Before you embark on a major marketing campaign or content creation project – like a new website – it helps to know what you want to say, and to whom. That's where messaging, positioning and personas come in.
If you find it difficult to say what you do clearly, or to picture your customer, this is for you.
Typically, a client will ask us to run a messaging, positioning or persona workshop when there’s a big content project on the horizon, or when something significant in the business has changed. (For companies that often grow by acquisition, or who have many services under one brand, it can become quite a regular occurrence.)
We’ll work with a particular deliverable in mind. It could be new website, a persona slide-deck, or a manifesto-style ebook. Most often, though, we produce a matrix of multi-purpose copy, aligning key message and proof points to your various audiences and contexts. You can use this as the basis of web pages, email campaigns, or brochure copy.
Crucially, it can also work well for personal emails, social media messages, and presentation decks from your sales team – helping your sales and marketing to converge around a single, coherent approach.
And this alignment begins during the workshop process itself, with marketing, sales, leadership and product experts discussing a common set of questions. In truth, clients say the session is as valuable as the copy it produces: “why haven’t we ever had this conversation before?”
Hosted by a Radix director, or a writer with in-depth knowledge of your brand, the workshop usually takes four to five hours. Typically, we’ll prepare by analysing your competitors, and having a few quick conversations with some of your customers.
During the workshop, we define who your customers are, what their needs and aspirations are, and what kind of terminology they respond to. Then we look at what you can offer them, what makes you different, and how you can “prove” what you tell them.
You’ll find more detail about who you should invite, and how the session works, in Fiona’s comprehensive blog post on messaging workshops. (We also recorded a podcast on the subject.)
It might be you’re only really interested in the part where we clarify your audience. Our persona workshop is typically a bit faster; it takes 2-4 hours, depending on the size and breadth of your audience.
During the session, we talk about your audiences in detail: their job titles, roles and responsibilities, their professional ambitions and challenges, and their role in the buying decision (e.g. decision-maker, influencer). We’ll look at what will make them likely to consider investing in your product / service, what objections they might have, and what obstacles might stand in the way of their buying from you.
We’ll tailor the outputs of your session, depending on what you’ll find most useful. Often this might include:
Essentially, a table in Word, or a series of PowerPoint slides that contains:
You can use the completed messages as “copy blocks” wherever you need them: in marketing materials, in sales presentations, on social media, as well as on your website. This will not only save time, but will also ensure that you communicate consistently about your business and/or products.
B2B persona deck
A PowerPoint deck, typically breaking down 3-5 key audience personas. (We’ve seen examples with many more, but this seems incredibly difficult to use, and surely defeats the object.) It’ll include detail like:
And we’ll present our findings back to you in a 30-minute call, or meeting segment.
While these are the most popular outputs, the beauty is you can have whatever you need.
Because our workshops are so bespoke to your needs, the easiest thing is to get in touch and discuss your situation. We can usually design something to fit.
Drop us a line at info@radix-communications.com, or call +44 (0)1326 373592.
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