Message Maps Made Easy

There are a million platitudes about messaging in advertising and marketing. Show don’t tell and the truth told well certainly have their worth, but for the more right-brained of us, they are simply too vague — if not clichéd or even smug. Though good advertising is often clever, good messaging is more than cleverness. It’s an understanding of your customers’ aspirations, obligations, and pain points refracted through the prism of what your product provides. 

At Content Workshop, we’ve worked with dozens of clients to develop this core messaging infrastructure and hierarchy and organize it in one of our most useful tools: the message map. 

This blog will share some of that content strategy secret sauce with you.

What is a message map?

For each persona, our message map captures five elements:

1. A brief profile of the persona that relates their responsibilities, priorities, and objectives. 
2. The particular obstacles and pain points they experience in achieving those objectives.
3. Features of your offering that speak to each pain point.
4. The outcomes when you “treat” the pain point with your product’s corresponding feature.
5. Why those outcomes are beneficial to the customer. 

You end up with somewhat of a journey, a transition from life or work before your product to after its adoption. 

Step 1: Know your customers

To begin, you need a picture of what their daily life is like. You need to know what they’re responsible for, how they will identify or quantify success, and to whom or what they are accountable. 

Big picture: What do they care about? 

For example, we have a deep bench of cybersecurity clients who tend to have a triad of stakeholder types: technicians, managers, and leaders. 

• Technicians live in the day-to-day trenches fighting cyber threats. They are overwhelmed with alerts and tools to the extent that they are essentially forced to tread water each and every day. 
• Managers feel the pain of technicians and are accountable for departmental metrics. They are the “throat to choke” if a cyber incident results in a substantial business impact, like a customer-facing app being knocked offline.
• Leaders are typically divorced from the daily work of cybersecurity. They care about cost, efficiency, business risk, and big-picture strategy.

Granted, I’m simplifying this a bit for the sake of the message mapping exercise, but you can tell that these stakeholders all speak different languages. Technicians don’t focus on cost or the bigger picture of the business. They want to make their work lives easier so they can prioritize more immediately pressing tasks that actually matter. Leaders, meanwhile, rarely have any idea what the technicians’ lives are like or what it would take to improve security. They just care that they don’t get ransomware-d, sued or fined because of a cyber incident, or publicly embarrassed. 

Point being, if you talk to leaders about securing S2 buckets or NextGen firewalls with over 400M concurrent Layer 7 sessions, their eyes will glaze over like yours probably are right now. If you talk to managers about “driving a culture of risk-aware decision making” or “compliance-driven response frameworks,” they will politely ask if they can please get back to work. 

These stakeholders all play a part in the buying process. Someone needs the purchase, someone else vets the purchase, and someone else approves the purchase. Not everything will matter to everyone, but you can find ways to convey the needs of the technician to a leader in ways the leader understands. You can also find common denominators of need that are relevant to all stakeholders. E.g., nobody wants a data breach. 

My point is: understand what this person is ultimately trying to do. Save money? Save time? Everyone is trying to reduce some sort of friction. This phase of the message map should relate what that friction is in basic terms. The nature of various forms of friction will be the fault lines along which your personas will fall. 

Step 2: Know their problems and your solutions

This is where the message map gets more granular. Now that you understand each persona’s objectives and priorities, identify the obstacles that stand in their way. What parts of their work are they trying to make easier? 

These pain points constitute the next column of your message map. Let’s use a more relatable example. 

An early client of ours sells a management platform for homeowners associations that makes it easy to collect dues, communicate updates to homeowners, etc. One persona of theirs is a Millennial-aged adult who’s been nominated as their HOA’s treasurer, often against their will. The following are some of this persona’s pain points: 

• Older homeowners prefer paying dues by check, which is a pain to physically collect and deposit at the bank. 
• HOA dues are easy to forget, so the Treasurer (our persona) has to catch the delinquent homeowner at their house and collect their dues. 
• Even people who pay digitally do so in a million different ways – Zelle, Venmo, Cashapp, WhatsApp, Facebook transactions, digital wallets, etc. 
• The work of reporting and forecasting the HOA’s income is a whole ‘nother ball of wax that the treasurer may or may not be proficient in. 

