Developing a messaging strategy and knowing the strategy works are not the same.
This is why you need a plan to validate the efficacy of your messaging strategy. (Yes, this is true, even for strategies built with solid buyer data.)
A lot of interpretation happens between analyzing the calls, interviewing the frontline team and turning it all into a strategy. There are many, maaaaaaany decisions made between kickoff and strategy approval. As such, you should be validating your messaging strategy to make sure it lands the way you intended and results in the outcomes you want (like attention from the right people, sales, and also, hopefully, the kind of brand recognition that makes you the obvious choice in your category).
If you’re paying a consultant or agency for strategy development, or if you’re considering developing the strategy in-house, but you don’t have a plan or process for strategy validation, you’re exposed to a lot of risk. The biggest risk is that the strategy is too many degrees of wrong and you waste time (and, as a result, money) investing in execution that doesn’t deliver the outcomes you want. It’s safer if you validate your strategy early and often, with course-correction “checkpoints” built in as you implement.
So… how do you validate your messaging strategy? Here’s what I typically recommend:
Option 1: Your sales team. This is the fastest path, but it requires a willing partner in sales. Pick a small handful of reps who are game to test with you. They're talking to buyers regularly and will quickly know what's landing, what's not and what new questions are coming up as a result of messaging updates. And you’ll be able to watch those call recordings (or attend live), so you’ll have raw and team data to course-correct against.
Option 2: Email. The viability of this channel ultimately depends on your list quality, list health, typical engagement levels and content calendar. The main advantage is that email validation is typically faster than web validation, unless you already have a high volume of traffic on tightly targeted landing pages.
And, because I'm sure it'll be asked, I don't typically recommend validating messaging shifts using your homepage hero. Yes, it's highly visible marketing real estate. But most homepages receive so much mixed traffic that it can be challenging to get a clear read on messaging efficacy unless you have a reliable method to segment your traffic, either via testing or reporting. If you go this route, you must confirm that the way you want to isolate traffic is actually configurable within your tech stack. AND ensure that no one adjusts traffic composition while you test because this’ll either slow down your speed to learning or, worse, make learning impossible (don’t ask me how I know this, it was a painful lesson to learn). The TL;DR here is that homepage hero message testing sounds good in theory, but is far from ideal for this type of validation work.
One more caveat to messaging strategy validation:
Your buyer is your buyer. Your prospect is your prospect. Everybody else is not your buyer or prospect.
When you do more general, demographic-based validation on external platforms, you can really only check for big gotchas (typically around clarity, sometimes memorability). These methods will not give you a clear enough read to validate that your messaging is positioning your product as the obvious choice in your future buyer's mind.
When in doubt, remember: messaging strategy development isn't done until messaging validation is done.
‘Til next week,
Carolyn
Off the clock…
🎥 Shoresy on Crave. What’s fun about this wonderfully Canadian comedy series (besides the sharp acting) is the maximalist writing. I’m convinced the density and speed of message repetition are part of what makes this show so funny.
📕 Skippy Dies by Paul Murray. This is a “start with the end” story where (spoiler) Skippy dies. I typically like this type of construction for piquing curiosity and holding interest. Just getting started, but so far, so good.
🎧 Jon Hamm | Good Hang with Amy Poehler. If you’re a creative process nerd (like me), or if you’re just curious to know how many ciggies Hamm smoked in the Mad Men pilot (also me), this was, indeed, a good hang. Listener beware: you may feel compelled to rewatch Mad Men.
Before you go…
My firm (Boxcar) helps sales-led B2B software companies turn their proven sales motion into the messaging foundation that gives the whole team a clear path to generating more qualified leads.
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