Perceptions & storylines

What is a perception?

• Perceptions are the key tenets of your story for the next year. You can think of them like high-level storylines.
• Perceptions are what you want your audience to think or say about you.
• Perceptions are a set of statements that you have strong opinions about.
• When you write perceptions properly they guide your marketing efforts, so you stay focused and tell a repeatable story that is uniquely your own. 
• Perceptions then trickle down and shape marketers’ goals, messaging, and content roadmap.

Hypothetical perception examples

The image below shows three examples of hypothetical perceptions from Stripe, Salesforce and Asana.

• The combination of your 3-4 perceptions are what’s truly unique.
• To write these, you can use categories: insight or opinion, product, and community/customers as guidelines, or just list your strongest opinions.

Perceptions exercise

Gather the founders, marketers, and potentially the product team to make a long list of potential perceptions, and then the marketing lead can cull the list and propose 3-4 final perceptions for everyone's approval. Writing perceptions ensures you have a clear story to tell--not just about your product, but other topics that resonate with your audience right now. Without perceptions, your content, talks, pitches, etc will feel scattered.

Step 1: Perceptions Q&A

‍Answer these questions to find common themes and then write your 3 or 4 perceptions.

Opinions:

• What does your company or founders have opinions about?
• What are your unique points of view?
• How will the world change if your company is wildly successful?
• What’s your unique story?

Landscape/trends/market: 

• What change or movement are you a part of? 
• What's your unique POV on the market?
• Why does your company exist today?
• How are you 10x better than competitors or the old way of doing this?

Company: 

• What do you want to be remembered for? 
• What do you stand for? 
• Why do you exist? 

Product: 

• What do you want your audience to say about your product? 
• What product type do you fall into? (10x better product, new category or type of product, vertical product, buy vs build product)
• What's your unique differentiator? 
• What pushes your next 250 customers over the line to buy?

Customers/community: 

• What's unique about your customers and people who choose to use your product? 
• What do your power users now or in the future have in common?
• Fill in the blank: People who do x at y companies all love [my company]

Step 2: Write 3-4 perceptions to share

• Develop statements based on the questions above
• It's typical good to have 1 about the product, 1 about either your company or about your audience, and 1 about the market generally.

Step 3: Share perceptions for approval and buy in

Perceptions test, ask everyone for feedback here:

• Do you have 3-4 perceptions that are memorable and repeatable (by everyone in your company)?
• Is the combo of the 3-4 perceptions unique to your company? Could any other company claim these?
• Can 90% of your non-SEO content/story/copy/fuel ladder up to these this year?
• Do these perceptions cover not only storylines related to your product, but also to relevant trends, what's unique about your company or approach, the problem you solve, and what your audience cares most about?

Step 4: Start using perceptions

After you write perceptions it can be helpful to write down a list of content ideas that will support each.

• You might have some sub-bulleted perceptions or storylines as well, especially if your perception is broad or if you have multiple distinct audiences or products
• Require the perception or storyline content ladders up to be included on every brief or document.