Unlike a retired person serving as treasurer, this Millennial-aged treasurer is balancing work and family with their HOA duties. Ergo, he or she wants those duties to take up as little time as possible. Efficiency, convenience, and less stress — these goals power his or her search for our client’s platform. Success means not having to worry about these duties nearly as much. 

OK, so, the next column of your message map will strictly name and describe features of your product that speak to each pain point. Continuing our example from above (respectively):

• The platform allows remote deposit capture, so the homeowner can upload a picture of their check to make a deposit. 
• The platform allows homeowners to automate payments.
• The platform digitizes payments through a single method and format, depositing dues directly into the HOA’s bank account.
• The platform comes loaded with pre-formatted report templates of all kinds and automatically records collections and expenditures.

Pretty simple, right? 

Keep in mind, the main problem your product solves will also be solved by your competitors. Differentiation lies in the details, in how your offering solves the problem better. That said, you must first validate to customers that you can solve the main pain points they’ve come to you for. Once you’ve done that, you can get into features that only you offer. These features often open the customer up to improvements they didn’t even know were possible. 

For example, our client might say something like: “While all HOA platforms help digitize payments, our HOA platform makes it super easy to register new homeowners when they buy a property from a previous homeowner. It can be set up in just a few minutes. It comes with live support staff that you can call, email, or text anytime. “

These features may be farther down the list of the prospect’s purview, but they can make the difference. You just have to validate the big concerns first. 

Step 3: Bring it home

Not to get too right-brained about it, but you could think of this process as an equation: pain point + feature = outcome. 

What outcome occurs when you apply each feature to each pain point? This is the next column of your message map. Continuing our HOA platform example:

• The treasurer no longer has to wrangle checks, while homeowners who prefer checks can still pay how they want. 
• With automated payments, more homeowners’ dues are paid in full and on time. 
• A normalized payment method cuts complexity and immediately puts dues where they need to be: the bank. 
• With automated logging and forecasting, the HOA can generally manage its finances better, make improvements, and create stability.

Just like features themselves do not communicate outcomes, outcomes themselves do not communicate the benefit. That is, how is this outcome good for the persona? How is their life better? This is the next column of your message map. 

• The treasurer doesn’t have to spend time chasing checks and running to the bank. 
• The job of treasurer is far less work for the persona, so they can enjoy more downtime.  
• The job is done better because the cash flow of the HOA is steadier. 
• Even without accounting knowledge, the treasurer can look good to the board and contribute to his/her community. 

And there you have it, a five-column message map all your own. 

Footnotes

Talk directly to customers if possible, or at least to people in your company who deal with customers directly (sales and customer success).
In their customer conversations, what issues tend to be at the forefront of the customers’ minds? What was the triggering event that caused them to even start seeking out your product? For salespeople, what part of the conversation seals the deal, or breaks it? 

Remember, message mapping is not in and of itself messaging. 

The message map is the underlying logic that messaging is built upon. Once you understand the dynamics of the personas, your messaging will illustrate, encapsulate, tweak, twist, and clever-ize these dynamics into powerful marketing content. 

Don’t get caught up in irrelevant minutiae.
My personal hell is the Starbucks vs. Dunkin’, Target vs. Walmart version of persona exercises. It does not matter that one persona drives a Subaru and the other drives a Ford F-150. This nonsense is usually a proxy for more valuable questions like “What does this persona actually care about?” and “How comfortable is this persona with technology?” and “Does this persona prefer to email or call support?” Ask questions that matter. 

Help us help you

Of course, you could do all this work yourself, but you’re probably very busy! At Content Workshop, we specialize in helping small, overworked marketing teams meet their goals with impactful content. We’ve worked with small, family-owned brands selling everything from stainless steel grills to high-powered race horses. 

On the other hand, we’ve worked with highly technical enterprise clients whose reach spans the globe. At the end of the day, we put our emphasis on people — you, your team, and your customers to make your lives easier and make your goals more achievable.

As our fearless leader, David Ebner, says, “Our friendship is free.” Whether you need a strategic co-pilot or simply an extra set of hands in producing content, we’d love to hear more about you and your marketing objectives. Tell us about yourself here.