In the last step, you crafted your headline message (your proposition) to get the attention of your ideal client. In this step, you’ll expand on your message with value principles that retain and engage readers, and support it with more context. These will be your pillars for the next step of expanding again into your unique framework of component elements to fill out your service envelope and help you respond to diverse client needs.

With your position calculated in the previous step, you know who to target on which problem and how you help solve it. In this step, you’ll use this information to craft your headline message to get their attention. In the next step, you’ll expand on this message with value principles that retain their attention and engage them further.

If you’re not sure what to decide for this step, use your best guess and move on. Your perspective will develop and you can always update previous answers as you go, so don’t feel too constrained by what you’ve already written either.

Your value principles are the next logical step for those people interested enough in your headline message that they want to continue reading.

Be sure to refine your headline message, value principles, and unique methodology elements to work well together.

First off, consider your headline message (or proposition) and the three main challenges, tasks, or pain points your ideal client faces in achieving it, or that will be resolved by achieving it.

People are wiling to commit to solving problems more readily, so – at every stage – it’s worth knowing which problems your expertise can help solve.

Brainstorm the key problems your methodology solves, in line with your headline message and the major problem that it solves.

Brainstorm your repertoire of expertise for high level solutions you deliver. Consider how they organize under a hierarchy structure, framework, or methodology, and how they match against your longlist of tier two problems.

Your value principles are the next logical step for those people interested enough in your headline message that they want to continue reading.

They should meet many of the the same criteria as your headline message, in that their job is to entice your reader to keep reading with relevant value. But, as their job is to retain their attention rather than win it in a crowded environment, value principles can afford to be more helpfully descriptive than attention-grabbing. In fact, you’ll need to start demonstrating some expertise to retain readers evaluating you against other candidates.

Delegating descriptive duties to your value principles frees your headline message up to focus on gaining attention than explaining your expertise. In turn, your unique framework elements, organized under these value principles, will free your principles to be more high-level in nature. Be sure to refine your headline message, value principles, and unique methodology elements to work well together.

Your value principles should work together as a set to begin demonstrating a cohesive approach. There’s lots of types of sets available, including:

• Top-level process steps

• Key benefits, outcomes, or characteristics of success

• Key features

Three is the magic number

Aim for three value principles. Three is the optimal balance of simplicity and comprehensiveness; easy to understand at a glance, and sufficient to suggest a framework or methodology.

While it can be a challenge to refine your expertise down to three key takeaway points, consider them as a cohesive suite of abstractions of your comprehensive methodology that engages your ideal client to delve further into the one that resonates for them and explore the finer points of your expertise further.

Challenging as it might feel to organize your expertise under three key pillars, the goal is to provide sufficient information at the right time to entice your audience to seek greater detail in the area that suits them. Presenting more detail at this time creates more work for the reader to understand and choose from, and can lose them to competition that does a better job of simplifying their expertise. This commonly referred to as analysis paralysis, where a person is overwhelmed with choice and opts for the status quo: in this case, not taking action with you.

You’ll also gain a greater understanding of how your expertise is perceived by others, and the huge gap between yours and others’ understanding of the subject.

In the previous step, you crafted value principles to support your headline message, and retain and engage your ideal client with greater context. These form the pillars for this step of expanding into your unique framework of component elements to fill out your service envelope and help you respond to diverse client needs. In the next step, your framework components will provide the content foundation for publishing blog articles and social media posts. 

Despite all your work to refine your expertise into a clear, compelling, and actionable framework, it’s actually rare that someone will ask for exactly that. Everyone has their own lens on their challenges and solving them. Rather than telling them they’ve got it wrong, and that our perspective is correct, we need a way to acknowledge their challenge and smoothly introduce how we can help.

A broad but cohesive framework of your expertise – that expands on your headline message and value principles – gives you a greater range of responses to peoples’ problems. Arranged in a branched structure, it lets you go on to introduce its parent value principle, and your headline message. This approach positions you to solve their immediate challenge, and introduces your expertise to provide a greater scope of service.

