6 Tips for Writing Better Messaging

Starting out by saying if you’ve spent any time around me, you know I loathe mavens, self-improvement gurus, and the like. I don’t believe that following someone else’s path makes you better. That being said I have managed some folks and put them through a clinic in messaging and they’ve turned into some of the strongest marketers I’ve ever seen. So much so I usually joke if I get hit by a bus the closest approximation to me that exists, that you could slot in is Tony. The funny thing is I don’t think I’m the strongest writer, I’m not grammatically a Rockstar or anything like that but I’m a damn good storyteller so much so that it often drowns out other talents I have in people’s perception of me. But enough of me being a blowhard let's get to the point at hand.

Knowledge is power, and knowledge transfer is a gift of power. So, I figured I’d pull back the curtains on the process a bit and give a look at some areas that can help improve your messaging work.

1.??????LISTEN!

I think it's safe to say this is one of those that a lot of people get wrong. You need to listen to the market before you ever put pen to paper. You need to occupy spaces and watercooler conversations your audiences frequent. You need to become so accustomed to hearing from them that you begin to think like them. I’m not deep in tech by any stretch of the imagination but I can carry on a conversation with a developer, Chief Data Scientist, IT Ops person, or a CIO. I used to pivot my messaging/positioning of a product in booths based on each audience believe it or not.

But this isn’t enough… on the backend you must also listen, and that means message testing. So many organizations I’ve been at or consulted for barely had any research to back up the messaging we were writing, Dell is very different very claims-oriented, and has a lot of available data points. At previous stops, I often didn't have a lot of A/B testing of the message, no rapid measurement, or my own personal favorite messaging listening exercises (Shout out to my colleague Jill Shoup absolute legend) for being the gateway to this information for me. Dell has been pretty great on the listening side of things. Sometimes we’d see a singular word in a message that threw off everything, we’d get the sentiment on if a customer thought the message was believable based on who we are and what products stand behind it. In essence, before I ever even launched a message I could avoid pitfalls.

2.??????Speak to an army of one

When I worked at Microsoft they had a course around effective messaging and branding taught by a professor from Kellogg School of Management. In this course, we were given 8 different personas of buyers and told to craft a 25-word statement. Each persona was given a certain population size, I did some math and thought I was clever. I thought we could win the game by targeting 3 separate groups and trying to bring them together with a message that fit the majority of their top-ranked needs. Cool exercise and I fell on my face. You see in trying to hit all 3 I watered down the message enough that when we split up the teams and had to vote as the customer side of things, not even I could vote for our messaging.

So let's take a look at this in practice with everyone’s favorite buzzword du jour “DevSecOps”.

There’s 2 ways we could go after this, and honestly, we probably have to do both in this instance to some degree. We can come up with a DevSecOps message something like:

Product X enables DevSecOps teams to move more rapidly and cohesively together via a shared workflow that leverages AI to streamline your CI/CD platform.

The other alternative is to target each individually, and I would argue this would be the greatest way to present the most value, but this also means you need many more deliverables to be successful.

For Ops for instance: Deliver the necessary service levels and empower your developers with rapid OnDemand access to reliable infrastructure via a common CI/CD platform that leverages AI.

For Developers: Spend more time innovating with a modern CI/CD platform that puts resources at your fingertips and leverages AI to reduce the operations burden.

For Security: Ensure all projects meet security and compliance objectives by integrating policy enforcement into your CI/CD platform and leveraging AI to monitor for configuration drift.

We did this at ExtraHop for the Gartner MQ and ended up outperforming every other networking company when it came to acquisition because we talked about the product differently for each audience.

Now those examples probably are not winning any awards I wrote them in 3 minutes. This brings us to our next bit.

3.??????Trust a bolt of lightning but it takes time

The best ideas come on like a bolt of lightning look no further than the great songwriter Paul McCartney writing the hit song “Get Back” out of nowhere. You see he’s got the beat, he knows where he wants to go, but it's not quite there. He keeps fumbling around with it, riffing on it, then the rest of the Beatles begin to add in parts and lean in. Its an exercise in “yes and” as a creator, I cannot stress how beautiful and like the process I go through even with the most boring (for most people) copy I’m writing.

