Digital marketing techniques, like “Account-Based Marketing,” for example, heavily depend on high-quality content that can draw a crowd. Now, to stand out from all the other marketing content from organizations trying to get attention also requires offering compelling thought leadership content with a differentiated point of view that highlights your advantages, but without degenerating into a sales pitch.

Prospects typically start their “customer journey” by browsing the web for answers to their problems want to be informed and persuaded, and in control of when and how they are being approached. Rarely do they want to be sold to the right off the bat? For example, when’s the last time you clicked on a LinkedIn ad in your feed or accepted an invite from a pop-up chat window?

Considering those challenges, how effective is your marketing message? Creating a marketing message that differentiates your company’s product and services is one of the hardest things you will have to do. But formulating a highly differentiated message is essential in beating your competition, successfully swaying analysts and influencers, and making your online presence more compelling. When done well, highly differentiated messaging will drive demand and increase your market share.

In this blog post, we’ll go over five key things your B2B cloud software startup should consider when creating a message that will be compelling enough to be effective.

Knowing What Your Company Stands For

Shared values build relationships and are the power behind purposeful action. Of the consumers surveyed by Harvard Business Review, 64% cited shared values as the primary reason to have a relationship with a company. This applies as much to B2B as it does to B2C and is the very essence of a strong brand. Before you even start creating your message, you need to know what your company stands for. Why? Because those values will reflect in your voice, your visuals, and your interaction with customers.

Steve Jobs once said, “To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world, a noisy world, and we’re not going to get the chance to get people to remember us. No company is. So we have to be very clear about what we want people to know about us.”

B2B technology companies are so focused on getting the enterprise deal that they often forget that their buyers are human beings with their desires, passions, and beliefs. How you communicate your values, creates a window into the soul of your company. Without getting metaphysical about it, you probably already know who you are, and if you don’t, someone in your organization does – most likely, a founder who put her soul in creating the product. You must dig deep to find those values, to find your best selves, and then translate that into messages to use to interact with everyone – from customers to vendors to partners.

Marketing is not just about a piece of content you blast to the world or the one-liner you put on your homepage; it’s about your customers experiencing the brand philosophy at the heart of your organization. For example, if you are selling to developers, but your message is full of marketing buzzwords that coders can’t relate to, likely, you haven’t figured out how you should represent yourself to them. If you cite customer satisfaction as a priority, but your sales representatives take three weeks to respond to a prospect call, there is a gap between the truth and your perception of reality. The entire organization has to encompass the core values to give customers the experience they truly want.

Understanding Your Customer

Before writing your value proposition or tagline, it’s useful to go through a series of logical steps to understand why someone would choose your product over your competitor’s. This requires not only knowing your product’s strengths but having a deep understanding of your buyers and competitors.

This might sound straightforward enough, but we’ve realized that many B2B technology startups struggle with this critical step. It’s because when we start a business, we often think we know the answers when we don’t. We have to learn from trial and error. Larger organizations have the luxury of relying on an established sales and marketing track record to pull reliable analytics from their CRM and marketing systems or conduct thorough customer and market studies. As a startup, knowing your target audiences’ personas can be difficult, but it’s essential in helping you formulate messages that talk to their needs.

Depending on your situation, here are a few practical things you can do to get a better understanding of your customers:

1) Listen to Your Prospects and Customers

Do you have a list of prospects and customers? Even if it’s only a handful, whoever is creating the message should set up a time to speak with them directly. Performing a win/loss analysis is invaluable in understanding the logic behind a decision to purchase or not. Taking detailed, structured notes allows you to identify patterns not only for refining your message but product enhancements that you can later feed into your roadmap.

For example, we had a software client who believed that their user interface was the key to their success. However, when we did a win/loss analysis, there was no difference in UI likeability between those who had bought the product and those who hadn’t. It turned out that they all had liked the UI, but the UI had not necessarily been the motivator to purchase the product. On the other hand, customer support was rated as one of the biggest reasons customers had decided against partnering with the company. So, while the UI was a vital aspect of ensuring a prospect would consider the product, it was the customer support that made the real difference. As a result, fixing the customer support experience made a much more significant difference for their market share than making the already appealing UI even better.

