How to perfect your company messaging

I have been consulting with many companies lately and realized that many struggle with their company messaging.

The common pitfalls I usually see are “We make the cloud better” and “Code breaks, fix it faster,” - Many successful companies have this headline. How can this be?

It all comes down to company maturity. The more known you are, the more fancy that title can be and even unintelligible. I mean, Apple's slogan is “Think different”. It says nothing about the product.

This is what you should be writing

Usually, there are three categories (by difficulty)

• You improve an existing market - Something is already in the market, and you improve it.

• An open-source alternative - You are building something that has a commercial close-code product.

• New market - you invent something new that nobody has heard about before.

When people arrive at your website, you want them to know what you do just by reading the headline and sub-headline; if they have to scroll down to understand - many will churn or will fail to understand.

My few guidelines will usually be:

1. Don’t be afraid of long headlines - you can literally write the problem and the solution in the title - write as much as you need.

2. Talk like a baby (dumb it down) - You can write “a complex queuing architecture for your social media experience,” or you can write something a lot simpler, such as “An architecture to schedule your social media posts.”

3. Avoid using words like “better,” “faster,” and “stronger” - developers are the ultimate persona, and writing those words doesn’t answer their problem - what is better/faster/stronger? How exactly?

4. Don’t be afraid to use your competitors in your title - if you find it hard to explain what you do, or many people ask, “What is the difference between you and X?” - you can write something like: “Like X just with Y, Z."

Invest in graphics

I have written before about the importance of graphics on your website.

When I was In Novu, we used the headline: “Simple components and APIs for managing all communication channels in one place: Email, SMS, Direct, In-App, and Push, “ and over the years, I started to hear people asking again and again: what is the difference between you and Twilio?

For those of you who know Novu, we are actually a notifications wrapper, so we tend to work with Twilio and not as an alternative.

And when I looked up Twilio on Google, I saw a similar headline.

So, I had a nice suggestion for the team: let’s start by changing the Novu graphic.

Before, we were showing things like Email and SMS and how they worked:

And then I suggested to change the icons from “In-app” and messages to the actual providers:

So, if we show Twilio in the graphics, it means that we are not competing with them - we are actually working with them.

The luck of the dominator makes it harder

Novu was not the first. There was also knock.app, courier, and Magicbell, but that’s it. Furthermore, none of them are big companies; the most advanced one is Courier, and they are a Series B company stage (raised $35m).

So, to say there is a dominator in the market is a stretch because most of the developers in the world don’t know about any of the companies.

So we did something that many other companies that invent a new market do: We coined a new phrase, “Notification Infrastructure.” Of course, it also came with some other words (because nobody knows what a notification infrastructure is).

But over time, we started to see a growth in search terms.

Pay money and test it

Send a bunch of developers to your website and ask them to explain what you do; pay people in Upwork or Usertesting to test it. If they don’t understand, try again.

See you next week!