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- your messaging as a cure for tough crowd
your messaging as a cure for tough crowd
also: tiny peckers, valid points, and pulling a Don Draper
Pavlo Cherniakov
July 07, 2024
Hey,
Last Thursday, Anthony and Robert from Fletch briefly went live on LinkedIn to do a Q&A session. Except they barely announced the thing in advance because it was more of a test.
Impromptu live sessions usually gather a tough crowd, and this was no exception.
(The proper—as in not a test one—LinkedIn event they do announce and promote in advance. Go register for the part 1 of 2 here.)
But this example shows the importance of messaging isn’t limited to just the website — it’s everywhere.
Virtually any marketing asset—and I’d argue that most non-marketing ones—communicates something:
homepage
pricing page
competitor page
demo request page
interactive demo
demo video
case study
paid ads
webinar
email course
LinkedIn posts
LinkedIn comments
ProductHunt launches
HackerNews comments
In a perfect world, all of these communicate roughly the same ideas, just from different angles — the pricing page focuses on the financial side of things while the competitor pages are more concerned with the rest of the consideration set, etc.
You want them to be at least somewhat aligned, just like you want people in your company be aligned on what to tell prospects and customers — nothing worse than being promised one thing by sales and hearing something completely different from customer support later.
But the real power of good messaging isn’t in just aligning these.
A strong product that clearly says what it does across assets isn’t enough to budge the “we already use X for that“ folks. Because—surprise!—they do already have a solution for that.
And pulling a Don Draper on them isn’t gonna work as well as it looks on the screen. It’s a tough crowd.
The real power of good B2B messaging is in shaping the narrative around the problem to make the buyer think that you’re right — because you are. Kinda like this:
The face you want your ideal buyers to be making when looking at any of your marketing assets.
And to make good, aligned points across your entire GTM motion, you do need to start with the market, the ideal buyer, and what their day-to-day problems are…
…then map those onto your product…
… and then map the entire thing onto your current and future marketing assets.
All of a sudden, the crowd ain’t so tough anymore — no matter where in the buyer journey they interact with you.
One of the marketing agencies I’m working with recognizes this — and they bring me on early into their new engagements to do exactly this, so their team could take that and hit the ground running fully aligned.
This is the canvas we’re using—with the video explainer. Someone did message me recently asking for permission to use it, so here’s a blanket permission to you:
Grab and use it on your own projects as you see fit, for free.
(And do let me know if you need help.)
