What are the most common messaging mistakes you see product marketing teams making today?

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.

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.

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.

• 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.