Inside Olivine #9
🕵️♂️ Demystifying the difference between messaging and copywriting with Saahil Patel
👋 Heya!
Quick note—we’ve added a new segment to our newsletter: open marketing roles board (see at the bottom).
I’m Saahil, product marketing associate and copywriter at Olivine. I’m a Bay Area (now SF) native, enjoying this 72-degree weather for once (if you know, you know). Currently, you can find me working my PMM day job at LinkedIn, creating Bollywood Fusion dance content (shameless plug: check out my side hustle Saahil Patel Choreography), or possibly even at the airport — I’m literally always going somewhere (most recently 🌴Tulum, next up 🌵Sedona).
For the past few months, my friends Jadon and Angie have caught y’all up on positioning and messaging, arguably the most important responsibility a PMM owns for their product.
Today I’m going to take it one step further — how to turn your positioning and messaging into what the world sees: copywriting.
Hot topic: Too many marketers don’t know the difference between messaging and copywriting
And before you come at me, I’ll openly admit I was once one of them 💀. I mean, I get why it’s confusing — the two concepts are closely related and often go hand in hand. The difference is nuanced, but it’s important because you definitely don’t want your “messaging” to be the copy you lead with on your next marketing campaign. Let me explain.
As Angie explained last month, messaging is the clarity of what you say about your product. It means explicitly calling out the core benefits and value your customers get from your product. You can have different types of messaging, such as:
platform messaging, when you want to talk about a suite of products as one
product messaging, when you want to talk about a specific product
audience messaging, when you want to talk to a specific persona you’re selling to (sometimes this is considered solution selling)
Good messaging is straightforward, concise, and jargon-free. But that also means it may come off as boring and won’t necessarily get your audience interested in your product. That’s where our lovely friend ✨copywriting✨ comes in.
Copywriting is the cleverness of how you deliver your message.
Copywriting is built on top of messaging and turns it into something punchy, compelling, and worth remembering. It’s what you might see as a subject line in an email or on a highway billboard. It’s how you get your audience to engage with you or think about you when the time to buy is right.
(PS: here’s a great blog post our Director of PMM Arielle wrote on the difference between positioning, messaging, and copywriting).
Now let’s look at a real example of copy out in the world. Air Asia launched a billboard with the following:
Whoever the copywriter was on this project, they killed it. I’ll definitely be flying Air Asia on my trip to Thailand this winter (I wasn’t lying about always being at the airport lol).
While Air Asia’s messaging was probably something like “Affordable travel to 93 countries in Asia,” the copy here is what effectively delivered that message. It’s funny, relevant, and easy enough to understand, especially when you’ve only got like 5 seconds to read it on the highway. I’m pretty sure most people would’ve forgotten about Air Asia if they had just pasted their super serious and straightforward messaging statement on the billboard instead.
All PMMs should be great at positioning and messaging, but copywriting isn't always a given. So if you ever find yourself playing the role of copywriter, here are 5 tricks that have helped me.
Deeply understand what you want to say and to who. This should be pretty easy if you’ve done the foundational work of positioning and messaging. Reference that guide and get to the crux of what’s most important to your audience.
Appeal to emotions. Evoking feelings of delight, fear, and surprise will startle your audience when they least expect it. You’ll likely leave some impression because you’ve connected with hearts, not minds.
Tailor your copy to the marketing channel you’re using. Copy is cool because it can change based on where it’s going, which means it’ll look different in a Tweet, marketing email, and ads.
Find a connection to macro and industry trends. Connecting your copy to real-life changes and crazes will make it easier for your audience to understand what you’re trying to say. Keep a pulse on what’s going around you and use it as inspiration.
Test, test, test. You won’t know what lands until you have a reason to believe it does. Tools like SurveyMonkey and Wynter let you test your copy with people in your target audience. Or if you’re tight on budget, get scrappy and test copy in sales emails, campaigns, or SEO.
Top tweet
100% agree. This tweet by Noel Davila kinda reminds me how my Economics degree taught me nothing about product marketing (granted I didn’t even know what PMM was back then).
My favorite copywriting insight in this thread is the one around CTAs. I often overlook how powerful that one word needs to be to get someone to take action.
“Receive my rewards” or “Sign up for my rewards”. Which one would get you to click?
Fresh finds
Tool I love
We’ve talked about this one before, but plugging it again in case you missed it — copy.ai, an AI content generator that helps you write copy quickly. I’ll be honest, it’s not always the best, but it works great for inspiration and copybanking.
Shallow dive
A super interesting Twitter thread by Katelyn Bourgoin, where she talks about “counterintuitive marketing,” aka, how brands can flaunt their mistakes and imperfections to make themselves more likable. (Maybe that typo in your marketing email wasn’t so bad after all!)
Deep dive
A solid read written by Grace Parazzoli — 12 Great Copywriting Examples (Plus a Ton of Copywriting Tips). I love oat milk (and Oatly) so #3 made me laugh. Haha.
Inside Olivine
Content gems
Before & After: How we evolved positioning & messaging for our clients (PS, I wrote this one!)
Client happenings
Benefex acquired Wrkit and announced they’re opening a Dublin office
Equals raised a $6.6M Seed round from David Sacks at Craft Ventures to replace Excel
TrueNorth, software for truckers, just launched their new website
Open marketing roles (new!)
Equals is hiring a Product Marketing Manager
ConductorOne is hiring a Product Marketing Leader
Topl is hiring a Product Marketing Manager
See more open marketing positions on our shiny new job page!
Thanks for reading; see you next month!
 | A guest post by
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Loved writing this one! Hope you all enjoyed it :)