Product Messaging
This week, while working through CXL Institute’s Scholarship program where they have numerous minidegrees from Growth Marketing to Conversion Optimization, I was working through Product Messaging.
What is Product Messaging
Medium.com defines this as “Product messaging -sometimes referred to only as “messaging” by marketers — is the description, meaning, relevance, and value of a product or service. Product Messaging = The description, meaning, relevance, and value of a product or service.”
This is part of the evaluation process where we look at Product Messaging, Value Proposition, and Website Copy in order to boost conversions on their website. A lot of work and planning goes into this, but the value it brings is invaluable if executed correctly.
When to use Message-mining
In essence, when we do message-mining we want to find high concentrations of prospect-generated messages about your product (or similar products) online. Because most people would probably have a new product that they want to bring to the market and do not have any prospect-generated content, be it reviews, comments, feedback, or anything related to assisting in the journey. So, we need to check for relevant buzz-words, keywords, value, and even frustrations.
Mining messages from your customers
I am sure that you can already see a promotion or advertisement from a mile away, right? And this is exactly the first thing I want to bring across, is that when we want to ask for feedback on our product, website, or anything really, make it organic – Don’t pull out all the stops and decorate it with all the bells and whistles, because how do you feel the moment you see a promotion, ad or feedback form you can already see will take you ages to fill out? You are going to skip it, let’s be honest.
As we start out and begin to make progress selling products, it is important for us to get feedback on our product. Because if we do not keep improving our product won’t make the impact we want it to. Now, there are ways to get this feedback and I will be touching on this soon. But, this information can be then used to better our website copy, because if the feedback process is done right we will have valuable comments available to help us understand how the market is experiencing our product(s) and the process of continuous improvement is underway.
Just for what it is worth, please take some time to read up on Kaizan (a Japanese business philosophy of continuous improvement of working practices, personal efficiency, etc.). While I have qualifications in this area, it has helped me tremendously with a lot of processes relating to my business and the execution thereof.
Feedback can be done in MANY ways, let me mention a few:
- Surveys
- Interviews
- User Tests
Before you start, it is super important for you to send these to your existing clients, NOT possible prospects. Because existing clients already have a high awareness of your product(s) and will give better feedback to work with.
It is also important for you to plan your client’s journey throughout this possible survey, interview, and user tests you will be conducting. For instance, when sending out surveys, make sure, as I said, you don’t make it so obvious that you have sent this to hundreds of people in a generic manner, make each person believe you have sent it out to them personally. So, don’t use an email address like, info@yourdomain.com to send it out from – This will make it obvious… Rather use someone’s name, making it more relatable.
Also, when you conduct an interview with a client, make sure that you stay engaged, set expectations before the interview starts, and allow for your guest to talk freely, but gauge the interview to make sure that you don’t go completely off-topic. There is nothing more frustrating than an interviewer who is looking at their note the entire time and nothing more frustrating than an interviewee who is awkwardly trying to stick to a strict guideline or “unofficial” script (Knowing what is good to say but trying not to give too much information due to time constraints or other limitations.)
Another tip you can take into consideration is allowing the silence to “hang”. Dragging out silence is not always a bad thing. If you feel like the guest has not given enough feedback to a specific question, allowing the silence to “hang” will soon make them feel obligated to broaden their answer and most times only then give their true feedback around that question.
Pro-tip! When using forms, make sure you use multi-step forms and allocate the steps above in order for people to see how far they are from the finish. Otherwise, you will find people who will jump off earlier than you wanted.
There are a few factors to think of when creating copy on your website. Some are Motivation, Value, and Friction. It is totally worth investing time into this process before building a website because you might just need to make SO many other changes afterward and it might still not help you make conversions. Rather invest time into customer research and make sure you do it right from the start.
Wow! More resources!
I cannot explain to you how awesome it is that with almost every lesson, they have resources available, and as I mentioned in one of my previous reviews, is that CXL Institute has over 600+ resources in their Resource section of this Minidegree – To such an extent that even the spreadsheets they use in the lesson will be made available afterward as well as their slide-deck, making your journey so much easier.
Conclusion
Everywhere I go and whomever I meet within my industry gets to know about CXL Institute from me. The course content is excellent, the resources are top-notch and the user-friendliness of the Learning Management System is something to write home about.
As I also said in a previous review, it might be because of a lack of exposure, but CXL Institute is the only company whom I have encountered that has made a significant course like this Minidegree available over a Scholarship program – Maybe it is because most companies don’t market it as much?
JD Koch is a full-time Agency Owner of DigiPlug in South Africa, a Internationally Certified Conversion Optimizer, LinkedIn Marketing Insider and Marketing Expert with customers across the country as well as in New Zealand. Join JD on in learning about software that could be useful to you as a Digital Marketer, Business Owner, Teams Leader, Manager, Freelancer, Agency Owner or just want to be more productive with your marketing.
