In our experience, messaging is the Bermuda Triangle of B2B marketing communication — where sales initiatives (like the idea of creating a 2-Minute Explainer), mysteriously disappear without a trace. Oddly enough, although I hear about messaging pretty often, it’s not defined anywhere I know of.
What goes on in these “messaging exercises” so many businesses take up? How does it come about that a business selling to other businesses can raise capital, rent offices, develop products, and engage sales staff without being able to say who is the likely buyer and why he or she might want to buy what they’re selling?
Anyway, here’s what we think makes for good messaging:
- Find out what successful salespeople say.
- Find out what customers ask about your product before they buy it, and what they say about using it.
- From all of this language, pull out the phrases that seem most resonant. Try them out. Replace them with better ones as you discover them. Today’s messaging technologies — phones, websites, email, PowerPoint, even 2-Minute Explainers — allow for continuous improvement.
- As much as possible, try to keep these messages in words that people actually use. A lot of engineers seem to believe that people in “marketing” speak a language that’s somehow more magical than the one the engineers use. Nonsense. If the marketing language sounds funny, it’s probably puffery, not magic.
- Relax. If you know your product, how likely is it really, that you’ll “send the wrong message”?