1 Page Message Maps
What is a 1-Page Message Map?
A 1-Page Message Map is a visual communications tool designed for business storytellers.
Use a 1-page message map to hook audiences in 7 seconds, by telling a quick story that fits their short attention spans. A Message Map simplifies and streamlines your story, fits the whole story onto one page, and gets to the gist.
As you choose the right 23 words for your Message Map, you gain a ready-made elevator speech, sound bite, email subject line, headline or Tweet.
Example: 7-second Message Map for the Virgin Chicago Hotel
Example: 2-minute Message Map for the Virgin Chicago Hotel
Using a co-created Message Map, everyone who speaks for you and your company learns to tell one story consistently – across all media, to all audiences, everywhere you do business.
Neuroscience shows: to break through and earn a spot in your audience’s place cells, you must tell one consistent story.
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Most people can’t tell their business story crisply in 7 seconds
That’s the length of the average sound bite in news media. People who can’t tell their story briefly don’t get quoted – on TV, in the newspaper, or on the Internet. Too bad.
It’s really expensive for a business not to have a clear 7-second message. Not having a message means countless missed opportunities to spread the story of your business.
In fact, the lack of a message is the #1 reason people leave websites.
Granted, it’s tough enough to get to a unified message in any organization, small or large. Marketers face many obstacles to developing a concise, clear, consistent message.
Make your message clear and compelling with a 1-Page Message Map.
Here’s how too many companies put a mess into their messaging:
• A lack of leadership focus on messaging
• A lack of agreement among executives on what the message is or which audience comes first
• A message so complicated that almost no one can explain it or follow it
• Multiple conflicting messages from product, sales and services people, or from different geographies
• Business units each pushing their own message to the exclusion of others
• Self-centered messages that talk about the seller, not the customer
• In the absence of a message, people who just make stuff up.
Do any of these symptoms sound familiar?
Create Message Maps to strengthen your story’s potency and enable its consistent delivery through any channel, anywhere in the world. Problematic messaging damages all kinds of organizations — start-ups, public and private companies, units of government and nonprofits.
That’s why, 25 years ago, Tripp Frolichstein and George Stenitzer co-invented Message Maps, a tool to bring simplicity, clarity and consistency to your business message. Message Maps give you, your executives, marketers, sales and service people a simple, intuitive tool to help keep everyone on message.
With a consistent message, customers know why they want to visit your website, consume your content, and maybe even go down the path to a purchase.
To be effective, marketers and communicators need a unified company message, one that is agreed on by executives, product developers, sales, and marketing. That message must convey clear benefits, differentiate your company from competitors, and back up claims with facts, figures and case histories.
A Message Map workshop catalyzes your messaging by getting the whole team on the same page quickly. When marketing, sales and executives need to tell a consistent story about what’s in it for customers, it’s time for a Message Map.
With a Message Map in hand, you’ll find it easier to develop websites, blogs, articles, white papers, social media posts, video, podcasts – you name it. Message Maps streamline the review process, since the message gets buy-in quickly.
Message Maps get even stronger when they’re sharpened with insights from buyer persona research. Buyers know best what they need during each step in the buying journey, whose messages they believe and whose they don’t, and which content most influences their buying decisions.
Develop buyer personas with input from sales people, service people and, most important, one-on-one customer interviews. Creating buyer personas will make the message even stronger, immunize it against buyer disbelief, and reflect an understanding of how the world looks through your customers’ eyes.
With a Message Map, you can clearly convey customer benefits, in a simple message of 7 seconds, 23 words or less – which fits short attention spans.
We facilitate half-day and full-day workshops to co-create your Message Map. We work with you to refine, revise and polish your message.
• Research current company messaging.
• Facilitate a messaging workshop
• Get buy-in from across the organization
• Spell out your clear competitive difference
• Develop proof points and uncover customer stories
• Create a 1-Page Message Map to enable and guide consistent message delivery.
Learn more about Crystal Clear Communications
Examples: Color-code your message map to address different buyer personas
Read: How to deliver a consistent marketing message to all audiences and buyer personas.
Read: What Is A Message Map?
1-page branded content marketing plan