What are the most common mistakes in messaging and content development for a new product launch?

Don’t get only a partial view of your customer as if they only deal with the need your product is covering. You might be launching the best solution for one of the customer’s problems. But what if that problem is not prioritized by the customer because is one among many? Instead, have a 360 degrees perspective of your customer’s activities, dependencies and desired wins. Is in that complex ecosystem that your product value proposition should stand out.

Not only is it a mistake not to test, it's a mistake to test a *single* message with a *single* audience. At best, it gives you a binary answer: it works or it doesn't. Multivariate testing at this stage increases the likelihood of locating a match between value proposition and messaging on the one hand and audience on the other. And it saves a ton of time! Also, surveys and focus groups will only tell you "stated preference"--what customers think they will do--not what they will actually do. Use a behavioral testing method instead.

And test in multiple languages and cultures. Even great brands have used product naming with wrong meaning in other languages, tag lines which don’t translate elegantly or copy with bad cultural fit in some key international market.

Actually, I would argue the problem is the exact opposite for most tech companies. In our experience, marketers in B2B often ONLY share benefits and outcomes without ever explaining the features and capabilities. Yet the features and capabilities are the primary way for you to differentiate against your competitors — especially when connected to a target audience. Different segments care about different things, so highlighting the relevant capabilities and explaining how they improve on their unique context is the key to differentiation (rather than talking about high level outcomes like “boosting your revenue,” which everyone says in the exact same way.)

Are users = buyers or not? If yes, outcomes and features can be explained to the same brain. If not, which is often the case in more complex B2B software, outcomes & benefits are more for budget owners/buyers, while features and capabilities are more for users. And you will need to figure out the right mix of focus between the two levels of explanation.

A buyer's journey is after all an experience journey. So design it well so that you can turn strangers to paying customers. 1. Map out the stages of the buyer's journey. 2. Identify the steps in each stage that are taken by the potential buyer. 3. Identify the problems they face to complete each step. These could be current situation, motivations, outcomes needed for the specific step, etc. 4. Create assets (incl. content) for each step to address the job-to-be-done. Eg. Comparison between your brand vs alternatives, thought leadership pieces, technical evaluation, etc. When creating content, make sure that: 1. Your brand has positioned itself in a nice blue ocean with defensible moat. 2. Your messaging is hyper-specific to the buyer.

Whenever you can tie a campaign into a conversation, issue or pop culture moment that's already in the zeitgeist, the easier it will be to market. So think about what hook you can use to make your campaign and service or product relevant right now.