Three Essential Steps to Messaging that Makes Prospects Buy

Creating effective messaging is not easy work; it’s an art.

Far more than being able to put words together well, it requires an empathy with your prospect that takes time and effort to develop.

The tips below won’t have you writing better messaging tomorrow, but they will help you improve your messaging process, which will ultimately lead to a better final product.

Remember, the words you put on your blog post, landing page, or introductory email will often be a prospect’s first and only interaction with you. It’s important to make them count.

Before You Start, Make Sure You Know Your Buyer

Before you try to craft messaging, you need to know your buyer.

I’m not talking about knowing their job title and annual budget, I mean you need to know them inside and out:

• What is important to them?
• What goals and metrics determine their success?
• What problems do they keep thinking about even after they’ve left the office?

This kind of knowledge will not only allow you to create powerful messaging, but it will also help you serve their needs better.

I could write an entire book on how to better know your buyer, but someone already did. The most important thing to keep in mind is this: in order to really understand your audience, you need to spend time talking to them.

It’s not a novel idea, but it’s one I’ve seen too many marketers forget. Online communities, ever-expanding resources, and a constant stream of research reports have made it possible to study almost any group of professionals without ever leaving your office.

While this information can be valuable, it should be treated as supplementary. The real knowledge comes from live interaction with your buyers, both formal and informal alike.

Now that I’ve addressed that important point, here are the three essential steps to messaging that makes prospects buy.

Write With a Goal

Great messaging and general messaging don’t often overlap.

The best writing is highly targeted, and crafted with a specific goal in mind. After you’re confident that you know your buyer and what’s important to them, you need to determine what you want them to do.

“Buy my [product/service/gizmo/whatever]” may seem like the obvious answer, but it’s rare that anyone goes from knowing nothing about you to buying from you just like that.

Instead, your buyer needs different messaging for different parts of their journey.

There are three main goals you should focus on when creating your messaging:

a) Piquing Interest

When a prospect is learning about you for the first time, they don’t need to know everything all at once.

Resist the urge to over-explain, and stick to the essentials:

• Who is your product for?
• What problem does it solve?
• How does it solve that problem differently (and hopefully better) than other solutions they may have tried?

This is the type of messaging that makes up elevator pitches, landing page copy, and introductory emails. Write this first. It’s the most important and will inform all of your other messaging.

b) Building Trust

Although it would be nice is everyone who was interested in your product bought right away, that obviously isn’t the case.

For those who don’t, you should continue to build their trust with messaging that shows you understand them and their concerns (see the previous point) but doesn’t specifically try to sell them on your product.

You’ll use this type of messaging for blog posts, infographics, eBooks, and other types of content marketing.

Great content marketing is a nuanced thing. I’ve seen marketers who try to sell their product with every blog post, which isn’t at all helpful to the reader, but I’ve also seen marketers spend too much time and money spinning their wheels, offering great resources to their readers, but letting their product get lost in the shuffle.

Here’s a general rule of thumb: every piece of content marketing you generate shouldn’t try and sell your product, but each one should be a step in the path toward selling your product.

It’s a subtle distinction, but it will make all the difference in the success of your content marketing efforts.

c) Sealing the Deal

OK, it’s time to close. This is the messaging that makes up sales decks, pitch scripts, and proposals.

This messaging should be an extension of the piquing interest messaging, but with more detail. You also need to answer important questions that drive the sale, like:

• Why should I buy from you instead of [competitor?]
• Why should I buy now instead of six months from now?

And so on. Finally, you need to answer the question, “Why should I buy at all?”

The #1 competitor for most products isn’t a similar product, it’s not buying a solution at all.

You should do your best to speak directly to the pain your potential buyer is experiencing:

• What is it costing them in time or money?
• How does it affect their day-to-day?
• What will change once they implement your solution?

Your ability to answer these questions effectively will have a significant impact on your bottom line.

Write More Than You Need

In the beginning of the messaging process, over-writing is good. You should always put more words on the page than you intend to use.

For one thing, it will help with message testing (more on that below), for another, it’s rare that you’re going to nail it the first time. If you want to come up with three key benefits of your product, make a list of ten and whittle it down later.

This process works because what seems most important to you isn’t always most important to your audience.

Even if you did a great job getting to know them before crafting your messaging, your prospects will still surprise you. They’ll be very interested in a feature you think is minor, or a certain benefit will resonate with them that you didn’t think was a big deal.

This approach not only helps you think outside the box, but it also gives you plenty of messaging to rotate and test.

If you don’t take the time to craft messaging points for every possible aspect of your product, your messaging won’t be the best it can be.

Testing, Testing

Testing your messaging is the most important aspect of creating messaging that resonates. Even if you feel like you’ve written the best possible sentence, paragraph, or pitch, you shouldn’t treat it like it’s written in stone.

You need to test it on your audience and see what works for them. What works for you is irrelevant.

There are a number of ways to test your messaging, but I’ll share my top 3.

a) PPC Landing Pages

This is probably the most metric-driven way to test your messaging.

Create two landing pages that each have different messaging. Send traffic from the same campaign through each and take a look at your conversion rates.

If the messaging is the only thing that changes between pages, it’s a good bet that the page with the higher conversion rate contains the messaging you should use.

One caveat: make sure you get get enough data to make this A/B test valuable. 50 conversions won’t do it. 500 is better.

b) In Conversation

I don’t think there’s any replacement for this one. You have to try out your messaging on real people, and in person if possible.

Keep in mind, these people should be your buyers, not the guy two desks down.

Tell them about your solutions and pay close attention to their reactions. What do they respond to? What do they ask questions about?

This takes some practice, but it’s absolutely worth it.

Nothing will help you shape your messaging better than getting real-time reactions and feedback.

c) On Sales Calls

If you trust your sales team — and you should — they can be an invaluable resource for message testing.

They can provide feedback on what their prospects are responding to, either formally through win/loss conversations, or informally, during regular meetings.

I’d also encourage you to take the time to listen to sales calls, either recorded or live. Not only will you get a chance to hear how prospects respond to messaging, but you’ll get to know them better, too.

At the beginning of this article, I wrote that crafting effective messaging is an art. While I think that’s true; it’s also an intentional process.

The steps above should give you a framework to build such a process for yourself. Follow it closely, and you’ll have better messaging — and more buyers — in no time.