your one target, or guess what the persona you've just developed. That's line one. Then naming your product or your company is the one category, what type of product is that provides what benefit unlike whatever your nearest competitive differentiator is, I have a separate class on product positioning that I'll refer you to at the end of this course if you're interested. But here's the example of how to fly right this is the cure for jet like I mentioned earlier, with their positioning statement look like and again, I won't go through it in detail on this video. Other than notice how nice and tight it is here, and I'll invite you to download it and compare this with the persona template that you can also download earlier.

Okay, so great. you've developed the positioning statement. But the positioning statement, as I mentioned earlier, it's a tool used for internal alignment. It is not the exact words you use for your press release headline, it is not the exact words you use in your brochure, we need something different, we need to turn the positioning statement into customer ready messaging. And that's what I call the message box. Now, the message box is the best, most fun, quickest tool I have ever used with the team to help develop what your story is.

And this is how you develop your elevator pitch. What are the words you use to tell your story in one minute, one minute or less, and that's what the message box is. Again, I have a separate course specifically about developing your best elevator pitch. But let me summarize what the template is and what it looks like. So you've got an idea here. So this is the The template that I use your offering goes in the center of the box.

It's all aimed at your target persona that you see in the upper right hand corner. And there are four messages that tell your story messages that would engage your target, we hook them. This is the business problem that we've captured in the psychographic part of our persona. That leads to a solution message, which is characteristics that your persona is looking for, regardless of vendor that they choose. There are some specific characteristics or business outcome that they're looking for. We want to show that we understand that that shows up in message two within the message box.

Message three is reinforcement. This is all about how your product or service is the best for addressing the solution criteria that solves the business problem your persona has. And fourth and finally is the value message, which is how their life will be better than before by using your product or service. Here's how the fly write message looks like. And again, I'm not going to go through in detail on this, I will refer you to the message box course if you'd like to have more detail, but you can see I now distill their persona. And I've woven in the positioning.

And now I've created some customer ready messaging that can fit together very easily as you move from box one through four, to tell the story and engage in a relevant and meaningful dialogue with your target persona. This, by the way, is great to use to distill down for an elevator pitch for your sales team. And assume you go to a cocktail party and somebody says, Hey, you know, Mike, you just released the fly, right product. What's that all about? This one slide, the message box will help you answer that question quickly and concisely. And not only that, everybody in your organization will be able to sing off the same song sheet.

Tell the story in a consistent framework. Lastly, so we've got our messaging. But then how does the persona help us execute our go to market plan? Well, for that we need a blueprint. And in thinking about the flowchart of activities and offers, I tend to think of six questions that will help us determine what our marketing blueprint should be. And these are related here, who is the target persona?

Well, guess what, we just develop that? How do they want to be communicated with, ah, kids are included in our persona for that? What information are they looking for? And what offers do they want and expect from us? Again, they'll be hints from your persona that will help you answer that question. After they respond to the first activity and offer what happens next.

And what happens after that? What happens if they don't respond? And how will our actions and offers help align them to our solution? If we can think about these six questions, but before we do Develop a go to market plan will actually develop more meaningful tactics, offers and messaging that will engage them in the right most productive way. Case in point, or actually before I get to that, so here again, his definition of a blueprint blueprint is literally a flowchart of marketing activities and offers that will help accelerate prospects through your buying cycle. This by the way, I wrote about in length in my book marketing campaign development, there are actually seven different types of marketing programs.

And each type has a unique program, or blueprints outline, which I talked about in detail, but this just gives you a flavor of what blueprints are and how they work that can actually drive better marketing outcomes for you. By the way, companies that tend to follow a blueprint model have been able to quadruple the number of qualified leads for each and every program that they run. So that's getting four times As many qualified leads because they've thought through the blueprint methodology, rather than hoping things kind of work out on their own. So here's a case in point. This was a company that we've been working with for a number of years who adopted the marketing campaign development blueprint process. And these are examples of what their blueprints look like.

What they did was they printed out these blueprints on big flip charts, and posted them on the executive row, because their marketing team was constantly bombarded by salespeople saying, hey, marketers, what the hell are you doing for me today? Well, rather than being defensive, they decided to actually post their blueprints up on the wall. And so when sales came by, they said, Ah, let me let me show you exactly where we are today. And these blueprints, although it's hard to make out here in color coded fashion, walk them through awareness to interest to preference to decision and each color code. refers to different activities and offers and messaging components that play to their personas, ideal strengths and expectations. And when they did this, the relationship between sales and marketing immediately changed.

It was much more of a partnership. Interactive model marketing was no longer the black box. It could more easily be explained how marketing was helping sales at any given time. And the best part was the CEO walking down the hallway one day pulled my senior director of marketing aside and looked at these blueprints and said, Wow, this feels like real enterprise marketing. And again, boy, the boost to the morale in the marketing team was huge. This makes a huge difference.

So again, applying your persona, to the positioning of your products, the messaging, the customer related messages you use, and the storyboard, if you will, that marketing blueprint of how you're going to tell your story over time using what tactics and offer. They are all tied together and they're all formed on the foundation of your person.