Become a messaging expert in 60 minutes

Messaging is so painful, a bad one means dry pipeline and being ignored by prospects, until you can show them what you’re all about on a call.

I’m still known by many as one of the messaging guys to follow, which doesn’t serve me well because I’m competing with a lot of fractional PMMs offering the same as part of their offer.

But that knowledge only come because I love it, and I’ve been breaking it down on LinkedIn for years.

Does that mean I’m the best at messaging? Not really ❌

But I do a pretty good job of making it simple, which is one of the key core component of messaging (pretty meta, I know). It means that I’m the most memorable when it comes to messaging.

And in a world of hundreds of fractional marketers, that’s an important edge.

Gatekeeping messaging isn’t the way to approach it though because it’s such a crucial skill in B2B, and that’s why I want to show you how to become a messaging expert (in less than one hour).

But what does being good at messaging means?

→ Recognizing patterns, be inspired by your positioning strategy, and having good taste

Today, I’ll show you what are my best tips to get better, so within an hour, you’ll instantly get better at messaging.

Start your timer, and let’s go!

Messaging 101

We have a bad habit in product marketing that make everyone having different definitions of what is what.

Too often, copy is considered messaging, while it’s the supporting statement to a unified GTM, and the way you’re identifying what you should be saying as a company to strengthen your positioning.

That makes it a strategic foundation of sales and marketing to have enough demand for their product. Great messaging is:

• Aligned with your ICP

• Differentiate you from the competition

• Is clearly understood, no jargon

• Trigger something emotional in prospects

• Stay consistent throughout your GTM

Crushing these five pillars get you closer to message market-fit. If you’re unsure on where to start, identify weaknesses from your messaging out of these pillars.

Tip #1 - Recognizing patterns

This one might sound weird, but being great at messaging means being able to see the bigger picture.

Are you communicating information that your prospects cares about, or are you just pushing noise? Patterns are how you can support and build a stronger messaging.

So the few elements you should be looking for are:

• Signals of buying intent

• References of specific pains

• Objections

• Competitive alternatives

• Current way of doing things

• Common desired outcomes (benefits)

• Jobs to be done (JTBDs)

• Preferred features

You can fill these up in your messaging pyramid.

That’s just my favourite way of storing it because you can just switch individual pieces based on the performance (useful in a message testing context).

Your line of questioning should be to validate specific elements of your messaging, and ideally, you should always be talking with customers.

That’s why using a call recorder is so important, just with the transcripts you can track mentions and if there’s any patterns or trends that can guide your messaging.

A way to approach the pattern recognition is to see this as problem mining, that’s how you strengthen your messaging.

You centre your messaging on these specific problems validated by real people insights → Track and find companies that have them today

TLDRs.

1. Understand the problem you’re trying to fix

2. Find patterns that validate these problems

3. Map out the most important and recurring elements

4. Tweak your messaging around these insights

Tip #2 - Purge your positioning strategy

Great messaging needs to come from great positioning.

When I interviewed 65+ product marketers, the main problem of their messaging is lack of differentiation, that’s how you generate demand in a crowded market.

Bad messaging = bad positioning

Once you recognized patterns, you will have your messaging documentation. Positioning should serve as inspiration to your messaging and make you write copy with it.

You need to purge great messaging from your product positioning. Here’s what it means practically:

1. Remove GTM Bloat

Buzzwords, jargon, generic promises, or overly broad ICP are bloating your GTM. If you’re identify that these are part of your messaging, they are probably coming from your poisonous positioning.

2. Return to first principles

It’s time to ask the hard questions here:

• Who is our best fit customer today?

• What specific urgent problem are we solving for them?

• Why are we uniquely suited to solve it better than alternatives?

3. Pressure-test against the market

Lead with your point of view (POV) and then do this test with stakeholders:

A) Take your top 3-5 direct competitors

B) Remove the logo and just put homepage headlines

C) Ask people to identify which companies is what

If your positioning is strong enough, it should not simply just be copy and paste by the competition, and should be repeated back by your customers in their own words.

4. Rebuild a clear positioning core

Once you cleaned up everything, you should have this as your positioning core:

• Audience → who you serve

• Category → the space you play in

• Promise → the outcome you deliver

• Proof → why they should believe you

With this, your messaging should have everything it needs to be fuelled up.

5. Translate into sharper messaging

Now that your positioning strategy is purged, you should be able to turn it into crisp, usable messaging (bonus point if you test it)

If your messaging is good enough, it should help you create kickass copy, even if you’re a lousy copywriter like me.

Which is why our final tip is to make sure you can get better at it.

Tip #3 - Developing good taste

Great messaging requires taste AKA the capacity to recognize when something in good. But that’s a concept that can be hard to understand in creative work, especially when EVERYONE has an opinion on marketing.

There’s an amazing quote by Ira Glass on developing good taste on creative work:

So to get better at messaging, you need to be able to recognize what is great messaging, so developing a good taste in it.

Here’s how to get started:

1. Build a solid swipe file

Your inspiration starts with examples of what is good and what is bad:

→ Found a recent campaign you loved? SAVE IT

→ Laugh at a good company meme on LinkedIn? SAVE IT

→ Saw an ad that made you smile? SAVE IT

Have a place to store what you consider good because it caught your attention, is a way to discover what great messaging look like, and a great source of inspiration on new projects to develop good taste.

2. Steal like an artist

Start by finding ideas of assets, campaigns, visuals and copy that you find great or that you just remember from recently.

And then, think on how you could take a similar angle for your brand. I followed this process for creating memes on our podcast, and did a whole video on it.

3. Create and iterate

By writing different copy out of a messaging structure, is the perfect example on how you can develop a better taste from it.

I like to just use either a booklet of paper, or something that forces me to write (you can check Cold Turkey Writer as a desktop app), and then I just write down different copy for different formats.

The key here is to do multiple headlines, and being creative, you can play with different angle or copywriting frameworks, but repetition is the name of the game.

If you’re lazy, I also created a GPT to create microcopy from you out of messaging.

4. Use templates to start

The best way to get started, is to follow a template or framework that can identify the info you need to gather.

My friend Jason created a resource that’s including a positioning and messaging canva + a customer interview questions and insight trackers.

That way, you can tackle tip 1 and 2 pretty easily to get better at messaging 👇

Check out the PMM Starter Kit 👩‍🚀

Jason was the first guest on We’re Not Marketers, and a pillar of the product marketing community, we call him Professor Oak because he drops KNOWLEDGE (and Pokémon hidden somewhere)

His newsletter PMMFiles is always sharing amazing ideas from his own swipe file, and he recently launched the PMM Starter kit. His resources helped me get a better taste of what great messaging look like too.

With a single download, you’re getting 5 battle-tested template, framework and playbooks you can start using right now:

✅ Battle Card Template (customizable doc)

✅ Product Launch Playbook (framework for tiering + prioritizing launches)

✅ Customer Interview Questions & Insights Tracker (get the most out of conversations with your customers)

✅ PMM Charter Template (show your org what PMM actually does)

✅ Positioning & Messaging Canvas (your new source of messaging truth)

If you’re a founding or solo PMM juggling a million things, this is your shortcut.

Get the PMM starter kit here 👇

Thanks for reading!

That’s all folks, till next time 👋

-Gab