Service
Communication Strategy Development
Strategy without Spin: OSP processes and frameworks empower you and your teams to tell compelling, consistent, accurate stories about your product.
Strategy Services
Click to read more about each service below.
- The OSP Value Map: Turn product information into assets faster.
- Product and Brand Positioning: Highlight and help your product shine.
- Product & Brand Vision: Focus your priorities to meet future customer needs.
- Competitive Analysis & Positioning: Promote, position, and envision your product.
- Audience Challenges & Verticals: Build trust with potential customers.
- Audience Personas: Inhabit your target audience’s perspective.
- Buyer and Customer Journeys: Clearer, more targeted communications.
- Trust Signals Audit: Gain a holistic view of how you present externally.
- Build Your Agency House: Make your website your best sales tool.
The OSP Value Map
Connect Engineering to Sales and Marketing. Turn your product information into consistent sales, content, & strategic assets faster with the OSP Value Map product communications framework.
What is a Value Map?
The OSP Value Map is a living library and canonical inventory of accurate, up-to-date product information stored as interconnected entities such as features, benefits, challenges, and personas.
- Every aspect of your product becomes structured data, distilled into reusable logical-functional groups, product positioning, and all your communications.
- Search, sort, and study your product for content ideation, production, and strategic insights through the lenses of its features, the challenges it addresses, the benefits it delivers, and the needs of your target personas.
- We convert your product expertise into product marketing and sales enablement with our expert framework and services for collecting, organizing, and maintaining your product information.
Why does Value Mapping matter?
Strategic communication begins with a granular understanding of what your product does and the value it delivers. A Value Map is a single source of truth that encapsulates the full potential of your product — helping stakeholders produce strategic and accurate content; aligning your communications with your vision, strategy, and technical truth.
How we can help
Tracking and updating everything there is to know about your product can get messy, fast. Open Strategy Partners collaborates with you to document your value proposition at every level of detail, from individual features to whole platforms. We bring years of experience communicating about complex technologies to transform your detailed knowledge into clear, consistent messaging for your audiences.
Product and Brand Positioning
What is Product and Brand Positioning?
Product and Brand Positioning Statements are clear, compelling, colorful definitions that describe what your product does and the value it delivers. They address your audience — implicitly or explicitly — and cover many bases, from expressing your brand’s personality to product descriptions to the measurable benefits you provide.
Why does Product and Brand Positioning matter?
You need to differentiate yourself from a sea of competitors purporting to do the same thing. Product and Brand positioning highlight the problems your product solves, speak to a specific audience, and help your product shine.
How we can help
OSP works with your team in a workshop setting to develop your Product and Brand Positioning. Based on your Value Map, select and prioritize the component parts of your positioning and create statements that best express your brand’s personality, services, areas of play, audience challenges, benefits, and more.
Product & Brand Vision
What is a Product and Brand Vision?
Your Product and Brand Vision represents your strategic direction. You chart a path towards this North Star, starting with how you operate today, where the market is headed, and your goals and ambitions.
Why does your Product and Brand Vision matter?
While any business entails a certain amount of reactivity, it’s important to make long-term, proactive thinking a daily task. Developing a Product and Brand Vision focuses your priorities and helps you create a product and organization able to meet future customer needs.
More resources
Refine your Brand Vision with a Communications Strategy Workshop.
How we can help
OSP works with you to define an aspirational vision for your company. Research, market trends, and workshops all go into developing a longer-term vision.
Competitive Analysis & Positioning
What is Competitive Analysis & Positioning?
Competitive Analysis and Positioning give you a detailed picture of where your brand fits in the market — and where there’s room to grow. It pushes past marketing-speak to create apples-to-apples comparisons between you and your competitors.
Why does Competitive Analysis & Positioning matter?
To create impactful product communications that convert, you need to know where you stand. Competitive analysis and positioning give you a deeper understanding of how to promote, position, and envision your product.
How we can help
We create a custom competitive matrix, using your Value Map as a starting point, to identify gaps and opportunities in feature sets and roadmaps across your competitive landscape. Our product and feature deep-dives standardize comparisons otherwise tricky to make between vendors using wildly differing terminology.
