Use Case framework: The most important step in creating industry messaging

As you create your industry specific messages for your horizontal product, one of the first activities you need to undertake is to develop a use case framework for the target industries.  Once you have defined the use cases, creating the rest of industry messaging becomes easier.  Following is the three-step process I have used to create the use case framework in my client engagements.

Step 1: Start with key business personas in each industry you sell to. Identify key business objectives for these personas, as well as key business drivers (related to your solution) that they need to incorporate into their business plans. These are typically things that keeps them awake at night. For example, if you sell a Digital Experience solution and your persona is head of marketing in a financial services company, the key business objectives for that persona can be:

1. enable omni channel experience for customers
2. enable personalized marketing to customers
3. etc.

Then repeat the process for other target personas. At the end of this process, you end up with a combined list of key business objectives for your target personas.  It is important that the list should only incorporate those key business objectives that your solution can address.  Talk to your customers and industry analysts, and complement it with primary research.  Goal is to end up with a list of 10 to 15 key business objectives for each of your target personas. 

Step 2: Once you have these 10 to 15 key business objectives identified, place them in three buckets – objectives that drive growth, objectives that reduce costs and objectives that reduce risk. Keep refining the list until every item in the list is mutually exclusive.  Goal is to end up ideally a 3X3 matrix – three business objectives in each category (growth, cost, and compliance).  For products that have a smaller footprint, you may end up with 1 to 2 objectives in three (or fewer) categories.

Step 3: Next step is to identify key use cases for your product for each of the business objectives you identified in step 2.   Ideally, the goal is to identify at least 2 to 3 use cases for each of the nine objectives.  Talk to your customers, your sales reps, your customer success managers, your services team, and industry analysts about use cases for your product. This should give you a good head start.   Complement this information with primary research – any RFIs/RFPs you can get from your sales teams, presentations given by customers (your and your competitor’s customers) at industry conferences, customer success stories from your competitors, customer webinars on your competitor’s websites, analyst reports and industry research (such as thought leadership from top consulting firms). At the end of this exercise, you will end up with 3X3 of business objectives, with 2 to 4 detailed use cases (how your solution addresses these objectives) under each.

For example, if you are selling a Digital Experience solution and creating a use case matrix for manufacturing industry and one of the growth objectives is targeted personalized marketing, the use cases associated with it can be:

1. Ability to support experiences in multiple channels including website, mobile, marketplace, supplier portals and social
2. Enable reuse of content across these channels, so you are not creating separate content for each channel
3. Scale your content development process, so you can drive a large volume of programs and have enough content to support – both the large volume of campaigns and personalized content in each of the campaigns
4. Ensure your Digital Experience platform allows you to easily manage personalization at scale across all your channels.    

If your product has a smaller footprint, the number of use cases will be smaller. Ensure that you use industry language/terms to describe these use cases.

Step 4: This is the start of your message matrix for your target vertical.   You may need to validate this use case framework internally and externally before you use it for driving your industry-specific content.  Use case framework is the most important element of your message matrix, so take your time defining and validating it. Once you have constructed this use case framework, you need to place this into broader industry messaging matrix, which I will describe in the next blog post.  If you have any questions, please message me on  https://www.linkedin.com/in/applicationsmarketing/