Product Messaging: Sharp and Smart
How to build an effective sales copy that drives customers to understand a product’s unique value proposition.
This is the 8th week in my series reviewing the CXL Institute Growth Marketing Minidegree. I will be writing and posting a new knowledge area that I learn every week as I keep progressing and will be sharing my insights with you.
CXL Institute offers wide variety of courses, industry-recognized certifications and mini-degrees for those seeking to learn updated marketing skills that sit at an intersection of user centric design, product management, growth strategy, customer acquisition and retention, digital management and analytics. There has been plethora of marketing courses in the past on other platforms however in the new digital age, I have not succeeded in finding a more relevant and applicable course about implementing growth strategies across digital customer funnel. With more and more companies being digitalized and with e-commerce as one of the highest growing industries, courses as this one is the need of the hour. CXL’s courses have been proven to be useful to marketers, growth strategies and managers, product manager, designers, digital data analysts and any other marketing-related professionals whose work revolves around coming up with diverse possibilities to growth a business across the customer funnel besides just customer acquisition and retention.
Today I will talk about the product messaging lesson which is about optimizing product messaging and value proposition so that companies can boost conversions on their websites. Here is a brief overview.
Conducting copy tear-down: This course helps the audience to essentially look at their own sales page copy and get a relative quantified view on whether the page is good. This helps the audience quantify the persuasive power of the existing copy. It also teaches us how to identify and prioritize what needs to be improved in a sales page copy. I was introduced to some introductory principles such as Cialdini’s Principles of Persuasion, MEClab’s Conversion Sequence Heuristic and relevant formulae. It also gave a detailed explanation of Hopkin’s rules like Offer Services, Be Specific, etc. One great advice the speaker offers is to use this tear down as a gap analysis tool which I found valuable.
Mining messages from customers: The purpose of this course is to teach audience how to gather high volume of prospect generated messages about product online. The reason marketers need this is to identify promising and powerful instances of these messages and use them for future sales copy. Most of the time, the customer is way more effective at recognizing and explaining what the value of your product or solution is than you are. Because they are the ones who use it and they are the ones who justified paying money for it. They also speak a common language with the target market. It also talks in depth about gathering information for sales narrative through voice of customer research methods such as user interviews, customer surveys, web surveys, exit surveys, customer feedback, user tests and likewise.
Crafting unique value proposition: In this lesson, I was made to understand how to sharpen our understanding of what a unique value proposition actually is and why they’re so important to any sales pitch, whether it is an offline or online narrative. It also taught how to recognize the way value propositions fundamentally change with product type and audience awareness. This course interestingly talks about customer motivation too. It is an influential element because there are many unanswered, mysterious questions: What is going on in your prospect’s mind when they hit the page? What are their expectations? What are they looking for? As important as motivation is to our probability of conversion. The course teaches about the key building blocks of UVP (unique value proposition): what the product/service is about and what the customers want. It also talks about how the kind of product we are working with, influences this framework. For example, the UVP changes between new/niche products and broad/established products.
The lesson touches upon the steps to brainstorming a creative UVP which I found to be very interesting. Some of the steps include listing key product features, filtering the unique ones, listing customer pain points for each feature, defining desirable outcome for each pain point, scoring pain points by severity and frequency, edit top scored points into UVPs and go with the best UVP.
Writing first draft: This is the easiest part of the process. In this lesson, we discussed about creating a customer-informed, data-driven first draft of your sales page and including raw customer-generated comments into compelling headlines, sub headlines and body copy. One approach to creating first draft is to start with a messaging flow: UVP -> Motivation -> Value -> Anxiety -> Call to Action. It also talks about a smart approach of using data driven strategy to avoid blank page.
Editing the copy: This part of the lesson talked about how to create a sales copy that is highly better by following few editing principles that are mainly focused on conversion. It highlights seven key rules.
→ Rule 1: Be clear because clarity trumps persuasion.
→ Rule 2: Match the reader’s mindset. Because a well-researched, message-matched headline will often outperform an un-researched “persuasive-trick” headline.
→ Rule 3: Show how the product/service creates value.
→ Rule 4: Use quantifiable proof if needed.
→ Rule 5: Do not just talk. Paint a picture.
→ Rule 6: Show and tell generously.
→ Rule 7: Cut anything that is not doing real, good work.
Conversion-focused formatting and layout: This lesson highlighted many hands-on practices to make sales page easy to copy and scan to be read as digital text. It offers many real-life examples and anecdotes. It teaches the students to leverage key design principles to control the order, pacing and emphasis of the sales copy in readers’ minds. It also talks about how to create clickable prototypes of sales copy so that it can be shared with clients and team. It touches upon many interesting topics that must be followed when creating product messaging. For example, it talks about “Reality”. The concept is about aligning page’s visual hierarchy with the order of the copy. If not done so, the copy would not make any sense. The danger is that the reader will read out of context and order or miss parts completely. It also touches upon many other key topics including breaking down wall of text and likewise.
Message hierarchies: Another impressive topic that I learnt from this course was about understanding how the fundamentals of story can greatly improve your sale page’s persuasive impact. It also talks about how to construct a killer value proposition for a product with some strategically collected voice-of-customer data and then use Google Spreadsheets to instantly transform dry survey response data into a complete messaging hierarchy for any sales page.
As with every week, this week also I was able to complete exhaustive level of reading, studying and examinations. The lessons were loaded with great practical examples, anecdotes and final exam to test our learning capabilities.