Product Messaging and Growth Marketing

This week is my seventh week in Growth Marketing Mini Degree from CXL. It is not quite easy to finish every week in time while working especially with content that is mostly technical. This week I started Product Messaging, the course length is five hours, couldn’t finish it earlier as the course has great resources that I loved checking and diving deeper on the ideas.

The course is constructed to eight lessons, each lesson has it’s own resources that gives you the chance to dive deeper, the journey of the course is mainly divided to two parts. Part one is finding your key messages and Part two is Writing, Editing, and Laying out the page.

The eight lessons of the course are:

- How to conduct a copy “Teardown”
— Introduction to Message-Mining
— Message mining from your customers
— Pinpointing your best value proposition
— Creating a Messaging Flow for your Sales page
— Writing the first draft of your sales page
— Editing or “punching up” your sales copy
— Formatting and Laying out your sales page

The first problem that arises in the first lesson of how to conduct a copy is that usually people assume when they do a copy teardown and you should usually avoid assumptions when working around any aspect in the digital industry nowadays. There are three basis of page copy teardown that should be followed. The first is Meclab’s Conversion Sequence Heuristic, the second is Cialdini’s Principles of Persuasion, and the final one is Claude Hopkins’s Scientific Advertising.

The funnel sections is constructed into four parts. The first part is Attention-Capturing Copy which basically means your ads and how you usually capture your consumer attention whether by PPC Ads, Display Ads, Facebook Ads, or any other relevant ads that you usually use. The second part is the persuasive copy which is mainly about your product and service. It includes your homepage, Landing Page, and Product Page. The third part is the transactional copy which includes cart page, order summary, and checkout page. The last and fourth part is the confirmation copy which is the payment success message and first time ux copy.

The second lesson of the course is about Message Mining. So, what is Message Mining? Message Mining is the process of sourcing the internet for the voice of your consumers. It means basically listening to what your consumers are saying. Getting introduced and learning about Swiping was really beneficial for me. It discussed how to message mine perfectly and use swiping which I believe can boost your key performance indicators. Swiping is about looking for how people describe our product and the multiple benefits they are talking about and using it in our ad copy or product messaging.

So, how to Message Mining? there are a 5 steps process, starting with the first step which is making a list of keywords about your brand and your competitors. Second, looking at Google reviews, complaints, and questions. Third, checking popular websites like Amazon, Yelp, and Truspilot. Fourth collecting the data into a spreadsheet. Finally to rank and categorize messages.

The next lesson is about mining messages from your consumers. Eventually, it is your consumer who you serve. You should listen to your consumer and trying to get as much information as you can without frustrating them. You can get data about consumer from the consumer himself by doing Surveys and Polls. Adding a survey on your website for visitors to fill can you get you loads of information about what you need. Make sure than when doing a survey to make it short as possible and only address your most important points to get the customer to fill it. You can use a reward system or gamification to make consumers fill your surveys. Gamification can include certain rewards that user can get once he fill a survey.

The fourth lesson is about crafting a value proposition. So how to brainstorm the best unique value proposition? First, starting with listing your product’s key feature. Second, pinpoint those that are unique. Third, List consumer pinpoints for each feature. Fourth, defining desirable outcomes for each pain. Fifth, Score pain by severity. Sixth, Edit top scored pain/outcomes into unique value proposition. Finally, Score the unique value propositions and get the best one.

The fifth lesson is Message Hierarchies. Message Hierarchy is about identifying each message and listing the message in the funnel to know when to use the message. It starts by identifying your visitors awareness followed by pinpointing your unique value proposition and finally mining surveys, transcript, and polls.

Now is the time to write your first draft. Use all the data you gathered and the messages you found to help you on deciding on writing your first draft. Lesson seven is about editing and punching your copy. There are two handy headline trick, the first is message match with a question and the second answering with a specific unique value.

To summarize, crafting product messaging can kill your page or make it a killer one. Deciding on the product messaging should be done based on research and insights and not on assumptions. It is more frequent that people assume on many aspects in the digital industry. Research and data mining is frustrating and a long term process that directors usually ignore and decide based on their experience. Even if you got a result based on assumptions, how would you know if their was a better result?. All of these lessons could be applied in different areas. Starting from captions in a post or even in big campaigns. One of the benefits that platforms provide business owners with today is A/B Splits. For instance, when you are using Facebook as a platform for promoting your business now you can choose to start and A/B test for different ads copies. Let’s say you are creating a message that plays on the motivation part and other message that focuses on belonging part, which one is better than the other? Now you can know with A/B split and cut all the assumptions. Go with the two options and check the results to see which one had a better performance.