Jump in loser, we’re going to the Matrix

Welcome to the Matrix.

The messaging matrix!

Red pill or blue?

(okay, full disclosure, i have never seen the Matrix. it’s on my list of classic movies to catch up on over the summer.)

Getting your messaging right is hard. Getting it narrowed down by persona and baked into your marketing?

Well that can seem flat out overwhelming.

(And you wouldn’t be alone in that mood if that’s you)

I’ve covered the seven marketing foundations over the last several months,

but as i’ve been coaching and teaching lately i’ve found that there’s still a lot of confusion on messaging.

Namely, how to go from customer research → messaging and any other part of your marketing plan (aka the other bricks in your foundations).

I like to call these spots between the foundation bricks as marketing mortar (for lack of a better term, i’ll noodle on it).

Your messaging matrix is the first step in that transition because it takes you from getting to know the customer to being able to talk with them at scale.

This spot right here ⤵️

So, today we’re breaking down

• how to fill in your messaging matrix to make it easy to use that hard-heard customer research

• how to go from messaging matrix to next marketing foundations

A few assumptions as i go through this:

• you’ve already done your customer research

• you can clearly break your interviews into different Personas/Use Cases/Stages in the Buyer Journey (i’ll walk you through what each of these would look like)

→ if you have just one Persona/Use Case and/or you sell straight to the decision maker with purchasing power, then

• you have some modicum of PMF (if you don’t then there’s gonna be a lot of blank spots in your messaging matrix until you have it)

We’re going to walk through each row of this table and i’ll explain how to analyze your customer interviews to fill out the table.

By the end, you’ll have a clear picture of

• what to say to whom

• which product features to emphasize

• what “quick-hit” marketing pieces you might need to stop losing deals (and start closing them)

• and how this Messaging Matrix rolls into the next 4 marketing foundations.

let’s get to it like [insert Matrix Reference here]

Row 1: Pain points

What are the explicit pain points that they’re looking to solve with your product?

This is pretty straightforward. Look for the places where they mention what’s driving them crazy.

Row 2: Underlying problems

Welcome to therapy session! These are often tied to their job goals, not the company goals

These are the “problems behind the problems” of their “tipping point” to go look for a solution.

Do they need their boss to like them? Are they going for the safest option because they’re afraid of taking too big a risk, it going poorly, and losing their job?

Listen for the emotional drivers. They are often just as- or equally as- important as the financial or time stated pain points.

Row 3: Product/Feature Descriptions/Outcomes they want

if you’re doing customer discovery and not showing them the product, then

What features were they describing as must-haves?

How do they envision a product giving them the outcomes they want?

if you’re showing them the product

What are the specific features of your product matter most to them? How are they describing those features and the overall product itself?

What are their top outcomes that they want when using your product?

How and in what ways does your product give them those outcomes?

Remember - you want to write about features in a way that ties them to outcomes, which takes us to…

Row 4: Unique words & phrases

What are the words and phrases that this Target Audience used from the interviews/reviews/sales calls that really stood out or were repeated by multiple people? **Especially quirky or very direct phrases or things (make great copy) while search terms are great for the keywords you need to hit in content and emails.

This is one of my favorites from when i was doing my customer research to update Ignore No More’s positioning this winter. Really paints the visual, doesn’t it?!

Row 5: Biggest objection(s)

Customer interview calls are more contemplative than reflective - you’are askign people to think about what they want.

• Not asking for feedback on what you’ve already built -

So people might be speaking in more general terms of the objections they would broadly have.

You will get to the specific objections on sales calls.

You might need to bait them a bit here, to get objections they don’t want to flat out say. especially if you are dealing with technical buyers (like developers or finance peeps).

Row 6: Objection handling

Here, put how you would respond to their objection in a way that ties back into their pain points and outcomes they want.

ex:

Objection, “That price is too high.”

Response: “okay, how much do you spend on [problem you have]? how many people does that affect? okay, so rough math, that’s $xyz with the way things currently are.

(let them cook).

“What would it mean to [people who have problem the most] if it cost $abc to solve [problem] instead of $xyz?”

Row 7: Stats they need to convert/send up the chain

This is especially important if you are selling to SMB’s or enterprise and dealing with multiple people in the sales process who need different things.

If your end users is the same as your buyer (Prosumer or B2C co’s), then they might just need

• testimonials from other users with their same job title

• a certain star review (4+) in a marketplace they trust (Shopify App Store, Google Play store, etc)

But If your audience SMB/enterprise and you have multiple people in the process, then that might be:

• pre-recorded demo of how the product works from the end user, the manager, and the admin level

• a landing page that calculates how much time the product could save (for the manager fighting for productivity) and how much money that will save the company (for the exec signing off on buying it)

Row 8: Their next steps

What’s the next thing you need this person to do? This is the spot where you go from Marketing → Product or Marketing → Sales.

• if it’s the end user (and the end user is also the purchaser) → It’s probably start a trial/use the product

• If they’re one part in a multi-person buyer journey/sales process, then get the next meeting scheduled with the next stakeholder (with their help).

Tell them what you need next. Like Brandon said last week, you have to lead them to close (Or pay). They won’t (necessarily) do it on their own.

How this Messaging Matrix rolls into the next 4 marketing foundations.

You did it! you filled out the matrix!

Here’s how that affects your other 4 foundations (whether you’ve done them before or are doing them for the first time!).

Branding

A quick glance at this Messaging Matrix will tell you what all your target audiences (or stages of the sales process) have in common across pain points and outcomes they want to see.

Build your brand around those throughlines.

• make sure your positioning reflects that your product fixes those problems

• check your tone of voice for consistency with the way your target audience speaks - if they’re casual and nerdy, you don’t want your copy to sound stiff and legalese

• see if your visuals match the ways they describe your problems (ie: if your target audiences pain points include “bad at tech” you don’t want your brand to be hyper modern and high-tech or it will scare them away)

I literally wrote a whole guide on how to do each of these things!

Website

You need a one-page site/landing page. Hopefully you have that up. If not, then follow these steps and get it up in a week!

If you’re expanding it, start with a landing page for each of your personas.

This often looks like industry or use case pages pages.

If you have a single use case, but have multiple people in the buyer journey/sales process, you can have pages for each of those.

This often looks like “for front-line workers” “for managers” “for executives”.

Each of these will effectively be a duplicated version of your homepage, but the copy, examples, and images are tailored to specifically talk to just one persona instead of multiple.

CRM (Sales database)

You need templates in your CRM for each of your discovery calls (here’s what those look like).

Even better tailor them based on what each ICP wants so you’re ready and prepared for each call without having to remember.

Click “persona 1” discovery call from your templates and have the questions right. there.

And if they need case studies or examples to go up the chain?

Don’t forget to include the links so you can easily copy+paste

Emails

Hopefully you have your base emails setup. If not, here’s the list. start there.

Once you’ve done that, you can setup custom ones (advanced), or at least add in better notes to existing general ones (intermediate).

intermediate

add in a list of possible pain points, noting who would feel them.

”If you’re a [persona] this might look like [pain point]”

”If you’re a [persona], then this might look like [pain point]”

advanced

step 1: add an onboarding survey

”what’s your job role” ”which problem do you most need to solve with [product]?”

That way you can trigger emails based on their responses.

step 2: Create a separate email series for each major persona (follows the same flow, just has different wording to be specific to their needs)

You did it!!

You organized your customer research so you can jump into getting the rest of your marketing on fleek! (does anyone say that anymore?)

We’ll see you and your inbox next week!

Cheers!

Sophia ⚡👩🏽‍💻 & Aelia 🪄🧕🏽

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