With messaging, there’s a lot at stake. Messaging impacts your Marketing team’s ability to produce the right content and run successful, targeted campaigns. It also affects your Sales team’s ability to bring in revenue.
Messaging that resonates with your buyers is critical to all your Marketing and Sales content. It should represent your brand, product or solution in a way that considers your buyers’ specific needs and behaviors in order to help them learn what they need to continue moving through their buying journey.
Getting messaging right is key to any successful go-to-market strategy. When developing or refreshing messaging for a product, solution, industry or category, validating your messaging is a critical—and often overlooked—step.
Here’s a tried and tested approach to successful messaging validation.
When
Early! Validate before you start investing in the continuous flow of content and campaigns that will be developed based on the messaging.
Who
- Identify who should validate the messaging your team creates.
- Meaningful validation requires a bias-free look at your solution or product. Internal employees are generally not a good fit for market validation. They wear brand goggles and see your company’s challenges with a partisan view.
- Test your messaging with people that are representative of your audience. Make a simple grid of messages and audience constituents and fill it in to make sure you test your messaging against 2 or 3 people that represent each audience.
How
- Meet with your validators individually.
- Preface the conversation with information about what type of feedback you’re looking to get from them.
- Talk through your messaging and/or pitch.
- Get their feedback. Listen to and note their language, reactions, hesitations and concerns. Talk through anything that does not align with your expected reactions and dig into the point of view or market climate that is driving their opinions.
- Next, iterate your messaging. Don’t have all your conversations at one time on the initial version—take the opportunity to iteratively refine and hone the messaging through a series of conversations over a period of time. It could take days, weeks, or even longer depending on the scope and pace of your project.
- Present your revised messaging to your validators for feedback on how well you addressed their opinions.
- Make sure to thank them.
- Validate with a quantitative process as well as this qualitative one, if feasible. This is only practical if you have sufficient traffic to your website, and many B2B companies do not. However, if you are getting hundreds of visitors a day, using technology to A/B test your messaging is an excellent way to validate your messaging quantitatively.
Once you’ve validated your messaging, created content and implemented it in your go-to-market strategy, make sure to have a process in mind for how you’ll continue to collect buyer feedback. Listening to your buyers will help you address their needs and continuously build impactful messaging.