The key is to listen to your customers. Don’t put words in their mouths, and if they voice criticisms or even false opinions, don’t get defensive or try to sell them still if they have decided not to buy. The point of these conversations is to understand their motivations and objections. And then analyze the patterns.

2) Listen to Your Sales Team as if They Are Your Customer

Sales representatives are usually the first group of your employees to hear from prospects and customers about what they do and don’t like about your company or products. Therefore, they usually have a keen sense of what sells and what prospects resonate with. Usually, it’s not some overly general or abstract value proposition, but often very earthly concerns around pricing, implementability, the ability to plug-and-play with other products, the products’ ability to help the buyers’ careers, and even the fact that they just like their salesperson.

To understand what your prospects find compelling about your offerings, and what moves them to a purchase decision, start by watching your sales representatives present the sales deck in a meeting. Besides providing useful feedback on sales’ ability to deliver a compelling, customer benefits-oriented product and company pitch, it is beneficial in tweaking the message, as necessary.

3) Search Your CRM Tool for Purchase Patterns

Do you have a CRM tool like Salesforce or Pipedrive? Is your sales team using it? If so, you’re in much better shape than many startups. You can pull a report that can show who your sales team has worked within an account, who has signed the PO, and who has influenced the opportunity. Analyzing this data and identifying patterns can be useful in testing your assumptions about who you think your buyers are.

For example, if you believe that the VP of Marketing is your primary buyer, but then you realize that more often than not, it is the Director of Product Marketing who is making the purchase, you know that you might want to create new messaging that targets that persona. However, the accuracy of the analysis relies on the accuracy of the data in your systems, which is why it’s essential that the sales team is trained adequately in using the CRM tool.

4) Hire Luminaries

You can run your messages by those who could be a potential buyer within your network or online. You can find luminaries and thought leaders from your targeted industries who would be more than willing to work with you for a fee or a free license. Either way, their input, more often than not, is constructive in formulating your message.

5) Knowing Your Competition

Often companies drink their cool-aid, thinking their product is the best in the market, but your competitors exist for a reason. They may have their weaknesses, but they have their strengths, too. Do you know what those strengths are? And more importantly, do you know how to beat them? Also, do you know what they say about your real or perceived weaknesses, and do you know how to disarm those arguments with credibility and impact?

Once you have this information and comparisons, write them in a format that can easily be shared with sales. We often see founders conveying differentiators verbally via a team call. You need to write down concise and memorable statements about your differentiators so sales can refer to them when needed. And your prospects can repeat them to their colleagues when they’re building consensus internally around whether they should consider purchasing your offering.

Also, as you write your marketing message, keep those differentiators in mind so that you can address them. Talk about your differentiators as your strengths without mentioning your competitor by name or disrespecting them. Educate your potential customers through differentiated messages that you feed to marketing and sales, and allow the buyer to make their own decision.

Answering the “So What?”

Many times, we think we know why our company and product is the best in the market and write our messaging from our perspective. As you write, you have to ensure that your messages are answering what I like to call the “so what?” question. Why would the buyer care about what you are telling them? Make sure what you convey directly addresses their needs and isn’t only about what’s cool about your company.

The technologists in a company are often the ones that create the first version of the marketing and sales collateral. When this happens, some of the early pitches, though accurate technically, are focused on product features. This type of messaging might appeal to technical and junior level buyers, but if it doesn’t address important customer business issues, it fails to excite the senior business buyer.

A differentiated statement that reflects the soul of your company, while solving customer issues is the goal of active messaging. Creating this statement often takes weeks or even months, but when done correctly is a compelling, engaging summary of why someone should buy your product and services.

Keeping it Concise

Have you ever visited a company’s website, read their brochure, and still aren’t sure what they correctly do? Keep your messages concise. Avoid buzzwords and technical jargon. Communicate in a few clear sentences precisely what you do and how you are different. This respects the reader’s time and guides them to take the action you want them to make faster.

… And Finally

Once you have formulated your messaging, you can create value propositions, positioning statements, and messaging pillars. We’ll talk about each of these in some of our other blog posts. We’re also writing about how to create marketing campaigns with focused messaging that are effective in driving demand and can accelerate the growth of your sales pipeline.