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

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.

The net of the issue is that we don’t stay focused on answering the 3 big ‘why' questions that a rep needs to answer to close a sale: 1) why buy anything, 2) why buy now, and 3) why buy you. The idea is that if your messaging/story can answer these three questions better than your competition, customers will buy from you.

Over the past couple years, I’ve been working with a couple dozen startups here at Unusual Ventures and see the same problem at play with our founders. So, I wrote a new messaging guide that we’re going to be publishing (for free) called “Three Why Storytelling ”. It’s a simple storytelling framework that nets out 6 steps to crafting a story that wins customers:

Why Buy Anything
1. Start with an authentic founder insight
2. Align on shared view of impact

Why Buy Now
3. Connect problem to business urgency
4. Show current solutions to be ineffective

Why Buy You
6. Frame new approach to solve the problem
7. Prove unique offering and value

Is this rocket science? No. You’ve probably seen each of these concepts in various forms all over. But this framework strives to simplify and codify the building blocks of a story that, when laid out together, form an airtight, irrefutable narrative that is purpose-built to lead customers to your solution as the best choice.

By the way, if I had to pick one ‘Why’ that is most underrepresented in messaging, it is most definitely Why Buy Now. We are conditioned to think in problem/solution terms. But the reality is that there are two types of problems - big problems (we’re moving from on-premises software to SaaS) and urgent problems (my business units are going around my IT team and signing up for SaaS apps like Dropbox and Concur, cutting us out of our core function!). Big problems are market-focused while urgent problems are customer-focused. Companies that obsess on Why Buy Now typically have a solutions marketing mentality that starts with the customer initiative and works back to product vs. the other way around.

Here’s the draft .pdf of 3 Why Storytelling. Would love any feedback! 

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 WHAT
This 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 the product is or what the product can do. This is what I call ‘product/feature-centric messaging’. This type of messaging tends to be more mechanical and spec-oriented and does not emotionally connect with the intended audience. Studies have shown that when it comes to purchasing and decision making, human beings more often use emotions rather than logic. This is why you need to start with the WHY. Why should the audience care about your product or brand? Why is your product or brand capable of solving their problems, fulfilling their wants and satisfying their needs? Companies that have a brand or product message that starts with the WHY are often rewarded with higher customer loyalty and can generate up to 5x times more revenue than their direct competitors. This is what I call Solution-centric or Customer-centric messaging. Here’s a great TEDx talk by Simon Sinek on why great leaders, great inventors and great brands always start with the WHY. 

2. The idea that “one size fits all”
I’ve seen it over and over again, when product marketers assume that everyone will understand their message, even if they have, indeed, started with the WHY. This happens because of one of two reasons. Reason number 1: “Assuming the market is homogeneous”. This assumption can leave out large sections of the intended target population. Assuming everyone behaves and feels the same will make your message generic and less memorable. Reason number 2: “Assuming everyone is your audience”. Often, product marketers driven by business objectives want to target the entire market assuming that everyone has a need for the solution they are trying to position. Regardless of the reason, one way to avoid these mistakes is to carefully develop a marketing research plan. This research should uncover insights about your target audiences, validate or discredit your assumptions and ideally, test your messaging and value propositions. The ultimate goal should be to understand that the market is heterogeneous in nature and that you should be building persona-based messages. 

3. Lost in translation
Global product marketers can be biased towards their local market. Often times, given the nature of where they are located or which market is the biggest, product marketers tend to craft messages around specific needs and wants that are not always relatable elsewhere. As I mentioned before, a good narrative is based on clear needs and wants that should have been uncovered through research. Assuming that the needs of one market are the same in another can be a catastrophic mistake. There are a lot of examples of successful companies that failed in specific markets because of this assumption. For example, one of the reasons Walmart failed in Germany, was because they had a belief that every western country has the same culture as theirs (USA). In America, it’s not uncommon for retail assistants to be chatty and friendly with the customers, and so Walmart decided to train its German employees with the same talk tracks as in America, and this, of course, did not go over well with Germans.

The problem with most US-based businesses is that once the message goes international, not enough thought is paid to how the intent will translate – literally or figuratively. There are several examples of campaigns that, when translated, produced humorous, and in some instances, catastrophic results. One of the most memorable ones is when Coors translated its campaign tagline, "Turn It Loose," into Spanish, where it is a colloquial term for having diarrhea. Here’s a link to the 20 most epic lost in translation marketing mistakes. 