Audience Challenges & Verticals
What are Audience Challenges & Verticals? Why do they matter?
Strong communications speak directly to your audience. Showing that you understand the needs, goals, problems, and use cases in a specific set of industries or job roles will build trust (and conversions) with your potential customers. Clarifying your Audience Challenges and Verticals is therefore a fundamental building block of your communication strategy.
How we can help
We’ll work with you to get each department and team’s unique viewpoint. You get up-to-date Audience Challenges to create effective product communications that convert.
Audience Personas
What are Audience Personas?
Personas are characterizations of individuals within your target audience. Gaining better insights into your prospective and current customers helps you better connect with them. Take into account where your personas have influence, whom they trust, and their unique goals, needs, and challenges — so you can better connect.
Why do Audience Personas matter?
Whether your target audience is developers, small business owners, marketers, or someone else altogether, fully inhabiting their perspectives will help you choose appropriate terms (e.g., technical/less-technical) and tone (e.g., formal/less-formal) and create more effective communications.
More resources about Audience Personas
Learn more from our blog post, Empathy in Practice.
How we can help
We have helped many clients define their audience personas in interactive, high-touch workshops. We love sifting through and debating your team’s ideas to narrow in on the archetypes you connect with most.
Buyer and Customer Journeys
What are Buyer and Customer Journeys?
A Customer Journey is a diagram, description, or map that walks through your customers’ interactions with your product communications. By stepping into your customers’ shoes, you can better serve them the content or information they need.
Why do Buyer and Customer Journeys matter?
Customers who feel guided through your product are more likely to come back. Customer Journeys help you create clearer, more targeted communications that address your clients’ needs at precisely the right time.
How we can help
Open Strategy Partners can create customer journey maps that illustrate how your target audience interacts with your product. We’ll work with you to map out your product, website, and personas to identify your best-performing flows and slow spots.
Trust Signals Audit
What are Trust Signals?
We all pick up on cues that projects, companies, or products present about themselves. We make inferences about a project’s health or a company’s service from its community’s tone. And, obviously, these signals inform our decisions about selecting an offering or joining an open source project.
Are you aware of what you’re broadcasting?
Take stock of how you are communicating your competence and character with a Trust Signal Audit. We analyze gaps and opportunities in how you are projecting trustworthiness to help your audience choose to engage with you and your product.
Why do Trust Signals matter?
Your potential customers, partners, and employees — and all of us — make decisions guided by gut feelings, on their sense of trust in your product or service. If you gain a holistic view of how you present externally, you can make informed, mindful choices to change your communications.
More resources
Read our post on Ten Ways to Build Better Communications with Trust.
How we can help
We apply an objective and systematic lens to assess your trust signals and produce an actionable Trust and Vibrancy report outlining your strengths and areas for potential improvement. To do this, we assess elements that signal trustworthiness, including product communication, editorial communication, interaction, and support.
Sell better. Build trust with your prospects before they ever meet you.
Open Strategy Partners counts many technical agencies as trusted clients. We developed the Technical Agency Playbook to address the most common communication challenges among agencies that themselves cater to complex technology companies and others.
The “Agency House” is a straightforward content architecture model for making your website your best sales tool. If you are a small agency or freelancer, your house can help you spend less of your precious time selling and more time delivering the work your clients love.
Whatever the size of your company, if you want to sell better or more efficiently, the Agency House structure and methodology are there for you, too.
- Improve Sales Flow: Back up any sales pitch or conversation with authoritative links and resources on your website. Help prospects self-qualify and be closer to a sale when they contact you.
- Strategic Awareness of your Brand as Expert and Authority: Become the helpful advisor, thought leader, and source of knowledge in solving people’s challenges and helping them meet their needs and goals.
- Improved Search Results: Google explicitly says content quality matters, and that they define quality content based on expertise, authority, and trust.
- Connect with Leads: People looking for an agency partner are looking to solve a challenge or a problem. Reach your audience with your help when and where they express those needs.
What’s best for me?
We’ll help it narrow down in 30 minutes or less based on your business and situation.