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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. Have you ever written some messaging, put it out there, and found out that it just didn’t resonate? The words simply didn’t land. Why? What was the problem? Did we write about the wrong thing? Did we use the wrong words? Why didn’t the message land? Well, there’s lots of reasons why a message might flop with an audience. But in my work over the years, focusing wholly on messaging for B2B tech and looking a lot of the words out there, I’ve realized that there’s a pretty common reason why messaging doesn’t land. And that’s simply because the message itself is at the wrong altitude for the audience that it’s intended for. Now, altitude is a concept that I’m really into when it comes to messaging.
[00:00:56] Emma Stratton: It’s something I teach extensively in my training programs, and I really believe holds the key to messaging that resonates and really connects with your audience. So altitude is the word that I use to describe how either high level and value focused a message is or how technical and specific a message is. And it’s kind of like a spectrum. So if you imagine a big line going vertically and at the top, up in the sky, high in the clouds, we have a high altitude message, which is high in the sky and it’s value focused and it’s big and it’s broad. And then at the opposite end, down at the bottom in the weeds, the technical weeds, we’ve got a very narrow, specific techie message. Let me give you an example of each. So an example of a high altitude message would be accelerate growth and drive productivity, or unlock business transformation.
[00:01:51] Emma Stratton: It’s those big, make the world a better place type of messages that we see on a lot of company websites. I think especially larger enterprise companies tend to skew to this really big picture value statement that quite frankly is too broad, too all encompassing and too vague so that when you read it, you’re like, “I don’t really know what this company does.” Now on the flip side, we’ve got the example of a low altitude message, which is super technical and specific. An example might be monitor networks with an open source SaaS based agent. That is very technical specific. And to some people when they read that, they’re like, “I don’t even know what that is. Why should I even care about that thing?” And that’s what happens when your message is too low altitude. So I’ve explained high altitude and low altitude. And typically when it comes to messaging, we want to be somewhere in the middle between very high and very low.
[00:02:51] Emma Stratton: And it’s kind of like the Goldilocks principle. You remember how Goldilocks tried the porridge, one was too cold, one was too hot, with the one in the middle was just right. And that’s kind of how altitude goes. It is nuanced. It’s somewhere in the middle. Typically, that’s where we want to be. And so we really want to watch out when our messaging is super high altitude or super low altitude, and we want to be somewhere in between. Now finding that in between part, that’s the nuance and that’s kind of one of the challenges of messaging, but it all starts with thinking about your audience, your customer, and what is their point of view? What is their worldview? What is their experience? And then that will help you figure out what is the right altitude for them. The idea is that you want to choose an altitude that matches the level of experience that your audience has.
[00:03:48] Emma Stratton: So let me give you an example of altitude and how to kind of work it out based on your audience. I’ve got a couple ideas for you here. So the first is, say I’ve got an AI chatbot that I’m wanting to sell to talent acquisition managers. Now this is a little chatbot that appears on your company job sites and interacts with candidates. So I have this little chatbot. If I were to write a message and say to my talent acquisition manager, “Hey, this AI chatbot is going to help you grow your business with the right people. “ That is too high altitude of a message. It’s big. It’s value focused. I’m trying to connect the dots to how this little chatbot is going to help her hire better and then make the business even better. And in doing so, I’ve kind of over promised. I’m sort of promising something that a chatbot can’t wholly deliver.
[00:04:49] Emma Stratton: I mean, an AI chatbot that you plug in isn’t going to necessarily suddenly help grow your business. A lot of things have to go right. So I’ve over promised, but also I’m kind of missing what my talent acquisition manager cares about. It’s not her job to grow the business. She has specific things that she’s thinking about and kind of growing the business. Sure, that’s sort of the ultimate goal at the end of some other things, but that’s not what’s directly on her plate. That’s not what she’s really focused on. So it’s too high altitude and she’s going to read that message and just be like, “Okay, whatever. I don’t know what that does next.” So that’s an example of going too high. Now, if I were to take a separate tack and go super low altitude and say, “Hey, talent acquisition manager, this chatbot is going to enable you to have AI powered real-time communication with candidates.” That’s a little bit too low altitude.
[00:05:47] Emma Stratton: She’s like, “Okay, I get what you mean, but like, okay, real time communication. I guess that sounds good. It’s a little bit too in the weeds. I’ve spent too much explaining how it works and not really giving her a reason why. She should be excited about this AI powered communication. So again, I’m a little bit too low in altitude. So we know what too high looks like. We know what too low looks like. Then we can think, all right, what’s something in the middle? Can I strike a balance between these two altitudes in terms of how much value I show and how specific I get? “ And an example of a message that’s kind of at a middle altitude that sits between the two would be something like this. Speed up your screening process by asking candidates questions while they’re on your career site. Now that is an example of a nice medium altitude message, and it’s got a couple parts here.
