The Art of Getting your Product Messaging Right and Common Mistakes to Avoid

Your prospective customer will not select you if you have a convoluted, confusing, or duplicate messaging. We all know that. But the strange thing is most of us continue to make the same mistakes that make our messaging get lost in the maze of confusion, which needless to say won’t resonate with your buyers. So, what should a product marketer do? This article endeavors to identify some common mistakes that we all make and offers recommendations as to how to avoid making them. After all, without a clear message why should your buyer listen to you

?Our Messaging is getting diluted

How many of us have been guilty of using broad generalizations to create our messaging? Haven’t we all used phrases like “enhances productivity” and “reduces downtime” in the hope that our product stands out? But this approach reduces any product differentiations that the product might have and thus makes the product story irrelevant.

As a product marketer, most of us have also been guilty of including too much information. The art of communication also requires us to first decide what is most important and sacrifice anything is not important to the product story. But alas, most of us give in to various pressures, especially from sales and incorporate everything. This inability to forego the fluff, makes messaging generic and lacking focused.

Few Recommendations to avoid dilution of your messages

Get your target audience right and make sure the messages are tightly linked to the problems your customer wants to get solved. No point in being everything to everyone and end up being nothing to no one

Avoid technical descriptions and use the benefits that your product brings to the table. No one is that interested in the backend technology that you use but keener to know what you can do for them

Be clear on the impact of your product benefits and how it solves the user’s problems. No need to talk features or go full technical. Remember your content is just a trailer to your product, not the entire movie

Common Mistakes to avoid in getting your Messaging Right

1)Targeting Everyone

It is widely acknowledged that the easiest way to end up pleasing no one is to try and pleasing everyone. Targeting your audience also works in the same way. The easiest way to fail in your messaging is trying to be everything for everyone. If you are in the business of selling a marketing automation software and you are targeting the CMO, often you will fail. The decision on choosing the tool is made by some one at least 2 levels below. It is his problem that you need to identify and solve. And needless to add, if your tool is solving his problem very well, it won’t be that relevant to the CMO. Many product marketers make the mistake of creating a top-down hierarchy of the decision making team and send the same message to every one in the team, right from the CMO to the intern. Isn’t likely to work, is it?

?Recommendation

Select a clearly defined target audience or ideal customer profile that is identifiable and actionable Then, you can use the language and the value statements that best support that target audience. Done correctly, it should be self-evident to the reader what audience you are targeting, using language specific to their challenges, role, or industry. For example, if you are selling a sales enablement tool that allows you to track usage of content by the sales team, its no point creating messaging meant for product marketers.

2)Communication Overload

There is a dialogue in the movie Cliffhanger where the main villain asks his girlfriend to define what is love. When she can’t answer, he butts in saying the real meaning of love is sacrifice. On similar lines, if you love your product and want its benefits to resonate well, you will need to sacrifice all the fluff and unnecessary information and include only that which is most pertinent. One of the major mistakes we all make is to include every little, teeny-weeny detail about the product little realizing that your buyers just don’t have the patience to read through all of them. Death by datasheets is a reality and decreases the buying intent.

Recommendation

Be clear and crisp when introducing your company. Describe your company in a few sentences only, and ensure you include what your primary business is. Are you a solution provider or an product?

?Engage your ideal buyers with the most important message that is relevant to them. This is your brief opportunity to present your value proposition and to gain their interest in what you have to say. ?

Start with shorter stories, using a gradual engagement approach that communicates just enough value to gain interest and makes the reader say or think “tell me more.

Build empathy through showing knowledge of the customer situation and providing a strong basis for the calls to action of why, why us and why now. Buyers need to be guided toward when and why they should focus on specific content that you provide. Empathy can also be created by demonstrating your understanding of their problems and how you have solved them in earlier situations. Even if you cant name clients from your case studies, using use cases and anecdotes is a good way for the above

3)Empty Claims

Haven’t we all made claims about our product which we knew wouldn’t stand the test of time or proof? Haven’t we all been guilty of including facts which are either questionable or already there with our competitors? In our hunger to stand we tend to make tall claims about issues like performance, scale, timelines, without sufficient customer case studies and testimonials to support them. More often than not, your prospects, do not believe these claims which in turn hurts the organization’s overall credibility

Recommendation

Try not to make claims like “the best”, “most reliable”, “fastest to deploy” without being backed by facts that are supported by named customer case studies. On the other hand, if you do have customer case studies that support any of your claims, do not hesitate for a second. Remember, in B2B marketing, only what your customer says about you is considered credible

4)Too much focus on yourself – Being Inside out rather than outside in

Many product marketers approach the problem from their point of view rather than that of their customer’s. They get so taken in by the product benefits that they write more about the product features, its architecture etc rather than the problem that it is solving for their customers. Your customers are not that interested in what you do and how you do but more in how you can solve their problems and alleviate their pain. If you don’t talk their language, its unlikely that you will be heard. If you are trying to get an urgent meeting with a CXO and the reason that you provide is because you are an Harvard graduate, it isn’t likely that the person will meet you. However, if you tell him, how that meeting can add value to his time, then there are chances that he might agree.

Recommendation

Evaluate your marketing content and answer the questions below:

1. ·????????Are there mentions of customer pain points?
2. ·????????Is there a description of the value a customer receives from your product?
3. ·????????Is there an image of a customer or a representation of the customer’s situation, workplace, or industry? ?Are your customers named in the content, such as their logos or customer references?

Only if all the above questions are answered with an yes, then you can rest assured that your messaging is on the right track

5) No Incentive Offered for Engaging

Many product marketers forget that apart from communicating the value of your product and what problem it can solve, they also need to give a compelling reason as to why a prospect should invest time, their most valuable commodity, to engage with your communication and content. If the reason for engaging isn’t convincing enough, he isn’t likely to view your entire video, read your white paper or believe your testimonial

Recommendation

Be clear in explaining the value that a prospect will receive for every action or engagement with you, however small. Why should prospects click, or fill in a form to download a white paper? Will you advise them on how you can help lower costs? Will you provide a complimentary evaluation or ROI tool that will help them take decisions? What will you provide that your competitors won’t? By sharing insight and guidance that prospects benefit from, you provide value to the prospect, and in exchange, they provide their attention.