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Messaging shouldn't feel this hard.
If you’re staring at a complex product, an oversaturated market, and a mountain of conflicting opinions from stakeholders, you aren’t alone. Whether you’re a founder trying to find your voice or a marketer struggling to align multiple buyers, the "messy middle" of messaging is where most brands get stuck.
On Better Messaging, Emma Stratton, author and B2B messaging expert, is pulling back the curtain on how to turn technical complexity into clarity. Drawing from a decade of experience partnering with hundreds of tech companies, from seed-stage startups to global household names, Emma shares the practical frameworks and real-world lessons needed to make people actually care about what you’re building.
[00:00:00] Emma Stratton: I'm Emma Stratton, and this is Better Messaging. If you want to stop second guessing yourself and start writing better messaging today, you're in the right place.
[00:00:13] Emma Stratton: So I graduated university with an English degree. Well, to be specific, actually, I graduated with a degree in creative writing, which was a offshoot of the English degree and potentially even less useful than just a straight up English literature degree. And everyone loved to tell me that I would not make any money as an English major. And it was definitely a self-fulfilling prophecy in those first few years out of university. Now, just to give you some context, this was the early aughties. Just at the risk of aging myself here, it was the early 2000s, early mid 2000s, and I was working as a lowly publishing assistant in New York City, and I was making $28,000 a year. I actually had to pause and just really think about that.
[00:01:04] Emma Stratton: Was that really how much I was making? Yes, I was making $28,000 a year and trying to live in New York City in a Bohemian lifestyle for sure, but it was not easy. I was basically broke all the time. I didn't have much money even after payday. It was like the money would vanish. And because I was kind of like your classic English major that wasn't good with numbers, I had this thing where I never checked my bank account balance because I knew I would only have bad news. I knew it would be ultra depressing and I'd have $2 to my name or maybe negative $20. So I never checked my account balance. And instead, I kind of just made spending decisions based on how much money I thought I maybe had or how rich I was feeling in that afternoon, which was not a great strategy.
[00:01:58] Emma Stratton: And I often went into overdraft. It was just not easy to know how much money I had and how much I could actually safely spend. So that went on for quite a few years of me kind of just making these kind of vibe in my financial decisions and sort of being a mess. And I'll never forget coming across a headline from a new online bank a while back. And the headline stopped me in my tracks. The headline said, "Take away the fear of checking your account balance." And I remember seeing that headline and I was kind of like, "Oh my God, this company has just looked inside my soul and found sort of one of my deep, dark secrets." I couldn't believe it, partially because I don't think I'd ever actually articulated this fear that I had to anyone else or even myself. It was just kind of something that was happening that I was avoiding checking my bank account details and my personal finances in general.
[00:02:59] Emma Stratton: And then here is this company who I've never heard of before who seemingly totally gets what my problem is. And it was this moment of like, "Oh my God." So I kept reading after the headline and everything that this company was saying resonated. And they even made a little joke about English majors being particularly bad with their finances. I think they had a quote in parentheses and it was like, "We're looking at you English majors." And at that point I was just like, "Take my money. Who is this bank? I obviously need this bank to help me get on track." And I ended up signing up with this bank and I kind of stuck with them. As they grew, they kind of brought on merged with other companies and I stayed with them until they eventually got acquired and disappeared. And I was a loyal customer for many years and really loved them.
[00:03:51] Emma Stratton: And it all started with that headline. I mean, at the time I was not looking for a bank. I was not looking to improve my personal finances. I had a problem that I had not even fully articulated to myself, but a problem that I was aware of that had a real emotional charge to me. And this company kind of connected to that, which got my attention and drew me into their world. And I started to trust them because they seemed to understand me so well. I love this story. I tell the story a lot. It talks, I believe it's in my book as well because it just perfectly exemplifies what can be great about messaging and what's often not great in messaging, especially in the B2B space. B2B messaging has a lot of its own jargon or styles and ways of going about things that are just funny that we just don't do in other arenas.
[00:04:51] Emma Stratton: We use these big, important words. It's often dry. We're trying to sound really smart and serious all the time. We use big words. And it's just really funny how we tend to just really do it in this one space and not in other areas of our life. So if this bank that I had seen, if they had decided to take the typical B2B approach, their headline would never have said anything about fear. No way. They would have said something more safe and sanitized like, "Hey, optimize your personal finances or drive better personal financial decision making," or something like that. It would have been something really polished and dry and serious and I wouldn't have even seen that. I don't think it would have registered. I certainly would have remembered it. I wouldn't have acted on it. I would have just glided right on by and carried on with my day because that headline would have had nothing to do with me and how I felt.
