From the course: Launch Your Product to the Press

Create basic messaging

From the course: Launch Your Product to the Press

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Create basic messaging

- [Instructor] Creating your messaging is creating your groundwork. It's making sure you have all the necessary ingredients to get started, and ensuring you are preemptively solving for questions in your market, as well as for the media. This messaging can be used across all business unit communications, such as press releases, pitches, social media, and website copy, to make sure you are always on message. So, how do you create basic messaging? I like to divide messaging into four categories. First, your aspirational message. This is what's known as your mission statement. This is not exactly what you do, rather what you want to be. Are you trying to disrupt an industry? Make change in a space? Change the world? Take Facebook, for example. Part of their mission is to bring the world closer together. That doesn't explain exactly what they do, it explains the change they're trying to make. Their aspirational value. This should be one statement. There is a handy formula I like to use to determine this to make sure you're covering your bases. It goes like this. Your mission is to X, for Y, so they can Z. X being what you provide, Y to whom, and Z the benefit. Here's an example of a mission statement. We'll use one of my clients, EverlyWell, as an example throughout. Your next pillar of messaging is known as your positioning statement. A positioning statement answers the following questions. What does your company or brand do? Who do you target? And what benefits do you provide? The statement will generally be an internal document, although it should be used as a guide to ensure all of your content is consistent. An example of a positioning statement would be this. EverlyWell provides at-home lab testing kits with beautifully redesigned results. The platform empowers consumers to order, self-collect, and understand their own physician-approved lab tests with the goal of improving health and reducing risk of future or chronic disease. So in this case, the what EverlyWell does is provides at-home lab testing kits. EverlyWell targets consumers, and aims at improving health and reducing risk. Third, what are you solving for? Think about why you created this product. You saw a problem and you wanted to fix it. So you created a solution. What is it? People don't want to know what you do. They want to know how you can help them. How are you making their life easier? What problems are you solving for them? So back to the EverlyWell example. Why did at-home lab diagnostic testing companies become all the rage? Well, these companies were solving for the fact that lab testing is super cumbersome. It's costly, time-consuming, and the results are often confusing to read. And sometimes, specialty tests are not covered by insurance. And those are just a few things. What are you solving for is one of the first questions any reporter will ask you. So it's important to have this down pat. It's okay to have this simply as a list or supported bullets. I recommend three to five. And the last pillar is, how you're different. You can be solving for a myriad of things, but if somebody else is doing the same thing you are, then what? Think about what sets you apart. When you created this product or service, I'm sure you did a competitive analysis to see what you could do better. This is where you talk about that. Again, supported bullets are a great way to organize this. Here is an example of how you could bullet out the ways you are different. In the first one, we talk about how EverlyWell is the only company to combine three unique components. The second bullet focuses on how it is the only company offering a suite of benefits. And the last one talks about its unique redesign. Now you have created your backbone, the skeleton of your company.

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