Messaging: How to Get it Right

thirdsidesolutions.com
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
2THIRDSIDESOLUTIONS.COM

// 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.
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.

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!

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 WORDS
One 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.

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

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:

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

DO NOT:
ӀӀ Craft it only with internal stakeholders and a white board. Your
future customers are not inside the walls ofyour office building.
ӀӀ Be swayed by internal political forces or power brokers. Too
often the loudest voice in the room wins the messaging debate.
ӀӀ 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.
ӀӀ 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:
ӀӀ Include customer thoughts – there is valuable information
to be gleaned, but be sure to go further.
ӀӀ Include win-loss analysis – especially the losses. Find out if
your value is nice-to-have or need-to-have.
ӀӀ Include prospect interviews – ditch your marketing speak
and communicate in plain language to get inside their heads.
ӀӀ 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

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.

thirdsidesolutions.com
We hate ebooks that conclude with “buy our stuff” too…
Hopefully you’ve gotten some useful tips here.
If we can help, contact us!
info@thirdsidesolutions.com919.362.1200

Messaging: How to Get it Right

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