Summit 2018 Preview: Advanced Messaging Techniques
- In the four years since the SiriusDecisions Messaging Nautilus™ was launched, B2B organizations have used this groundbreaking model to transform their messaging strategy
- Rachel Young’s Summit presentation will provide vital information on the next steps after Messaging Nautilus adoption
- Portfolio marketers, content strategists and demand creation marketers can learn how to optimize, activate and amplify audience-centric messaging
What happens after your organization adopts the SiriusDecisions Messaging Nautilus™? As with many initiatives, creating audience-centric value propositions and messaging that align to buying stages requires regular refinement and advancement. Even with the messaging blueprint from the Messaging Nautilus in place, there’s always room for improvement – and many organizations with audience-centric messaging now want to do more.
During her session “Advanced Messaging Techniques” at this year’s SiriusDecisions Summit in Las Vegas, Rachel Young will offer new research-backed advice on taking your messaging to the next level. She recently answered a few questions about this must-attend session:
How did you come up with the content for this session? What were you seeing in the market?
The Messaging Nautilus is an amazing innovation that we launched four years ago. Since then, we have seen so much adoption among our clients through advisory and workshops. What I’m finding now is that clients that have adopted the Messaging Nautilus now need some next-level techniques. They’re asking, “What else can we do to amplify our messaging and make it work well for us?”
That’s the impetus for this session; it’s for folks who have adopted the Messaging Nautilus but it’s also designed to inspire those that have not adopted it all. It’s a chance to continue to put this research out there and let them know that it’s the best way to develop messaging.
This session is technically in the Optimize phase, but we are positioning it as a session for everyone. Messaging is an evergreen topic; we can all always improve our messaging.
What aspects of creating audience-centric messaging are especially important or frequently lacking among B2B organizations?
A major output of audience-centric messaging is an audience-centric value proposition. That’s not “The product does xyz” – which is a product description. For example, a product’s value prop for an IT leader needs to explain how the product meets the IT leader’s needs.
A second major output is narrative elements – messaging that aligns to buyer’s journey phases. This output is so critical because if you don’t have messaging built around buyer’s journey phases, you can’t pull the audience through the journey. Messaging must carry through the education, solution and selection phases.
The advanced techniques I’ll discuss in this session introduce additional strategies. For example, I’ll show you how to create messaging for account-based marketing (ABM), which is all the rage right now, and how to make messaging more actionable with buying triggers.
Which roles should attend this session?
This session is for all marketing functions – portfolio marketing, demand creation, ABM teams, content strategists. I’ll cover interlock and alignment for operationalizing messaging, provide tips on ensuring account segments are leveraged in messaging development, and discuss how to assess whether messaging is contributing to content performance.
Portfolio marketing creates the messaging, but if it does it well, various groups throughout the organization wind up using it. Those who create the messaging take a lot of pride in it, and it’s a lot a work, so the worst thing is if we create it and no one uses it. We’ve often seen companies get excited about creating personas – they do all the work and put it on a poster, and then no one uses those personas. The key is to take steps to ensure that the work personas and messaging can be applied across the organization.
Ultimately, it’s important to remember that messaging is critical. It’s the information that goes inside content assets. We have to invest time in it to make sure it resonates with the buying audience.