[00:05:48] Emma Stratton: You would have walked right by it too, I'm sure. And yet this is so much of how messaging sounds in B2B tech and in different industries, so formal, so dry, so sanitized, so safe. It's like we don't want to touch on the messy aspects of being a person, like having fear and things like that. We want to keep everything polished and business-like. And it's something that just always didn't make sense to me. Now, if you know anything about my story, before I got into B2B messaging, I came from consumer where I was writing messaging for fast moving goods like shampoos and gum and body wash and trains and clothing and all sorts of things. And in that world, we were using language and really trying to connect with people and make them feel something, feel emotion. And then when I moved to B2B, I was like, "Why is there no emotion here?
[00:06:45] Emma Stratton: Why are we kind of ignoring the fact that humans are reading this? Why are we not acknowledging that they have lives beyond this business task or this business that they're in? Why do we avoid it? Why do we avoid the messiness and realness of the human experience in so much of our B2B messaging?" And so that really became part of my mission from the get-go was how can we make messaging for the tech industry more human? How can we acknowledge how people feel? How can we bring that into the conversation and then make it more powerful, more meaningful? Now, this isn't just about like, "Oh, people are people. Let's talk about life and make people cry and get touchy-feely." Because I've had past clients say like, "Whoa, we don't want to be touchy-feely in our messaging." And that's not really what I'm talking about.
[00:07:42] Emma Stratton: I'm not saying you got to talk about fear in every headline or get touchy-feely or try and make your reader cry. That's not at all what I'm talking about. But what I want you to consider is getting more real and relatable with your messaging. That's where the magic is. When the message is real and relatable, that message that that bank gave to me was absolutely relatable and very real. I'm sure I wasn't the only creative writing major who came across that marketing and felt completely seen, right? I felt seen. And that's what we want to do for our customers. We want them to feel seen and heard and understood through our messaging. And when you can do that, it really stands out. Getting real and relatable in your messaging has a lot of benefits. The first is that you get people's attention, you stand out from all the sanitized kind of bladdy blah stuff that your competitors are saying.
[00:08:40] Emma Stratton: You get to stand out and be fresh and you're going to attract the right people. You're going to attract the people that think that way, that have that specific problem, that have that mindset, and you're going to not attract people who don't have it. So it's a great way to get really targeted and focused with your message and really hone in on the people you do want to attract. Another thing that's great about real and relatable messaging is that you actually connect to people's emotions. Now, again, it's not about trying to make people cry or getting all touchy feeling, but it's wonderful if someone can have some sort of an emotional response when they read your words. When I read stuff like drive productivity or unlock revenue growth, I'm feeling nothing. I don't know about you. I'm feeling nothing when I read that. And when I feel nothing, my mind is not firing up and it's not going to remember it.
[00:09:37] Emma Stratton: An amazing thing about our brains is when we think about memory and what really sticks in our mind, if we feel an emotion connected to something we kind of take in or experience, we are more likely to remember it. So emotion is actually the key to neuroplasticity and remembering things and being able to recall it years later, which is why I remember that bank message so well, but emotion really makes a message sync in and makes it more memorable. And that emotion, getting someone to feel something kind of lights them up a little bit. When I read that message from the bank, at that moment, I probably wasn't thinking about how I sucked at personal finances, but when I read that headline, boom, I was instantly taken back to that time when I was broke and like embarrassed to look at my own bank account and feeling bad about how I wasn't handling things and tapping into that negative emotion then almost fired me up to do something about it.
[00:10:37] Emma Stratton: It was like, "Oh, I remember this is an issue. I want to fix this." So the same thing happens when you're real and relatable about the challenges your customers are feeling when you bring them up, when you talk about them, it reminds them of them. It makes them kind of relive them for a split second and they're like, "Yeah, this is something I want to solve. I don't want this anymore." So you're kind of fanning the flames of their desire, if you will, by tapping into that little bit of emotion. The other thing that being real and relatable does, it's a way to actually build trust with your reader. Now, so much of messaging and marketing just comes off as BS. I don't know about you. I'm sure you feel the same. A lot of it looks like BS or I don't believe it seems like over promising.
