“Our software is the greatest thing ever. It is disruptive and something that will make your employees happy!”

That is not an exact quote, but darn close to the opening paragraph of every landing page created by newly minted marketers at Silicon Valley startups. Like most web fodder from such shops, it communicates nothing.

In our infobesity age, humans have learned to scan at a nearly subconscious level. Gone are the days when a one-pager would actually be read by a prospect. People glean information based on gut-level reaction to keywords, images, colors and social indicators. In short, they read headlines. Hence, if your headline does not grab the reader’s attention in the first five seconds, the odds of them investigating further approaches zero.

That headline value propositions are hugely important is not new, nor are the steps to creating them. But the urgency has multiplied. Ignoring the process for distilling headlines and value statements means writing off customers before they even hit your landing page.

Core market messaging is not a creative process, it is a reductive one.

Value is based on buyer motivations. Thus you begin by itemizing all the functional and emotional motivations of your target buyers and any stakeholder that influences the purchasing decision.

Since your headline statements may be read by any of the stakeholders, finding those motivations common to each of them is an important step (all personae don’t always have common motivations, so if in doubt choose those stakeholders who ultimately matter – economic buyers and those with veto power).

With this whittled-down list of motivations, filter out those that are aped by your competitors and prioritize those where you have unique differentiation. In other words, keep on your short list those motivations that are your uncommon points of value that address the desires of the most and the most important buying decision influencers and makers.

With this short list of common and urgent motivations, you seed all messaging, but importantly your headline value proposition. If your resulting landing page headline doesn’t contain a brief statement of value based on the motivations of your buyer personae, then you didn’t do the process correctly. Start over.

Again, core market messaging is not a creative process, it is a reductive one.