Work Through the Niche Matrix: Step #2, Messaging Ingredients

In the prior post, Work Through The Niche Matrix: Step 1, Make A List (16/100), we walked through listing out your best market opportunities and niches worth targeting. Now let's start fleshing them out so we can get into some gritty bits that you can turn into messaging!

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Step 2: The Messaing Matrix

Once you get a broad list of prospective niches together, rate or rank them across the five aspects (Popular Pain, Tangible Results, Believable Solution, Identifiable Targets, and Unique Genius), to pick out your best 1-3 to continue with. If you missed these, you can read more about them in Where Can You Be a Big Fish In a Small Pond? (15/100).

Now we'll dig into the Messaging Matrix. Don’t be precious about this. You’re not getting married. Better to go through the whole exercise with a couple of niches first to get the hang of what's useful and how you want to adapt this process, before trying to shove everything through it.

We’re going to break them down into a second, more detailed Messaging Matrix. It will help you find blind spots, especially with the “Pain-Solution-Results” breakdown we’ll get to.

Here's a sample Messaging Matrix layout...

Niche: Which opportunity or use case from the list are we talking about? “Cashflow Management,” “Financial Services HR,” “General Electric,” or “Mobile Advertising”?

Popular Pain: A general label of the problem customers need to be solved. “Content Marketing Reporting,” “Sales Team Attrition/Costs,” “Inaccurate Executive Reports,” “High Employee Costs,” and so on. The detail comes two steps later.

Power Person: Who are the people you aim to help, and who has the most power over buying your stuff? What roles are the typical decision-maker and influencer/helper? Start with one or two roles, even though we know you can list a lot more. You can do more later if you decide it's valuable. Who are the main people you help? Who has the most power over buying your stuff?

Business or Personal Pains: What specifically does that one person deal with on a day-to-day basis? Not the company as a whole, but that one person. This is where the pain gets detailed. “Embarrassed in front of the board because the forecast was off,” “Overwhelmed with time spent inter-viewing because there’s no way to filter candidates early,” “Goals are going up, leads are staying the same.” Start with one to three specific pains for the main decision-maker, and do it again for one other influencer on their team.

Solution: What do they need and want in order to solve this? Customers want to buy solutions, not products or services. How can you position your solution to them? It’s possible what they want to buy is different or “more than” what you currently offer. Usually, this is the easy part for you, since you know your solution so well.

Results: What are the identifiable outcomes that customers get? What can you measure, track, or gauge? “Everyone feels good” isn’t specific enough. “Employee satisfaction increased from X to Y” is better. How can you demonstrate financial benefits? (Make money, save money, reduce the risk of losing money...). Also people say they want to "save time," buy they won't buy it unless it's very specific, like "cut your commute from 45 minutes to 15" or you can point to cost savings from saving time.

Proof: To charge based on value, or to market and sell to Mainstream Buyers, your lead generation and sales teams need proof. If you don’t have proof, you can still sell to people, but this will require more relationship-building, or sticking only to Early Adopters. Proof can take many forms, some examples:

• Free trials
• Case studies with details
• Testimonials, especially in video
• Lists of logos or brand names
• Stories
• Demonstrations

When it comes to proof, the cliche is true: the more you can show vs. tell, the better.

What Even Veterans Forget: Pains vs. Solutions vs. Results

People need to practice differentiating pains from solutions from results. Filling out these three columns can be an education in itself because people often confuse pains with solutions. “Their pain is a lack of automated payroll” says nothing about their pains - it's saying in a backhanded way that automated payroll is a solution. "Payroll's run manually today" is just a description of how it works today, not a pain.

Break it down: Why does that matter? So what? “Manual payroll creates errors every month, meaning employees get frustrated, reducing selling time (pain 1), and finance teams spend 10 hours a month fixing those errors (pain 2).” Is there anything else? "Employee trust or eNPS goes down, and voluntary attrition up, when it happens too often (pain 3)."

Usually, the “Solutions” box fills up fast. That’s the easy one.

• Do your people keep wanting to fill the “Specific Pains” box with solutions?
• Is your “Results” box frustratingly blank?

Spend the time to nail these down pains/solutions/results even if it takes 10 times longer than you think it should. Because it can help open up a whole new way of thinking for your team, so they can catch themselves when they skip over digging into customer pains, leap too fast into pitching solutions, or are unsure of the results they can promise.

Using This In Your Messaging

Now you've got some raw messaging ingredients! The goal isn't to use only Results - but to force yourself to fill out your blindspots and uncover messages you missed. Now, once you have the Pain / Solutions / Results broken apart, you have more options on what to choose in your messaging. Sometimes using Solutions and features in your messaging will be the best, sometimes Pains, sometimes Results. Or all three. You now have more ingredients in your cooking area to choose from to make your best cake.

Validate: Sometimes a niche or proof is hypothetical and needs validation. We'll get to this in a future post.

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Observations: I've found spending an hour or two with a small, key team can be enough to get people 80%-90% of the way towards picking a niche and nailing down the important points. No one needs to go through all the details for all their niches in exhaustive detail up front - save that for the final 1-2 niches you land on.

Also, remember it's common - especially for consultants, agencies and service providers - to spend years of uncertainty around which niche or messaging will work best, because nothing stands out. It happens, a lot. All you can do is keep going, until something changes, which eventually it does. Maybe your offering is immature. Maybe you have a hidden fear or block.

I spent years in that space while juggling general sales consulting, Unique Genius and CEOFlow, before getting married and having to triple down on outbound sales prospecting. I wasn't as interested in going back to it, but I had to support my growing family.

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NEXT WEEK: Work Through the Niche Matrix: Steps 3, 4, 5 - Choose, Validate, Campaign

PRIOR POST:?Work Through The Niche Matrix: Step 1, Make a List (16/100)