🍕Buongiorno!
Angie here, Product Marketing Associate and Copywriter at Olivine. I’m spending the summer in Naples, Italy, following my work-from-anywhere dream. Next home base will be Paris.
We’re back to our regular programmin’ after launching Olivine Marketplace, where startups can hire vetted Product Marketing Consultants.
Hot topic: Messaging is just as important as positioning
TL;DR: Positioning is half of the battle. Messaging, the way we talk about a product, needs to be super clear and specific so our main persona gets what it is.
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Last month, Jadon Thomas explained why you need to take a stand with your positioning, comparing it to shadow boxing. He said you gotta step in the ring and see how well you can actually fight (pick and introduce your positioning), whether you get decked or not (you won’t know the results until you try). Today we’re following up with a one-two punch: messaging and assessing great and not-so-great examples of it in the wild.
To preface the game we’re gonna play, a quick note on what messaging is:
Messaging is the clarity of what you say about your product.
Six key elements of product messaging:
Product description: what your product is—try for 5 words or less.
Headline: a compelling headline and image that resonates with the buyer and makes them want to learn more about your product. Generally a combination of why you exist and what you do.
Subhead: Hint at the problem and how your product solves it.
Benefit/Outcome: What your target buyer will achieve by using a combination of features. Use the description to explain how that happens.
Customer testimonial: In a perfect world, what would your ideal customer say about your product?
Features: This is where you check off their shopping list with feature names and descriptions.
(Taken from this blog by Arielle Shnaidman, Director of Product Marketing at Olivine.)
Guess that messaging
So, let’s play a game 😏. I’ll show three homepage headlines and subheads without any further context. Pause at every screenshot and guess what the company does.
1:
2:
3:
My takes
1: This has something to do with e-commerce, but I couldn’t figure anything else out. Maybe they’re selling to small or medium-sized business owners. Who knows?
2: I understand this a lot more than the first one. The subhead tells me it’s a type of all-in-one workspace for people who manage teams. There’s familiarity with the nod to Google Docs. But what is “the evolution of docs”? Wasted header space 😢
3: I can instantly understand this is a hiring marketplace that connects tech startup founders with top-notch developers. There’s so much shared language here between the brand and their customers—“Behold! The almighty devs,” and using the double slash, “//.” This is amazing messaging (and copywriting) that speaks to one persona and one persona only.
All this is to say, of course there are some caveats here. One, I’m not an April Dunford (yet). Two, a lot of other factors go into positioning and messaging, including how far along you are as a brand. Disney can say lofty shit like “where dreams come true” because everyone knows Disney.
Regardless, starting and tinkering with messaging can be simple. Pick your positioning, know your core persona deeply, and write as if you’re speaking to them in a 1:1 conversation. These days we can test how effective messaging is with a tool like Wynter. Let’s keep celebrating products that simply say what they do and do what they say—not claim to create superpowers.
Top tweet
Use exactly what your customers say they love about your product. Boom. Free, legit messaging you didn’t have to create from scratch.
Fresh finds
Tool I love
I’m learning how much time each task takes to create product marketing content with Clockify, a detailed, free time tracker.
Shallow dive
Amanda Natividad’s Twitter thread about why you should give away your juiciest info upfront as “zero-click content.”
Deep dive
Experimenting with Reddit as a channel? Enter any subreddit into this site and it’ll map out related subreddits.
Inside Olivine
Content gems
Before & After: How we evolved positioning & messaging for our clients
Seven ways to leverage social media in your product marketing strategy
Client happenings
Congrats to Elation Health on raising $50M in Series D funding and their really nice write-up in Forbes. Their medical EHR has been paving the way for innovative primary care.
Topl is the first blockchain ecosystem of its kind to help companies track and monetize social impact initiatives like carbon offsetting. Congrats on their $15M in Series A funding.
Thanks for reading! Ciao, see you next month.
P.S. Guess that messaging: 1 = Deltasqrd.com, 2 = Coda.io, 3 = Lemon.io.
Loved this one, Angie!
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