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MESSAGINGA practical guide to marketing with words that will resonate with your target customers.
GET IT RIGHT
// DOES YOUR STORY RESONATE?Messaging is a critical component of any successful marketing campaign. It’s the voice of your brand, the narrative of your business, the key to luring new customers over to your side. And, today, more than ever, as we’re bombarded with some of the 27 billion pieces of content shared daily, crafting the right message is crucial to your success.
Your story needs to reel your prospects in quickly...but does it?
As buyers contemplate their purchase plans, only 47 percent of the information they review comes from the actual suppliers they’re mulling over, according to the Corporate Executive Board.
If you have a handful of competitors, that means those potential customers are spending only 10 to 15 percent of their time actually reviewing your website, ebooks and marketing materials. What’s more: Just 14 percent of B2B buyers see an important distinction between what you and your competitors have to offer.
You have a story to tell. But, are you telling the right story to truly capture your prospective customers’ interest? Do you stand out? Are you talking to your custo-mers or at your customers? Are you speaking their language? Do you even know?
Of information that buyers review comes from the actual supplierCONSIDER THIS:
ONLY
47%
IT’S TIME TO FIND OUT.
ONLY
10-15%
of time potential customers spend reviewing your marketing material
ONLY
14%of B2B buyers see an important distinction between competitors
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// SYMPTOMS OF POOR MESSAGING
The indicators that your company is not properly communicating with the market span the entire sales & marketing spectrum. Here are a few illustrative examples that can ultimately impact your ability to drive revenue:
Messaging can be one of the root causes of the whole sales-marketing alignment drama.
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01/ Your messaging was created in a conference room with internal stakeholders only.
03/ Few quality prospects engage with your lead generation campaigns.
04/ Sales wants more leads, better leads and better tools to help close them. (Can you say “sales-marketing alignment”?)
02/ Your messages focus too much on your product & features and not enough on what your customer needs.
05/ Sales makes up their own messages and sales tools when they talk to prospective customers.
Apples’ Steve Jobs once said, “Your customers don’t care about you. They don’t care about your product or service.”
“They care about themselves, their dreams, their goals,” he said. “Now, they will care much more if you help them reach their goals and, to do that, you must understand their goals, as well as their needs and deepest desires.”
To put Jobs’ point another way: Your customers care about their pain, not your pill. They don’t care if your solution is effective, flexible or winning. They just want to know if it will, for instance, clear all of the spam from their inbox so they can move forward with their own brilliant ideas and plans.
Consider this messaging for an anti-spam product that we’ll call SpamClear:
SPAMCLEAR: An agile, efficient solution for your inbox
GOT SPAM? Delete it with SpamClear
Customers with bloated inboxes might understand that SpamClear has something to do with spam after reading that first example, which focuses exclusively on the product’s offerings. They’ll know exactly what it does after reading the second, which focuses on potential customers’ problems.
As you craft an effective message, here’s a hurdle to keep in mind.// THE PAIN VS THE PILL
YOUR CUSTOMERS DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU. THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR PRODUCT OR SERVICE. THEY CARE ABOUT THEMSELVES, THEIR DREAMS, THEIR GOALS. Steve Jobs
vs.
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Messaging can be powerful when it’s done right.
But wordsmithing alone doesn’t create an effective storyline. The power happens when companies understand the motiva-tions and the language of the people they’re trying to sell to. When companies communicate in the lexicon of their target customers and about issues that actually interest them, good things happen across the entire sales and marketing spectrum – more leads, better leads, healthier sales funnels. But few are attempting that translation.
In fact, many B2B companies inadvertently focus on themes and pitches that have very little influence on buyers’ impres-sions, according to a McKinsey & Company survey of 90 global B2B companies.
The survey found that companies tend to focus on messages that are not considered important by their target customers and that the messages were often not well differentiated from those of competing companies.
When you communicate using the wrong words, you might as well be shouting at the market in a foreign language.// SPEAK THEIR LANGUAGE
Make sure you address the pains and motivations your customers care about AND make sure you do it using the same words and phrases they would use!
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Does your product strategically optimize efficiency? Is there a lot of utilizing, facilitating and incentivizing going on? If so, your message might just be guilty of too much marketing jargon.
Stop it. In any writing form, small words always have more impact than big ones.
Words like agile, strategic and compelling have little meaning in a product description. If you’re throwing out phrases like that, you’re not really hitting the thing your prospective cus-tomer really cares about.
Author Oscar Wilde once said: “Don’t use big words. They mean so little.”
In other words, just use plain old English.
Don’t use big words. They mean
so little.
Oscar Wilde...in other words, just use plain language.
// BIG WORDSOne more thing about communicating with words that mean something to your target customers: don’t fall into the trap of trying to make your value proposition sound more complex than it needs to be.
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You want your product to be in the customers’ need-to-have category, but the wrong message could send you to the nice-to-have bucket — the kind of purchase that might happen if the budget ever allows. Few buyers will ever champion a product that they think is just nice to have. They might engage in a conversation with your sales team, but they’ll never pull the trigger.
