There’s a reason “content is king” is such a prevalent expression in marketing. Content touches everything you do – from website to ads to emails to social, and a lot more – meaning it often forms the first impression anyone will get of your brand.
Despite its importance, good writing is spectacularly difficult. Pair this with an increasing deficit in writing skill created by a move to video and visual content, and an oversaturated Internet filled with consumer and corporate content, t’s become harder and harder to stand out.
Good news for those brave at heart writers, there are a few secrets to writing high-converting messaging. It starts with getting your positioning right!
Positioning
Often, positioning is confused with your vision, messaging, or taglines. The reality is that positioning informs all those things because it shares with your customers why you’re offering is differentiated and what they will get if they buy from your company. The messaging and taglines reinforce that position.
It’s critical to get your positioning right because it highlights your best value to your specific target market. Positioning includes your audience, competitors, value prop, and differentiator. Even with the most creative messaging, without correct positioning, you will find yourself barking up the wrong tree and your audience won’t respond.
So, what are the steps to uncover your positioning?
1.Start by talking to your customers.
Discover your competitive alternatives
Set up interviews with your clients to ask them which competitive alternatives they know. Go deeper than having them list brands and dig into how they meet customer needs and how they would solve it if your company wasn’t around. The answer may surprise you.
See your unique characteristics
Follow this question with what you believe your differentiators are by asking “What do we do/have that others don’t?”
Understand your value from the eyes of the customer
Drill into what value your clients are getting from the product/service. Go beyond what their favorite features are and why they like them. After talking to a few clients (5-7 at least) you should start to see the value and benefit themes emerging.
Pro tip: As you’re converting your positioning into messaging, capture the language customers are using and use their quotes and perspective for market validation when capturing new customers.
2. Segment your results for analysis
With your customer interview feedback, make sure they categorize the results into segments including industry, persona, size, revenue, and ease of working together. Segmentation helps group the results to how answers vary for different target markets. This informs your messaging. Similarly, de-emphasize client answers that are likely to attrit, low-margin or difficult.
3. Focus on your market
Determine market category
Playing inside a market category is great because it eases customer understanding of your offering and how you can help them. The market category contextualizes what you do.
Discover market trends
Once you have your market, look at emerging trends. Influencers, events, and industry publications are great sources to find these topics. Position around a relevant trend appeals to the emotional side of buyers on why they should care and invest time and money to solve this problem today.
Writing tips for today’s audience
You have your positioning – that’s a fantastic start. Now, write high-converting content. Content is really everything your users touch – webpages, emails, social media, video scripts, etc. –
Here’s a checklist to create compelling content that converts users:
- Write in an active voice
- Write in the language your audience speaks
- Use validation (quotes, awards, analyst feedback)
- Avoid complex words (make it simple to understand!)
- Make your content easy to read with lots of white space
- Focus on the reader using second person, not your company (avoid we, us, and I)
- Test, test, and test your messaging across mediums
When writing compelling messaging and positioning, remember, even if you’re B2B, you’re selling to humans.
Make sure you understand your audience and you have a perspective they will care about. Otherwise, you’ll write well, but with generic messaging written for everyone that resonates with no one.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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Erin Pearson VP Marketing, at Evalueserve
As VP of Marketing at Evalueserve, Erin Pearson is responsible for both the strategic and tactical sides of entering a new market, understanding competition, and growing demand. She works with cross-functional teams across sales, marketing, customer success, and product. Prior to Evalueserve, she has worked in sales to break into new markets and led customer success teams helping build adoption in a new category.