I have a confession to make: the fact that at Galimark we continue to work from home (WFH) during the Coronavirus outbreak is not interesting to any of our customers. In fact, they also didn’t care about it before the outbreak. Why should they?

Your customers are probably no different. They don’t care about it, even if you use the WFH abbreviation and a picture of your team’s happy talking heads in a Zoom or Teams conference.

Sure, entire companies moving to WFH is a sign of the challenging times. But when planning your outbound communications these days it is important to recall three principles:

a)      You want to be different. If everyone else is on the same boat and working from home, then your company is no different in this aspect.

b)     You want to be relevant. Currently there is an elephant in the room, and you can’t ignore it. You need to adjust your messaging to fit the new situation, yet still emphasize your unique value proposition to customers in the long run.

c)      You want to be consistent. Without consistency you keep reinventing the wheel with each content piece, creating a disjoint messaging that confuses potential buyers.

One of the most efficient ways to ensure all three principles above is a message map. Product message maps are internal documents usually owned by Product Marketing. They serve as a messaging structure guide for collateral and outbound content such as web site, social media posts, blogs, presentations, white papers and videos.

There are different definitions and forms of message maps. The one I like most is described in an excellent Pragmatic Institute article by Steve Piper: A Practitioner’s Guide to Product Message Maps   

In Steve’s words, developing and maintaining a message map takes an effort, but when you create and consistently use a product message map, you reap a variety of benefits:

–         It reinforces your key messages

–         It improves understanding of your products to reduce sales cycles

–         It saves time in developing content

Here is a fresh example of an efficient message map. In the US, the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) has recently published COVID-19: Simple Answers to Top Questions. In this document they used massage maps to help organize complex information and make it easier to express the current knowledge on Coronavirus. In this case the risk of Coronavirus is the “Product”. Messages are presented initially in no more than 3-5 short sentences and convey 3-5 key messages, using the least number of words possible. The key messages are then followed by additional information.

It’s like peeling an onion – the message map distills information into a series of layered messages, from basic to more complex.

Have you ever created or used a message map?