Industry marketing: best practices for a messaging matrix

In my last blog post I shared how to create the most important element for industry-specific messaging for your product – a use case framework.  Once you have developed this foundational framework, here are the key elements you need to pull together to complete the industry specific message for your product

1. Landscape (segments you are targeting within the industry:  For example, in Financial Services it may be Retail & Commercial Banks; Asset Management firms; Investment Banks, Property and Casualty Insurance Companies etc.; subsegments of Banking segment by size such as National Banks, Regional Banks, Credit Unions etc., number of target businesses in each segment/sub segment, names of some of the accounts in each subsegment – either your customers or targets etc.
2. Key industry trends (overall trends as it relates to your solution area): These may be broken out by sub-segments if they are very distinct) Refer to articles in respected industry publications (such as American Banker in financial services) or consulting publications (such as McKinsey insights or Accenture Insights) to support the trends listed.
3. Key personas you are targeting. For example, one of the personas I may be targeted is Head of digital at a Bank. They should be the same personas from your use case framework.
4. Key use cases for each of these personas.  Use the framework that I shared in my previous post, so the use cases align well with the trends from step 2.
5. Key challenges that key personas face today in achieving the goals in use cases (they may be process or system related) and external data supporting these challenges.  For example, if the use case is delivering seamless digital experiences for the ‘head of Digital’ persona, the challenge may be that the data in the Bank’s legacy operational systems sits in product silos, making it difficult to provide a 360 view of all their accounts in the digital portal, along with relevant offers
6. How does your solution address these key challenges with key customer proof points
7. Key competitors (by segments, if needed)
8. Your strengths and weaknesses against these competitors
9. Recent wins against these competitors in the segments and why?

Think of industry guide structure as follows

Segment 1

• Sub Segment A
  • Trends
  • Personas
    • Persona 1
    • Persona 2
    • Persona …
• Sub Segment B
  • Trends
  • Personas
    • Persona 4
    • Persona…
• Sub Segment C

For Segment 1, Sub Segment A,

Persona 1

• Use case 1
  • Challenge A
  • How your solution addresses challenge A and customer proof point
  • Challenge B
  • How your solution addresses challenge B and customer proof point
  • Challenge C
  • How your solution addresses challenge C and customer proof point
• Use Case 2
  • Challenge D
  • How your solution addresses challenge D  and customer proof point
  • Challenge E
  • How your solution addresses challenge E and customer proof point
  • Challenge F
  • How your solution addresses challenge F and customer proof point
• Use case X  etc.

Persona 2

• Use case 1
  • Challenge G
  • How your solution addresses challenge G and customer proof point
  • Challenge H
  • How your solution addresses challenge H and customer proof point
  • Challenge I
  • How your solution addresses challenge I and customer proof point
• Use Case 2
  • Challenge J
  • How your solution addresses challenge J and customer proof point
  • Challenge K
  • How your solution addresses challenge K and customer proof point
  • Challenge L
  • How your solution addresses challenge L and customer proof point
• Use case Y etc.
• Competitors
• SWOT Analysis
• Recent Wins and Losses and why?

These industry messaging guides are meant to be living and breathing documents. They evolve as you win more customers or bring new product capabilities to markets or even learn more from your sales cycles – since either of them may add some new and interesting use cases, which give you another way to engage your prospects.  These industry messaging guides not only drive your customer facing decks, sales enablement decks, marketing collateral, campaign content, sales playbooks, website content etc., but more important, they also ensure that your message is consistent across all of them.

I have used this framework to assist many clients (in a wide array of solution areas) to develop their industry marketing guides and help their product marketing evolve their GTM from horizontal to include an industry-specific orientation. Please message me on LinkedIn if you have any questions.