"Clear, compelling, and differentiated messaging isn't enough."
Micro Prose are stories, lessons, and advice about messaging and product marketing (and life) from the On Messaging Community. Enjoy!
Please give a warm welcome to Jonathan Pipek, Product Marketing Consultant, Blue Manta.
Thank you, Jonathan.
Let’s get started:
When you’re feeling stuck or uninspired, what’s your favorite way to get back in the zone?
Playing with my 1 year old daughter always puts a smile on my face. My wife instantly de-stresses me and makes me more positive. Both help me reset and make me feel refreshed. I find that listening to music, especially instrumental music, to be quite helpful for getting in the zone.
What’s a piece of messaging advice you wish someone had told you earlier in your career?
Clear, compelling, and differentiated messaging isn’t enough. Your messaging needs to convey the crucial market context your prospects need to understand and WHY they should purchase your product. Your have three essential goals.
First, establish trust by showing prospects you understand them.
Next, educate them by sharing a unique POV that they might not have considered.
And lastly, connect the dots showing them exactly how your product is the solution they’ve been looking for, making the next step clear and irresistible.
What did your biggest messaging failure teach you?
That developing killer messaging isn’t the end goal. The goal is to share messaging in a format that actually enables marketing to take it and turn it into marketing campaigns and collateral. If it’s just a complex matrix that sits in Google Drive and is never used, it’s not worth the digital paper it’s written on.
That experience taught me that implementation is just as important as the actual messaging. From then on, I always worked with Marketing to make it usable and with Sales to turn positioning and messaging into a Sales Pitch Deck.
What’s one messaging lesson that still shapes your approach today?
Write messaging that makes prospects' pain points and the solution crystal clear. To the point where they feel seen. You want them to read the pain points + solutions and figuratively raise their hands and say “hey, that’s me! they’re writing about me!” That immediately helps me get uber specific with my messaging rather than being more generic.
What book do you recommend all product marketers read?
Obviously Awesome by April Dunford
If you could put it into a single sentence, what is living all about?
Experiencing everything life has to offer with your loved ones.
A "complex matrix that sits on Google Drive" got me to twing. Been there. So unfortunate.
I've had a short "one slide" overview be enough. I've created a long, all-inclusive document covering market POV, personas, pains, value props, and more, which content marketing ingested to create long-form content. Content friggin loved it because they could give AI the detailed persona, teach our POV, and specific pain points solved, then go from there. But demand gen marketers were overwhelmed. Depended on what marketers needed, sales needed.
What approach and messaging elements drive better implementation from your POV?
Great points! The simpler soundbites are what can stick.
Notion is a good idea - I haven't used that much, but looking into it.
Another tactical topic I've wondered is how to create the knowledge base of messaging and positioning that can be more self service through a GenAI.