[00:11:23] Emma Stratton: It's a bit glitzy. It doesn't lack substance. Sometimes I wonder if they're telling the truth. And to be honest, these are valid questions to ask these days because there is so much lying, fudging of the truth, over exaggerating and copying that does happen in messaging. But when you get really specific and real with people and acknowledge how they're feeling and what their challenges look like and how you understand, you build trust with them. You show that you get them, that you understand them, and the person on the other end feels seen and then starts to believe a little bit that you might have an answer or solution for them if you understand them so well. So getting people's attention, helping them feel emotional and like strengthening the pull of your message and building trust on the page are three incredible reasons to get more real and relatable with your messaging.
[00:12:23] Emma Stratton: Now, here's kind of the mechanics of what's happening when we are real and relatable. And I'll use the example again of me and the bank. Here's the thing we have to really accept as marketers and people writing messaging. Our customers are living their lives, okay? Now, I've said before, like customers don't care about your product and that's not the whole thing. It's not that they wouldn't care about your product. It's just they're not walking around thinking about your product. They're not even thinking about anything necessarily related to your product. They're actually walking around thinking about their own stuff. I mean, think about yourself during the day, like what consumes your thoughts? I doubt it's product categories and features. It's you're probably thinking about the aspects of your day that aren't working. Maybe there's processes that are really annoying that you have to do, or maybe it's like stuff with your family, or maybe you don't have enough time or you're tired.
[00:13:25] Emma Stratton: We've got this litany of things that are running through our mind, things we want, things we don't have, things we're excited for, things we don't want. All these things that are happening in our mind, like a million conversations are happening at once in our mind, and that's what's happening with your customer. They have conversations and narratives that are running in their mind right now that are kind of related to the problems that you solve. These thoughts that are going on in their mind already have momentum. They already care about them. It's their shit. They care about their shit. They care about what's on their mind. So these thoughts, these ideas already have momentum and a pull in their mind. When our message is real and relatable, what we're actually doing is connecting our product to one of those conversations that's already happening in their minds, that already has momentum.
[00:14:18] Emma Stratton: We're hopping onto it and we're getting pulled along with it rather than trying to just shove some new idea into their mind and like force them into thinking something or teaching them something, educating them around something, asking them to care about something it's very hard to do, but connecting your product to an existing issue or thought pattern that they're having is a way to kind of build momentum quickly. So that's what we're trying to do with a real and relatable message. So some other examples of relatable messages. There's one that kind of has stuck in my mind for a really long time. It's an old message. It was an old value proposition that Hotjar had a few years ago, but I really liked it. Their headline was something like, understand how users behave on your website without drowning in the numbers. And because they were a heat mapping tool, they were kind of positioning against other options that maybe use the kind of numbers in that type of data.
[00:15:20] Emma Stratton: And what they were really calling out was the pain of trying to figure something out and drowning in the numbers, especially people who might be more visually minded. So that message I thought was really strong because it really kind of mirrored the pain that their customers were likely feeling by using another tool. So again, it's kind of bringing that pain forward and mirroring it and showing how they can actually solve it. So now I'd like to share a little exercise or process that you can do to start getting real and relatable with your messaging. And before I dive into it, I just want to acknowledge that it is 100% normal to kind of be in this habit of writing things that maybe have your industry or spaces jargon using certain phrasing, terminology that's a little stiff and sanitized. Okay? I want to acknowledge that that is 100% normal and many of us are doing it.
[00:16:29] Emma Stratton: It happens in every industry and every space. At Punchy, I've worked across all kinds of software categories and industries and worked with all types of people and everyone's got their own version of that dry sanitized language or that jargon, kind of going back and using that same language again and again. I was recently training a cybersecurity company down in the Bay and they were all bemoaning how they're so tired of using the word remediate all the time, like remediate, remediate, because that's just what you do in the industry, you think. And everyone else does it and your competitors use it and everyone's using the same words and it becomes a giant echo chamber and it becomes habitual and actually very easy to write that way. And so we're able to kind of put out that type of messaging and using that language easily. We've been trained on it and it doesn't take a lot of effort to write it and that is okay.
[00:17:28] Emma Stratton: A lot of people are in that place, but I bet you've had moments where you're like, "This is getting kind of boring. I'm kind of tired of writing about things the same way and using the same words like my students were with the word remediate." And you can kind of feel like you don't have many options, but this little exercise is a way to kind of stretch your thinking and realize that you do have some other options. So this exercise is really simple. It's about thinking how your customer would honestly talk about their challenges. So I was training a team a while back and they were a customer data platform. So they were all about customer data and we were doing this exercise about kind of getting real and relatable. So I asked people to list the challenges that their customers are thinking about, but to write those challenges in the way that they would actually say it to another person, like, how would they speak about this challenge to a friend or a colleague?
