Consider this, your website’s home page or landing page must answer these three questions all in a period of 7 seconds: where am I, what can I do here, why should I do it? * I’m not sure Usain Bolt is even that fast. Ask any creative director worth their salt and they’ll tell you writing a 30 second TV commercial is comparatively easy next to writing a 10 second spot.

And here’s the kicker - if you’re a proponent of Google’s must-read buying manifesto, ZMOT (Zero Moment of Truth), as I am, you know that buyers used 10.4 different sources to make a purchasing decision in 2011; in 2010 it was 5.3 sources.** In the words of tennis-great John McEnroe during one of his many tirades, “YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS.” Two times more sources in one year?

Developing messaging platforms is difficult enough, but now we’re also challenged with doing it in bite-size increments and possibly against 10.4 competing messages. It’s no longer good enough to put yourself in your customer’s shoes, you need to do it in racing shoes.

But how? How do you go about developing messages about your brand, products and services? Well, there is a process for message development, and I’m going to share it with you. This is the same approach we’ve used for a wide variety of clients including Footlocker.com and their divisions Eastbay and CCS, for the California Avocado Commission, WEA Trust and M3 Insurance in Madison, for LumiData and Minnesota Thermal Science in Minneapolis, Lion Apparel in Dayton, and North Central Health Care, the Wisconsin Potato & Vegetable Growers and MyInnerview in central Wisconsin, among many others.

Certainly, there are plenty of fundamentals when it comes to developing a messaging platform, and you know these, including the notion that your customers reside in themselves so don’t make them reside in you, and don’t develop messages at 30,000 feet (and steer clear of that term, anyway) when dialogue and sales occur at about three feet, and understanding that the status quo is your real competitor (aggregating the messages of other companies into your own doesn’t cut it). But in the end, these fundamentals, which are often overlooked, are really just the price of admission to solid messaging.

So, here are the steps to developing your messaging platform:

1. Communicate to Resonate – there is no conceivable way you’ll be able to develop effective messages unless you do some voice-of-customer research. Don’t try to second-guess what your customers and prospects are thinking.

2. Be the Orange – think segmentation, each audience has different needs and wants so your messages need to address multiple desired outcomes; in fact, many of our clients have complete personas written about each buyer type so they don’t lose sight of the audience composition.

3. Then be the Onion – remember you’re fruits and vegetables, even when it comes to messaging. You need to peel away the layers to get to a point-of-view and an insight that’s relevantly different and has an emotional connection to your audience. For example, tire companies are always talking about performance, traction statistics (more on this momentarily), durability and the like – no differentiation there. Michelin Tires hit the mark when they talked about, and showed, the proud parents of a newborn driving the youngun home for the first time from the hospital at about 10 MPH. There’s a lot riding on your messaging, too.

4. It’s not a Soapbox - it’s a platform, and that means a series of messaging tiers built one on top of the other. Here’s how we structure it: each audience segment has a series of overwhelming and compelling messages called Narrative Pitch Flows. Sometimes they are ranked in order of importance like Level 1 Narrative Pitch Flow, Level 2 and so on, but we prefer to categorize them by key influencers like Insights and Impact or Structure and Support. Each Pitch Flow is accompanied by one or more proof points and the series of proof points are categorized by either statistical and factual or human and emotional proof points.

5. The Proof is in the Footing - stay on solid ground with your proof points. Let’s say one of your messages is about having shoes that fit any size foot. One proof point might be that your company provided Bob Lanier with his size 22 sneakers and another might be how many SKUs you stock. If you’re an architectural firm and your message is about your abilities to design offices for the “human space”, then you’ll need proof points from people who agree with your claim. Don’t make the mistake that most companies make – your proof points are not Narrative Pitch Flows, so don’t lead with them.

6. Even Architects Need Good Builders - market builders that is, including one of my favorite contractors who also happened to be a Harvard Business School professor famous for telling his students, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” And for that, Theodore Levitt, you hit the nail on the head.

Here’s my message about messaging platforms. There is a proven process to messaging; it’s so critical to your brand, products and services that it needs to be done right. And like any good message, it ultimately needs to come with an offer. So here is mine; if you want to talk about messaging, I want to talk about messaging, so call me anytime. Like Ross Perot said, “I’m all ears”.

*Source: Optimizing the Entire Sales Funnel: 3 Essential Principles, presentation by Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director of MECLABS
** Source: Winning the Zero Moment of Truth by Jim Lecinski, Managing Director, U.S. Sales & Service for Google