If you’re not sure what to decide for this step, use your best guess and move on. Your perspective will develop and you can always update previous answers as you go, so don’t feel too constrained by what you’ve already written either.

Be sure to review your headline message and value principles to work well together with these elements.

Your unique framework paints a helpful picture of your expertise; with each element providing a compelling point, and all of them working in concert to demonstrate a purposeful methodology. Elements should be organized intuitively under each of your value principles, so they make sense however your prospect experiences them.

For someone exploring your service hierarchy top-down – for example, navigating a branched menu on your website – they should be logical sub-points of each value principle, expanding on and reinforcing that principle.

For someone matching their problem to a particular element, its peers should offer relevant adjacent value, and their parent value principle offer a higher degree of value, that encourages your prospect to increase the scope of their enquiry.

Together, your framework elements should reinforce each other, demonstrate your expertise, and convey authority.

Your unique framework conveys your service envelope; it should inspire confidence that you will deliver a resolved, holistic solution.

The scope of your framework elements will influence the authority you’re awarded and the latitude you’re afforded. There is a Goldilocks breadth that demonstrates the areas you want to work in, without appearing too generalist, or reaching beyond your demonstrable expertise.

Each of your framework elements needs to reinforce its parent value principle, as well as its immediate sibling elements. To make this editing or curation process easier, start with a tree-of-threes branched structure. Beneath your headline message, try three value principles, each supported by three framework elements. Flesh out each of these nine elements with three explanatory bullet points or subheadings.

Structuring your expertise into levels, and limiting your prospect’s choices to three at each branch or decision-point, encourages easier decisions and removes analysis paralysis from what is – at a glance – a comprehensive and complex menu of services.

Like your headline message and value principles, each framework element should relate to a problem experienced by your ideal client, and convey the benefit of adopting it.

If you’re keen to demonstrate features of your solution, framework elements is a good point in your prospect’s journey to convey them.

This leaves your headline message and value principles free to remain benefits. Benefits are positive outcomes of choosing your approach, while features are functions of your methodology. Benefits are more likely to help you connect with your ideal client; features can then help get you over the line versus your competition (but only if you’ve managed to connect in the first place). Research shows that focusing on beneficial outcomes is more customer-focused than promoting features, and that higher value clients are more likely to be trying to achieve their overall objective than fulfil a feature list. Features can play an important role in reinforcing the credibility of your benefit-focused headline message and value principles, and here in framework elements would be an appropriate place to convey them.

There is no requirement for your framework elements to list features rather than beneficial outcomes, only that if you wish to list features, this is the appropriate point in your prospect’s journey to convey them.

When conveying features, be sure to write them to still be benefit-focused, with the customer’s perspective in mind, and in succinct plain-English.

Your value principles and unique framework from previous steps have equiped you for this step with a rich, cohesive content syllabus to develop your comprehensive, long-term schedule of engaging online content such as social media posts and blog articles. This will provide a foundation to develop momentum in the next step of third parties validating your expertise.

If you’re not sure what to decide for this step, use your best guess and move on. Your perspective will develop and you can always update previous answers as you go, so don’t feel too constrained by what you’ve already written either.

The competition for engagement is tough, and people need to actually read your content to find out you provide great value. Whether it’s social media posts or blog articles, your content needs to be inviting to sample, so they can decide to follow and share. Framing your expertise in a conversational tone, and providing interesting perspectives on it, is going to reach more people and grow your network.

It can be tough to remain strategic on social media without sacrificing engagement. Logically-consistent content builds your credibility and increases recognition of your theme, while staying novel grows your following and develops engagement. Your unique framework solves this by providing the right amount of cohesive breadth to stay on track while remaining interesting and avoiding repetition.

Posting regularly is a great way to be seen more as your content appears more often and platforms start favoring you. Having a solid schedule of posts that comprehensively conveys your framework can buy you the flexibility to season your content with some timely, opportunistic, and frivolous posts that include humor or a popular trend, through the lens of your expertise.