How to structure a sales or marketing message

There's a pattern that repeats in every marketing team: someone writes a three-paragraph email to announce a product and nobody reads it; someone runs an ad that opens with "At Polimake we believe that…" and the click-through rate tanks; someone presents a proposal and five minutes in the client still doesn't understand what's being offered.

The problem is almost never the content. It's the structure—the order in which the information is delivered. The very same message can be invisible or convincing depending on how it's arranged.

This article gathers the message structures that have proven to work in different contexts: where each one comes from, what it does well, when to use it, and when not. It isn't rhetorical theory. It's a practical map for choosing—based on the channel and the reader's frame of mind—which message architecture to apply.

Before the structure: the three questions

Any structure does little good if three prior questions haven't been answered—the same ones classical rhetoric posed two thousand years ago. Aristotle, in his Rhetoric (~4th century BC), distinguished three appeals: ethos (the credibility of the speaker), pathos (the emotion of the listener), and logos (the logic of the argument). Modern structures are different blends of these three, but none of them works without first knowing:

• Who's going to read it? State of mind, prior knowledge, skepticism, available time.
• What do you want them to think, feel, or do afterward? A single thing, stated with concrete verbs. "Book a demo," "understand the difference from the competitor," "remember the brand."
• On what channel is it delivered? Email, landing page, ad, video, sales conversation. Each channel has different timing, space, and expectations, and different structures work on each.

Whoever jumps straight to writing without answering these questions chooses a structure out of habit—and almost always the wrong one for the case.

The inverted pyramid (journalism, late 19th century)

The oldest structure still in use today was born in press newsrooms when the telegraph charged by the word and the connection cut out halfway through. Journalists learned to put the most important things at the start and the details at the end, so the editor could cut from the bottom without losing the story. This is the inverted pyramid.

The structure is simple: the lead (what happened, who, when, where) in the first paragraph, then context, then secondary details, then background. Anyone who reads only the first paragraph already understands the story.

When it works: press releases, announcements, news of updates, emails to teams. Any context where the reader will decide in five seconds whether to keep reading.

When it fails: persuasive texts whose effect depends on a twist, a question, or a narrative build. An emotional brand ad with an inverted pyramid loses all its charm.

A modern variant is BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front), popularized by military and management correspondence: the first line of the message contains the conclusion or the request, and the rest justifies it. For workplace emails it works better than almost any alternative.

The Minto pyramid (consulting, 1973)

Barbara Minto, the first woman consultant at McKinsey, formalized in The Pyramid Principle (1973) a structuring method that became a standard in strategy consulting. The idea: start with the conclusion—the answer to the question the reader has—follow with the key arguments that support it, and then with the data that supports each argument.

The classic structure:

• Situation: shared context that orients the reader.
• Complication: the problem or question the context raises.
• Question: explicit or implicit.
• Answer: the conclusion.
• Arguments: two or three reasons that support the answer.
• Support: data, examples, evidence for each argument.

When it works: presentations to executive committees, B2B client proposals, internal memos, strategic recommendations. Audiences that value having the conclusion before the details.

When it fails: emotional persuasion, editorial content, narrative. If the reader isn't predisposed to consider your answer, putting it first can trigger rejection before the arguments.

AIDA (advertising, 1898)

E. St. Elmo Lewis, an insurance salesman and sales trainer, formulated the AIDA model in 1898: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. It was a description of how a buyer moves from first contact to decision, and it became the most-taught framework in 20th-century advertising copywriting.

• Attention: capture the eye. A headline, an image, a question.
• Interest: give reasons to keep reading. A promise, a benefit, novelty.
• Desire: make the person want what you offer. Social proof, examples, demonstration.
• Action: ask for the next step. Book, buy, download.

When it works: short ads, direct sales pages, sales emails, landing pages with a clear conversion. Cold audiences who are just learning about the offer.

When it fails: informational content, long-term brand building, internal communication. AIDA is very "salesy," and applied out of context it sounds forced.

PAS (Problem, Agitation, Solution)

A variant more focused on the customer's pain. Its popularization is attributed to copywriter Dan Kennedy (the '80s), though the pattern is older. The structure:

• Problem: the discomfort the person has.
• Agitation: deepen the discomfort, its consequences, the cost of not solving it.
• Solution: the proposal as the way out.

It works because it operates on the loss-aversion bias documented by Kahneman and Tversky in their prospect theory work (1979): people feel a loss more strongly than an equivalent gain. A message that first reminds you of what you lose by not acting predisposes you to accept what's being offered.

When it works: products that solve clear pains (software for operational problems, professional services, tools that save time). Audiences who already feel the problem and need it to be named.

When it fails: aspirational products, luxury brands, contexts where the person doesn't want to hear about problems. Misapplied, it sounds manipulative—"pushing the pain" to sell. There's an ethical line between helping name a real problem and exaggerating a marginal one to force the sale.

The story formula (Freytag, Campbell, three acts)

For messages with a narrative dimension—long spots, brand videos, case studies, founder presentations—the inverted pyramid and AIDA fail. What works is the structure of a story.

Gustav Freytag, in Die Technik des Dramas (1863), described the five-act structure of classical tragedy: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement. Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), formulated the "hero's journey" as a pattern common to myths across many cultures: the call, the threshold, the trials, transformation, the return. Donald Miller adapted this framework to marketing in Building a StoryBrand (2017), placing the brand as the guide and the customer as the hero.

