Do you have advice for developing product messaging when your brand awareness is still low with your audience?

When you don’t have your own network to tap into, you should get creative to find one.

People congregate with like-minded folks on social media, forums, blog newsletters, slack communities, meetups, etc. Find them and see how they talk about their work, their problems, their solutions. 

After some digging, you’ll develop pattern recognition on where you can add value. Build a voice with this existing audience in a way that adds value, that goes beyond “look at me” and is much more about “look at this big problem and our approach to solving it.”

You'll find natural pull when the messaging resonates. Keep going!

When you think about your product messaging, you may start with the features and benefits the product provides. While those things do need to be defined, they should not be where you start developing your product messaging from.

Instead, your product messaging should lead with the intangible value your product provides to customers. How does your product or service improve their life? Focus on how your product impacts their experience rather than the specific functions it offers. Features and benefits can contribute to that value, but they are not the overall value of your product.

The core value of your product is the sum of all the benefits your product provides. It’s more than just the tactical solution your product can accomplish — it’s what that tactical solution is building toward in terms of overall goal attainment.

Even though your brand awareness may still be low, your product’s core value should be concise, comprehensible, not jargony and easy to connect with. Once you know what the value of your product is and who you’re trying to market it to, use that knowledge to develop your product messaging.

Your messaging should start by explaining why the prospect should buy a solution like yours. That’s conveyed through your product’s core value. Then you explain why they should buy your product specifically, which you explain by showing how your product’s features and benefits address the prospect’s pain points.

You might frame your value proposition differently depending on the personas you’re addressing. The core value shouldn’t change, but the benefits you highlight might.

Be very clear and transparent about what it is your product is and what it does. I’d give the same advice for companies with greater brand awareness as well, but I think the problem is even more acute when you don’t have the benefit of that awareness. Avoid jargon, buzzwords and make it super easy for anyone to understand who you are and what you do. Also always lead with what the value or benefit is to someone who uses your product. Again, something that applies to companies of all sizes, but often surprisingly overlooked.

A few things can help here

1. Create differentiation by emphasizing how your product/service solves customer problems uniquely and better than other alternatives/incumbents

2. Create a new category - take a leaf from the playbooks of Drift or Gong.io. Instead of being another chatbot, gong.io created a category called conversational intelligence and sustained marketing momentum behind it