When that happens, your sales team is left with leads that never become customers. Prospects download your ebooks or attend your webinars with no intention of ever actually buying what you’re offering. The pipeline of leads gets bigger and bigger — but nobody makes a purchase decision.
Sometimes the need-to-have is not what you think. We’ve worked with some clients that have gone for the make money or save money angle in their messaging, only to find out later that the real needs were risk and compliance management.
The pipeline of leads gets bigger and bigger … but nobody makes a purchase decision.// NEED VS NICE
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1. Engineers, so ingrained in their work, don’t take marketing seriously and push messaging in a direction of confusing of technical terms or features.
2. The CEO, so proud of the vision, insists his solution is described as if it solves world hunger, even though it might just clear spam from an inbox … helpful, sure, but, perhaps, a smaller impact on the world.
3. The entire group pulls together ideas with the help of a white board and Expo markers. By the time everybody’s opinion is considered and that message map is created, the final result is “Messaging Pablum” – a bland mess of marketing medio-crity. The resulting words don’t mean anything to anybody outside of the company or even the room … especially not those future customers.
4. The marketing team gets this blob of mush with the request to “punch it up” or “make it sound better.”
It’s easy to see why so many companies fail at creating impactful messaging. The so-called magic happens in a conference room. There, internal sales, product and marketing teams sit with, perhaps, a consultant and somebody from the C-suite.
These situations all represent an inside-out approach to marketing - crafting a message internally with the hopes that it might just capture some buyers on the outside. (Hope is not a strategy).
// DITCH THE WHITEBOARD
/ /DEPENDING ON THE CULTURE OF THE COMPANY IN QUESTION, ANY NUMBER OF SCENARIOS FOLLOW:
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IT’S TAINTED. IF YOU’RE ATTEMPTING
TO BUILD AN
AND YOUR FOCUS
HAS BEEN ON
CURRENT CUSTOMERS
AND YOUR
FELLOW EMPLOYEES,
THE WRONG PEOPLE
ARE STILL TALKING TO
THE WRONG PEOPLE.
EFFECTIVE MESSAGE
Don’t look to your current customers, at least exclusively, as you create an effective message. They’re not going to give you the big picture that you need either.
They already drank from your punch bowl. And it’s easier for them to say what they think you want them to say than for them to be really truthful … especially if they think they’re bracing themselves against another sales pitch.
Win-loss analyses aren’t enough either. Talking to people who have heard the pitch, but said no, should be part of the picture as you create your message, but not the only one. And, often, you won’t get the real answer from them anyway.
Insight from sales might not be insightful. The sales team may have failed to close that deal for any number of reasons — a C-level leader lives next door to your competitor or the budget was cut or it wasn’t a need-to-have item. But that’s not really valuable information to help you look for new customers.
// LOOK BEYOND YOUR CURRENT CUSTOMERS
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DO NOT: Ӏ Craft it only with internal stakeholders and a white board. Your
future customers are not inside the walls of your office building.
Ӏ Be swayed by internal political forces or power brokers. Too often the loudest voice in the room wins the messaging debate.
Ӏ Limit yourself to feedback from only your existing customers - they are going to be predisposed to parroting what they’ve heard and reluctant to break bad news to you.
Ӏ Get lulled into a false sense of security with “Features and Benefits.” Just because there are benefits, does not mean you’ve hit on the core buying motivation.
Here are key points to help you get your messaging right.// OKAY, SO HOW TO DO IT RIGHT?
DO: Ӏ Include customer thoughts – there is valuable information
to be gleaned, but be sure to go further.
Ӏ Include win-loss analysis – especially the losses. Find out if your value is nice-to-have or need-to-have.
Ӏ Include prospect interviews – ditch your marketing speak and communicate in plain language to get inside their heads.
Ӏ Ensure intellectual honesty in your research by using a neu-tral third party to conduct the interviews. Yes - admittedly, this is self serving for Thirdside as this is one of our core services, but we fully support this approach. In fact, we use third parties when we need research conducted on behalf of our agency.
x
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To build a message that really resonates with your market, is written in your future customers’ language and turns leads into actual sales, you need to talk to the people who have never purchased your product … the companies who have never even heard of your offerings, the organizations you hope to sell to one day.
The candid (and often critical) responses you need won’t materialize when the inter-view comes through your sales team or marketing department. The hard facts are the result of neutral third party interviews, conducted without the stress of a sales pitch or any other expectations other than solid, truthful answers.
We do that at Thirdside. Our experienced team of senior marketing and sales profes-sionals have carried sales quotas and run marketing departments. We know your pain: You want to build sales, drive results, exceed expectations. You want to close deals.
We’re not afraid to pick up the phone to ask the kinds of frank questions that will get you the direct answers that you need.
As they say, there are three sides to every story: Your side, your market’s side and the truth. We bring you truth in marketing.
// THE THIRDSIDE APPROACH
YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND CUSTOMERS’ NEEDS BEFORE THEY UNDERSTAND YOUR TECHNOLOGIES. business author Steven Haines.
KNOW: WHO TO CALL ON, WHAT TO SAY AND HOW TO REACH THEM.
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