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 might broadly apply but is no longer impactful. Great messaging requires focus.


2. Developing messaging by committee. In an ideal world, your CEO, sales team, and customers would all be perfectly aligned on what messaging you should use. But in practice, this is rarely the case. Many teams will naturally resort to creating “Frankenstein” messaging that tries to marry everyone’s preferences…and it almost never goes well.


3. Trying to fit in every last detail. Think about buying a car. For those of us with a long commute, you might care most about gas mileage. A salesperson might try to also sell you on the backup camera, entertainment console, and sunroof, but those don’t solve your biggest problem—getting to work in a cost-effective manner. So now instead of looking more impressive, the car seems bloated, expensive, and irrelevant. Too much detail often works against you.

• 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 models that your audience uses - and are using too many buzzwords/ internal lingo (“marketing speak”)

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 – they’re not trying to buy your product simply because it’s the best, they’re trying to buy some unique aspect or characteristic of your product that makes it the best.

What specific attributes of the market leading solution in your industry do buyers care about? The more specific you can be, the better.

Focus your messaging on yuor customers and their pain points not driving your own company messaging. This is key. The easiest way to identify this issue is to read your company’s messaging and simply ask yourself, “Does our company care about this, or does our potential customer?”

Lastly, humanize your message. To generate a message with impact, you’ll need to understand how it can be meaningful to your target audience. You want to create a “pull.” Building a connection with your prospects is way better than simply handing them the information, right? By doing so, you let them figure out how your products and services can be valuable to them.

• 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 they're instead forced to just use that copy verbatim or not at all. You should be able to distill down the core elements of the messaging into its key components, which can be phrased in different ways for different audiences and channels. 
• Thinking it has to be perfect right out of the gate and/or not revisiting messaging again after it’s shipped: Messaging is a constant evolution. You should continue to shape and mold it as you learn more and as the market changes. Air out those static, stale messaging docs every few months to see if there’s anything you can make better!

It can be hard to keep messaging simple and poignant. It takes time, revs, and validation. There's pressure to get it perfect right off the bat. Or people sit and forget. Let it evolve over time. 

Something I've learned is how valuable it can be to tap the emotional benefit. It's still important to have rational data points so they can justify the decision, but a great story compels. 

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. This is why I think it's really important to have a good chain of command for content creation > editing > publishing. If content touches too many hands it can end up in a state where it feels like a human didn't actually write it.

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 the new messaging by using the proof points from customer interviews. 

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 requires integration / implementation (like Modern Treasury :)), spend time with customer success, sales engineering and product developing a mental map of how the product fits into the customers workflows or business model.

(2) Identify jobs-to-be-done. I describe in detail why I like this framework so much here - https://dysposition.com/2021/08/13/part-2-positioning-for-startups/

(3) Go deep on the competition. Understand how they perform the same jobs for your ICP. This will help you ground your messaging in market realities, making it more compelling and relatable to your ICP.  

They set and forget. People change. Customers change. Needs change. So your messaging will need to change with it. For that reason, it's good to do a high-level analysis of your messaging at least annually, if not more often. Make sure it still resonates with customers, make sure additional segments haven't appeared, make sure conversions haven't decreased on key landing pages, etc. 

It's not uncommon to see a blurring of capabilities and benefits. 

With companies that are very product focused and have an(often justified) zeal for their offering's capabilities, I have seen features/capabilities presented as benefits. This can also be the result of not really thinking about the buyer enough, and what their real problem/challenge is. It's a result of inside/out type thinking.

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 audience;

•Spending hours debating what to say in the next marketing campaign;

•The product marketing and marketing teams can’t keep up with the demand for lead generation programs and campaigns because it takes forever to launch a campaign;

•Lack of understanding about what will resonate with the target audience.

Not speaking in the language of the customer. We often alienate our customer with jargon and irrelevant data points or benefits. We don't need to say everything we do in every single touchpoint. Be strategic, be succinct, and be customer-focused. 

I would also add that PMMs should focus on clarity over cleverness. If you can be clear and clever, then go for it. :)

• 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 are saying and then backing into how you're different vs. starting from your own market research, determining how your company/portfolio/product are unique in a way that you can validate with data and being BOLD about your differences and why they matter for a specific audience.

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 marketers need to start with an appreciation of the pain felt by their target buyer persona. They need to empathize with that. When starting from a place of empathy it's easier to find the language to connect and show buyers a better way, through whatever solution you're selling.