The Messaging Guide That Rolls Up to the Job
A 5-7 page guardrail doc: value prop, competitive edge, ranked emotional and functional benefits.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 89%
The deliverable that turns customer research into everything the company writes. A five-to-seven page messaging guide covering the value proposition, major competitive advantages, and the major value themes — each value theme broken into its emotional and functional benefits and tied to the specific product attributes that deliver them. The whole document rolls up to the single prioritized job to be done, so website copy, onboarding emails and in-app copy all descend from the same source.
Origin
Georgiana Laudi and Claire Suellentrop's standard Forget The Funnel deliverable. The hierarchy-of-messaging principle draws on positioning work Laudi credits to April Dunford ('Obviously Awesome'), and the jobs-to-be-done spine to Bob Moesta.
Core principles
- 01Reflect customers back to themselves — use their language, not your internal vocabulary.
- 02Rank what they care about; the hierarchy of messaging matters as much as the content.
- 03Internal team knowledge is allowed, but never before listening to best customers.
- 04The guide is guardrails, not copy — it's the baseline every asset must trace back to.
- 05It's hard to read the label from inside the jar; that's why the guide comes from outside data.
How to run it
- 1
Anchor to the prioritized customer job
Write the customer job statement at the top: 'When I [situation], help me [motivations], so I can [desired outcome].' Everything below must serve it.
Pro tip SparkToro's job resolved to 'help me identify opportunities I wouldn't otherwise be aware of' — organized, shareable, buildable over time, so I look like a pro and drive better results.
- 2
Rank the value themes by frequency
Take your ~100 survey responses and count what customers said they cared about most, second-most, third-most. That count is your messaging hierarchy.
Pro tip It is literally a numbers game — paint-by-numbers is fine as a starting point, with judgment applied on top.
- 3
Split each theme into emotional and functional benefits
For every value theme, articulate the emotional benefit (looking like a pro, getting stakeholder buy-in) and the functional benefit (organized, shareable, reusable), then tie both to the specific product attributes that deliver them.
- 4
Write the value prop and competitive advantages
State the value proposition and the major competitive advantages, both derived from what customers said made you stand out — not from what you think is the coolest thing about the product.
Watch out The single most common failure is leading with the feature you're proudest of rather than the one they said they valued.
- 5
Use it as the baseline for every asset
Website copy, email onboarding sequences, in-app copy, sales collateral and briefs to freelance copywriters all get written against the guide.
Pro tip Handing the messaging guide to a copywriter is serving them the work on a silver platter — it's the highest-leverage use of the doc.
Watch out Without it, as teams churn and the product evolves, everyone quietly drifts back to internal vocabulary.
In the wild
Forget The Funnel delivered a voice-of-customer document plus a messaging guide, plus the identified value-carrying features. SparkToro's new VP of marketing then built a product onboarding checklist and onboarding emails off it, with no further consulting help.
→ Trial-to-paid conversion doubled within about two months, checked in on after the fact.
A social media tool's website messaging was rewritten off research that identified two jobs and zeroed in on one; the trial was shortened from 30 to 7 days.
→ 89% lift in website conversion, plus a 40% lift in trial-to-paid that came for free from better-qualified signups.
Common mistakes
Writing messaging from internal opinion first
You can use team knowledge and best judgment, but it should never come before learning from and listening to your best ideal customers and using the language they use.
Treating the guide as a one-off document
Its value is as a persistent set of guardrails. When there's a lot going on, the product is evolving, and people are coming and going, it's easy to lose sight of the customer — the guide is what holds the line.
Is it for you?
Best for
Marketing leads at SaaS companies with completed customer research who need one source of truth for website, onboarding and freelancer briefs.
Not ideal for
Teams without research to base it on — a messaging guide written from assumptions is just an opinion with a table of contents.
From the transcript
“generally they're you know I mean when we do them they're like five to seven pages long they hit on the value prop they hit…”
“in general you want to reflect back what they said they care about not what you”
“the customer job statement is when I and in a certain situation help me which is filled in by what those things that they're looking…”
From the episode
Customer-led growth
Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel)