What are some common Messaging mistakes you see Product Marketers make?

Messaging is hard to get right. At its best, messaging is a clear and simple distillation of who you are, what you do, and why it matters. But in my experience, there are a few common themes that lead to missing the mark:1. Trying to connect with too wide an audience. No messaging, no matter how clever or well-written, will resonate with every audience. The act of trying to make it work for every buyer persona, every company size, and every industry eventually leads to generic messaging that mig ...Read More

I love this question. Over the course of my career, I’ve seen inexperienced and experienced product marketers (including me) commit a variety of messaging capital “sins”.Here is my list of the top 3 messaging capital “sins” to avoid:1. Starting with the WHATThis is perhaps the most common mistake marketers will make and also the one that will most negatively impact the stickiness of your message. Due to their close relation with product, product marketers will often develop a message around what ...Read More

There’s basically one big one and that’s focusing too much on product/benefit and not enough on fitting the narrative into how a customer views their world, their priorities, and setting the table for the new world. There are all kinds of tools for salespeople to essentially become a consultative partner to their customer - Command of the Message, Challenger Selling, etc. As marketers, we don’t really have a single framework to help us build a narrative in the way that these sales frameworks do. ...Read More

Several things come to mind here:Messaging is too generic: you’ve not done a good job of really identifying the audience and understanding what they care about in order to develop a specific message Messaging doesn’t “provoke:” the objective of a message is to get your audience to do or feel something - if its too blase, you’ll have a hard time achieving that objective Messaging is inward focused: if you’re targeting an external audience, you’ve not done a good job of using the words/mental mode ...Read More

Not value-oriented: They focus on features and functionality, not value and benefits They’re not customer-centric: They aren’t putting themselves in the target audience’s shoes, to make sure the language is what customers would use and the benefits are things customers would care about Writing copy instead of messaging: You can write some great-sounding sentences that are more copy than messaging; that is, it's hard for other people to distill down the essence of what you're trying to say and th ...Read More

Every company wants to be the #1 in their field. I would argue that if your company is undeniably #1 in its market, you don’t often make this proclamation. People already know it. It’s very similar to the notion that “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” Companies believe that by saying they’re #1, consumers will feel a level of comfort knowing that they are buying the best.To solve this problem, ask yourself, “Are my potential customers really trying to buy #1?”Chances are, probably not – the ...Read More

One of the biggest mistakes I see when it comes to messaging in product marketing is trying to write to everybody at once. This comes back to the importance of who you are actually trying to reach with your content, if your language is too broad it won't land with anybody, better to be specific and make an impact with the audience you care about. This can also happen a lot when you write by committee - a surefire way to end up with sentences with many good words but don't mean much together. Thi ...Read More

Not validating it enough and getting sucked into internal debates between stakeholders. Messaging can be very subjective and emotional. When working on messaging for a new product - 1. Start very early, put the first draft of messaging and continue to refine. 2. Write the press release early too and use it as a way to create alignment. 3. Validate. validate. validate. Go onsite with customers, interview Beta users, and learn from CS/implementation/sales teams. This will help you drive buy-in to ...Read More

I think a lot of product marketers underestimate the importance of understanding why customers use their product at a fundamental level. I've made this mistake in the past where I've directly jumped to articulating product or feature value when working on messaging, instead of first trying to internalize how customers perceive product value. There's a few things you could incorporate into your messaging process to avoid these pitfalls:(1) Spend a lot of time using the product. If your product re ...Read More

The root cause of most messaging mishaps is: writing for yourself instead of the buyer. Here are some that I have overcome over the years: Leading with features instead of outcomes. It's easy to fall in the trap of highlighting what the product does and forget the buyer only cares what it does for them. Trying to say everything. The fastest way to say nothing is to cram in every capability, every persona, every use case. A message that targets everyone converts no one. Pick the one buyer and the ...Read More

One of the biggest mistakes I see product marketers make is they forget that their buyer is human. They have appealed to business case, logic, industry research, and demonstrate ROI, but sometimes they fail to simply tell a human story. B2B software buyers are people too. And like any buyer of really any product, they want to be pulled in by brands that "get" them. They are looking for themselves in the pages of your datasheets, web pages, and slide decks. So I always think that product marketer ...Read More

Not leading with empathy – shouting about what your product is/does without putting it in the context of the users’/buyers’ actual problems and stating what business value/impact your product/solution will have for them. Using jargon or hollow words/phrases like: integrates/integrations, seamless, easy to use, innovative, etc. Or using hyperbole – best, only, greatest, etc – without backing it up with data or some other qualitative validation Copying competitors or starting from what competitors ...Read More

Here are some of the common messaging mistakes I've encountered working with clients and monitoring the positioning strategies of companies in all the major B2B software markets: •Failure to differentiate; •Long sales cycles due to market confusion; i.e., copycat messaging; •Multiple benefit claims that compete against each other for prominence and effectiveness; •Claims that fail any reasonable test of credibility; •Marketing campaigns fail because the message does not matter to the target audi ...Read More