[00:18:33] Emma Stratton: How would they actually talk about it and not using that typical dry kind of jargony language that we might be using. So this one group, their audience was ahead of customer experience and one of their pains was need to align departments. Now, need to align departments is a really good example of kind of sanitized, not superhuman language. It's kind of like very B2B, not terrible, not wrong, but also not emotional, not super interesting or specific. So I wanted to dig into it with them. So I asked them, "Okay, align departments, tell me more about this. What do you mean by this?" If the head of CX was actually talking about this to a colleague or a friend, how would they actually talk about this need to align departments? How would they complain about it? How would they vent? How would they bitch and moan about it?
[00:19:32] Emma Stratton: And the products marketer was like, "Well, they'd probably be like, each department, like this department, they have their set of metrics, this department has this little bit of data on the customer and this other department has an even different metric and I just wish everyone could get on the same page and just chasing the same metric because it's driving me nuts." And I was like, "Ah, that is it." Getting everyone finally chasing the same metric. And that was such a great line. And I was like, "You've got to consider using that in a headline. Look at the difference between need to align departments and finally get everyone chasing the same metric." That second one is relatable. It is real. It is down to earth. And another head of CX that reads that, probably going to nod their head and be like, "Oh, yes, I need that too. Let me continue reading."
[00:20:30] Emma Stratton: So that is the exercise. It's about going back to basics and starting with your customer's most pressing challenges as they relate to your product. And I want you to write them out in the way that your customer might actually say it or think about it. How do they actually think about it? How would they speak about it? If they were venting and bitching and moaning to a friend, how would they actually characterize that challenge? Now this is a little bit like my exercise, say it like you would at the barbecue, which is just a way to give yourself permission to just say it casually. How would your customer say it if they had a beer and a hotdog in one hand and they were relaxed and they were talking to a friend? How would someone say it if they were outside of work and talking to someone?
[00:21:25] Emma Stratton: How would they actually characterize it? How do they maybe think about it in their own mind? How honest can we be? How real can we be? How deep can we go? And I want you to give yourself permission to just go there. I don't want you to self-edit or think, "Oh, legal would never let me say that." Or, "Oh, that's just a little bit too edgy," or, "Ooh, we can't curse." Yes, that's maybe true, but you don't want to kind of pen yourself in or restrict your thinking at this stage. I want you to allow yourself to go wide and I want you to see what comes out because you might just come up with some really relatable language that would be great in a headline or in a message. Another thing that you can do is talk to customers, record the calls, ask them what's hard, how does it feel? What have you tried? What's frustrating? What does it look like?
[00:22:18] Emma Stratton: You can really dig into those challenges, hear how they describe it and talk about it. You might be pleasantly surprised. I remember working with a company whose buyer was heads of IT and I was interviewing them and you would expect, oh, technical audiences, I doubt it's very emotional. They'll probably just stick to the facts and the features. But they ended up being some of the most emotional conversations I'd had with people because their job was so difficult. And we were talking about legacy solutions and what was challenging about having to work and maintain these big clunking legacy solutions. And I remember this one customer was like, "Oh God, it's like you have to be a NASA engineer to understand their dropdown menus. And it makes me feel stupid like I have to relearn everything every time I go in and log in and I just don't have the time for that."
[00:23:15] Emma Stratton: Another person was like, "I feel like I'm constantly having to babysit this solution as I'm trying to maintain it." I mean, what great language. We ended up using some of that babysit language in the messaging talking about how it wasn't something you had to babysit because I realized that a few customers actually used that type of language and it was such an interesting way to talk about maintaining a clunky legacy solution. And it was very human and very relatable and made messaging really stood out from their competitors. They just sounded more human. So if you remember anything from this episode, it's that getting real and being relatable does wonderful things for your messaging and brand.
[00:24:26] Emma Stratton: It's a great way to really connect with the person you're trying to reach, that human on the other side. And in this day and age when there's so many messaging out there, so much noise, so much distraction, really cutting to the heart of something, being real and connecting to what actually matters to your audience is a great way to stand out and get people's attention despite all the noise. So I hope this exercise has been helpful for you and I hope you feel good knowing that I have given you full permission to keep it real in your messaging. Thanks for joining me for this episode of Better Messaging. If you like what you heard, go ahead and subscribe, leave a review and share it with a friend. You can also follow me on LinkedIn. Until next time, keep it punchy, my friend.