Once our buyer personas are established, we can work on what we love to do — messaging and positioning. I've consolidated both messaging and positioning into a single framework to be the central source of truth for all product marketing efforts, from content development to launch and enablement to press releases and announcements.

A single voice of the market and the customer is necessary to build a cohesive and consistent theme for the story arc. And that ownership lies with the PMM to be the steward and advocate for the market and the customer.

When I created this we had a team of about 13 with five products, two solutions, and five industries. We kept the positioning and messaging documentation separate, however this vital information was not being accessed simply because of the volume of documents.

So we decided to have one shared Google document with the positioning and messaging combined in an accessible format.

When you're thinking about positioning and messaging, there are two factors to consider. For positioning, you have to know who it's for. Is it for your decision-maker persona or your influencer persona? You might end up with one positioning statement each.

When thinking about messaging, it's important to understand where in the buyer journey they are. Are they in the awareness, consideration, or decision phase? When you message is just as important as what you message.

Putting together your copy blocks right here in this document is a huge time-saver. You can then share this information easily with other teams within marketing or across the product org.

It's just as important at a small startup as a large Fortune 500 company — knowing how to tell your product's story in 25, 50, or 100 words is very powerful.

We designed these documents for a diverse audience, which meant our team was no longer solely holding onto the information, hence removing some administrative tasks. It also ensured that all of the teams were using the same language when talking about the product.

At first, we ended up creating a 50 page document which, while very long, did have a lot of great information for anybody and everybody from the sales leaders, to onboarding teams, sales enablement teams, and new hires learning to talk about the product. However, we knew we needed to make the information more digestible and making a table of contents was very helpful for that.

Div Manickam

By consolidating messaging and positioning into a single framework, this artifact serves as the central source of truth for all product marketing efforts.

Messaging and Positioning Framework from Div Manickam

Messaging and Positioning Framework

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