Software + Services Marketing Best Practices

Key Success Factor: Messaging & positioning

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Key Success Factors: Messaging & Positioning (PDF)

Messaging & Positioning

Positioning is the set of specific activities performed by a firm both internally and externally in order to fit a product or service into a market niche. Messaging is the means used to communicate this positioning consistently to the intended market audience.

Key Questions to Think About

Who really IS the customer?
Have you spoken with real customers directly, and how well do you understand them? Have you crafted personas to help you get insider your customers' heads - to understand and assess their motivations and behaviors?
Are there influencers in the buying process you have not considered?
Are you positioning your offers in tailored ways to assure they reflect relevancy to your customers' lives and work styles?
Are you communicating at each touch point using language that appeals to the real customer involved at that point in the purchase process?

The strongest positioning incorporates the creation of a product/service offering - not just the messaging - that addresses the well-understood needs of a specific market segment or segments; it incorporates use of personas and an understanding of customer motivations, and "pain points". It is unfortunately common for firms to shortcut both ends of this process by a) failing to undertake sufficient effort to understand their target market segment sufficiently so as to find areas for competitive differentiation, and b) by consequently having difficulties creating truly innovative product solutions that incorporate customer understandings and can provide a basis for believable differentiated messaging that speaks to the customer's situation. The outcome? Incremental changes to products - and product messaging - based upon sales force feedback driven largely by feature catch-up.

Getting Messaging and Positioning done well means using Persona-Defined Messaging.

What it means

Identify your best candidate buyers and important influencers via their similarity to a handful of "personas". Offerings - this includes things like pricing and packaging - and demand generation activities are then aligned to correlate to well understood persona behavior patterns.

Why it's important

Marketing campaigns might well educate and persuade someone into becoming a buyer, but the preferred and most effective approach is to identify and specifically target those buyers who are already the most ready and willing to buy - now.

Applications of the Best Practice

Instead of placing emphasis on a product alone, such as "Hosted Exchange" or "SharePoint", the most successful partners position themselves with benefit-focused messaging based on a targeted segment's understood needs, motivations, and 'pain-points'. Benefit messaging is best articulated when it describes the fundamental usage aspects of the solution. Examples are "Anywhere Access" (remote access to calendar, email, contacts, etc.), "Get More Done" (collaboration, document sharing, etc.), and "Peace of Mind" (secure hosted environment, strong SLAs, etc.). Each of these examples reveals a best practice regarding messaging; make it easy to read, quick to digest and understand, and have meaning that ideally invokes emotions that either draws the customer toward your solution or away from an alternative.

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