As I work through my story, my first instincts are usually where the best ideas come from, but it's not tested, it's not tempered the words are not quite there, there are gaps in the thinking. For this reason, I usually tell people messaging is a 3 weeks exercise from the time I first put pen to paper before I have a proposed final. You want to harness the right side of your brain to build the foundation, and the left side to fortify it. One acts in moments and relies heavily on intuition, the other requires you to remove yourself and your feelings and question everything.

4.??????Words have power, but more is not better

It may seem crazy to spend 3 weeks getting it to final but every word must be questioned. How will an audience respond to it? Can we legally make that claim? Are we overpromising? Is it exclusionary? Only by being obsessed with finding the most powerful, impactful, and welcoming of words can we get to differentiation. At the same time, there is always the threat of drifting, of adding, of complicating. Most often the things we are writing about are very complex and add a lot of value in many different ways, but much like my 2nd point, there is a limit that audiences will tolerate.

Quite a few years back someone asked me who my hero was. I said, “My god I hate my hero”. That hero I had realized was Steve Jobs, I hated how he treated people, but I love how terse and to the point his marketing style was. The “iPhone Launch” is a great example of this, but I think my favorite as a music lover was this:

(pulled from Business Insider)

It's clear concise and the value to any user is clear. I’ve worked with companies whose product names are more words than this advertisement. So for any messaging exercise while there are 25, 50, 100-word blocks you might need to develop to cover various form factors of marketing. It’s those few words that will make it memorable.

5.??????Feelings > Explanations

I am a firm believer that people will remember how you make them feel longer than they recall what your product does. Once a quarter I go back and watch this clip by Simon Sinek to avoid drift in my messaging. I don’t appreciate his example of what doing this wrong is, but the lessons in this video are better articulated than what I could recreate so just running with it. The reality is the forces of business, especially in product management, are at odds with this rule. So it’s a balancing act, how to articulate your value proposition, how to differentiate, while still invoking emotions. Simon Sinek is an altruist and when it comes to branding and advertisements his advice would seem straightforward, but further down the marketing/sales funnel it gets muddy. Stakeholders want to be clearer about their unique value, and sometimes the customer ends up losing some of the clarity that a “start with the why” message delivers. Everything is a balancing act so I constantly have to remind myself of this to create my most impactful messaging.

6.??????Challenges are the foundation for solutions

Messaging isn’t a justification as to why a product should be purchased. So often we see products hit a market that doesn’t solve an obvious need, this is especially true with large companies that have plenty of money to spend and competitors to poach customers from. For me, I would never start a new business or a product without a problem I was passionate about solving. And this is how I approach my messaging. Maybe it's my German half speaking, it's not quite schadenfreude (taking pleasure in others’ pain), but where there is pain that is where there is need.

I was one of the first and most vocal voices calling out the IT skilled labor gap last year. How did I get to the largest story of 2022 (that still isn’t being told by so many)? I had a little help. I had friends who were Site Reliability Engineers, IT Ops folks, developers all drowning. I had customers previously tell me they couldn’t possibly embrace containers because they couldn’t retain people. Without these workers, digital transformation stops in its tracks. We are not making them in large enough numbers in a timeframe that will address it. Something I coined a “whiskey problem”.

Now that I have a challenge, now I have a reason to exist, a reason to share my message with these audiences. I understand you’re drowning, I’m here to help. We built automation into all our technology because we get your reality. Every day more is heaped on your plate, you don’t have the budget to hire yourself out of it, not everything can be outsourced or go to a public cloud, you need a smarter data center/ IT environment. We can help build you one.

In closing

I hope everyone finds this helpful. It’s what goes through my head every time I write anything. It helps me find a genuine connection with my audiences, it helps me better appreciate them, and always respect them. I’d love to hear from people what they’re doing. If this resonated? Where I might have landed on something antithetical to your own approach.