The minimal functional structure for a brand message:

• A character with a concrete goal.
• A problem that keeps them from achieving it.
• An encounter with a guide (the brand, the product) who has a plan.
• A plan or method.
• An action the character takes.
• A result—success or failure avoided.

When it works: spots of 30+ seconds, founder videos, success stories, new-product presentations, editorial brand content.

When it fails: short ads where the story won't fit, direct emails, B2B content where the reader is looking for efficiency, not narrative.

Social media hooks (2010s–present)

Social networks like TikTok, Reels, and LinkedIn—where the viewer scrolls with a thumb and decides in one or two seconds—forced a different structure. The important thing isn't to introduce the protagonist or the context: it's to stop the thumb.

The typical structure:

• Hook: a counterintuitive statement, a question, a striking fact, a concrete promise. In the first 1–3 seconds.
• Minimal context: one or two sentences that orient, just what's needed.
• Value: the content the hook promises—explanation, demonstration, lesson.
• Close / soft CTA: an invitation to comment, save, follow, visit the profile.

Hooks that recur because they work: "Most people do X, and that's why they fail," "This changed how I understand Y," "If you do Z, stop doing it," "Three things I wish I'd known about…"

When it works: social media, organic content, short in-feed ads.

When it fails: institutional content, formal communications, premium B2B. A very "social media" hook in a corporate proposal lowers credibility.

"Made to Stick" (Heath, 2007)

Brothers Chip and Dan Heath analyzed in Made to Stick (2007) why some ideas are remembered and others forgotten, and formulated the acronym SUCCESs:

• Simple: a single core idea, not a list of six.
• Unexpected: breaks expectations, surprises.
• Concrete: sensory details, specific numbers, not abstractions.
• Credible: internal or external proof that supports the claim.
• Emotional: connects with something the person feels.
• Stories: narrative, not just data.

It's not a message structure but a set of criteria for evaluating any message, whatever structure it has. Useful as a final check: before publishing, does the message meet five of the six? If not, it'll probably be forgotten. To keep things simple without losing information, it helps to group ideas into manageable blocks; see chunking.

How to choose, in practice

There's no "good" structure in the abstract. There's the structure that suits the channel, the moment, and the reader.

• An email to a colleague or client who's short on time: BLUF. Conclusion or request in the first line.
• A press release: inverted pyramid.
• A proposal to a B2B committee: the Minto pyramid.
• A direct sales ad: AIDA or PAS.
• A 30+ second brand spot: story structure.
• A Reel or TikTok: hook + value + soft CTA.
• A long sales page: a combination of PAS at the start and Minto in the body.
• A founder presentation: a story.
• An internal memo: BLUF + Minto.

What almost never works: starting by talking about the company. "At Polimake we believe that…" can appear somewhere in the message, but rarely in the first line. The first line belongs to the reader, not the sender.

Mistakes that make any structure invisible

Starting with the brand. "We're a company that…", "For twenty years we've…". It wastes the first second of attention talking about something the reader doesn't care about yet.

Multiple main messages. "And also…" is a sign there's too much material. A piece has one main message; the secondary ones live in another piece.

Generic benefits. "Improves productivity," "helps you grow," "boosts results." Phrases that could apply to any product. Concreteness is more convincing: "cuts the campaign approval cycle from three weeks to three days."

Lack of proof. Every strong claim without support loses credibility. A data point, a case, a testimonial, a metric. Without proof, the promise sounds like generic advertising.

A weak CTA. "Contact us for more information" is the formulation that converts the least. "Book a fifteen-minute demo," "download the example," "reply with your preferred date" work better because they're concrete, low-cost actions.

The seller's language, not the buyer's. If the client says "we don't have time to review every piece," don't write "we optimize the asset validation flow." Write "we bring reviews into a single place so you get your time back." Speaking the customer's language seems obvious, and almost nobody does it well.

Length out of inertia. More words isn't more argument. Every paragraph that doesn't add, subtracts. Before publishing, read the text and delete everything the reader would understand without it.

How it fits into the workflow

The quality of a message depends on the prior work—customer research, positioning, hierarchy of value propositions—and on the discipline of the moment of writing. In small teams, one person does everything. In larger teams, it's divided up.

Creative operations are what ensure that division doesn't break the message. At Polimake, Studio translates positioning and research into the message and script; Media executes the piece in format (video, copy, page, presentation); Studio coordinates approvals and publishing so the message arrives on time and on its channel.

This logic connects with persuasive communication as the broader theoretical territory, with the call to action that closes every message, and with the choice of tone and voice that separates a generic message from one with identity.

To close

Structuring a message isn't following a template. It's choosing, among structures proven over centuries, the one that serves this reader, on this channel, with this goal. Whoever knows several structures can choose; whoever knows one always applies the same one—even when it's the wrong one.

The structures in this article—inverted pyramid, BLUF, Minto, AIDA, PAS, story, hook—aren't magic recipes. They're lenses for looking at any piece before publishing and asking: is this the right architecture for the reader who's going to read it? If the answer is yes, the message has a reasonable chance of working. If it's no, the number of words devoted to it won't save it.

Quick references

• A quick email: BLUF. Conclusion in the first line.
• A press release: inverted pyramid.
• A B2B proposal: Minto.
• A direct ad: AIDA or PAS.
• A brand spot: a story (hero, problem, guide, plan, action, result).
• A vertical social post: hook + value + soft CTA.
• A long sales page: PAS at the start + Minto in the body.
• Before publishing: run it through SUCCESs (simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, story).
• Don't start with the brand. Start with the reader.
• One main idea per piece. The rest goes in another piece.