[00:06:47] Emma Stratton: So the first part, speed up your screening process. That is the value. That is the why. This is what my talent acquisition manager is going to get, and it’s something that she cares about. It’s something that she’s measured against. She’s got to deliver on it. This is her remit, and so we’re speaking to something that matters to her. The second half of the message by asking candidates questions while they’re on your career site, that is the technical piece. That is the detail. A lot of times when we want to add more depth, more technicalness to a message, it’s not about diving straight into the tech speak, but often it’s about adding a little bit more detail and showing someone a little bit of the how and what they’re going to be able to do. So by saying, “Hey, you’re going to be able to ask candidates questions while they’re on your career site,” that makes me understand what this is a little bit better than AI-powered real-time communication, which is essentially trying to say the same thing, but has a really different effect.
[00:07:49] Emma Stratton: So this middle altitude message conveys to our talent acquisition manager why she should care and what she’s going to be able to do that she can’t do now. It’s aligned to what she cares about, and it also helps her understand why even consider this AI chatbot. So that is the power of going for that middle altitude. Another example, one that’s maybe a little bit more technical would be for sandboxes, for an IT admin. So a sandbox is like a production environment where you can kind of play around with things without breaking any of your apps or things that are already in production. And if my audience is an IT admin, they’re not the developer, but they’re one of the people in the buyer’s group. If I were to say to the IT admin, “Hey, these sandboxes are going to help you accelerate your app development.” And that sounds nice, but it’s too high altitude.
[00:08:47] Emma Stratton: It is too broad and value focused and actually too far removed from what the product actually does. And it’s not necessarily what is number one on the IT admin’s vision board or what they have to do or care about. Accelerating app development, sure, it sounds good, but that’s not really the number one aspiration of the IT admin. It is too high altitude. And we’re actually getting close to that over promising territory that I mentioned before. A lot of things have to go right in order to speed up app development. A sandbox on its own is not going to magically do that. So little bit too high altitude there. Now, if I went way on the other side, down into the weeds, I might say something like, “Hey, these sandboxes will help you isolate vulnerabilities, replicate bugs, and experiment with configurations in real time.” Now that is too low altitude, right?
[00:09:43] Emma Stratton: That’s something that maybe developers are interested in hearing about getting really into the weeds, but for the IT admin, it’s too low altitude. It’s like, why do I need this? Have a sense of what these things are, but not really locked into why these things are so important. So we have this example of too high with the Accelerate app development and too low with the whole isolate vulnerabilities, replicate bugs, et cetera. So again, we want to channel our Goldilocks and we want to choose something that’s somewhere in between where we’re really connecting to what matters to the IT admin and still showing why they should care and what they’re going to be able to do with this new thing. So an example of a nice mid-level altitude message would be safely test new features in a secure environment without disrupting business operations. Again, we’ve got what this is, which is an ability to safely test new features and why, oh, you’re going to be able to do it without disrupting the business.
[00:10:47] Emma Stratton: And I understand those things and it’s at the right altitude for the IT admin. So you can see that it’s a bit of a nuance kind of shifting thing with choosing the right altitude. You’ve got that whole level, right? If you imagine five feet in the air, 20 feet in the air, 30, 100 feet in the air, going up high and low, there’s this whole space here and a spectrum that you can really play in when you’re thinking about altitude of message. And it’s something that you kind of want to feel around. So what I’ve noticed, I’ve talked about altitude and teach it with my students and marketers who work with me, this idea of altitude. And at first, it’s kind of rare to write a message first time and you’re like, boom, nailed the altitude. What I’ve learned is that we can write something, then look at it through the lens of altitude and think, “Hmm, now that I’m looking at this, it’s a bit high altitude, or maybe it’s a bit low altitude,” and make a tweak there.
[00:11:53] Emma Stratton: So there are a few rules, best practices when it comes to altitude that can help shape your thinking if you’re wanting to apply this idea of altitude to your messaging. So I’ve mentioned that we want to be somewhere in the middle. We don’t want to be too high, we don’t want to be too low, but even that middle area, there are going to be times when you’re going to want to kind of nudge a little bit towards the higher side of things. So if you imagine a point being somewhere in the middle of high and low, you might want to nudge just a little bit higher towards that value and broad section of messaging of high altitude. So there are times when you want to nudge towards higher altitude message and you’re wanting to highlight the why do this thing in the first place, like why is what we want to kind of answer with a higher altitude message.
[00:12:45] Emma Stratton: Times when you want to go higher in altitude are when you are talking to business buyers, C-suite, or less technically savvy buyers. So maybe you’ve got software that’s for lawyers or teachers, an audience that is not super techy or buying lots of software all the time. For these folks, they’re going to want a slightly higher altitude message because they’re going to want to know why. Why should I adopt this software? Why do I need to maybe consider changing the way I’m doing things currently with this software? They need to understand a bit of the why because they’re newer to it. They don’t know all that we know about the product and what’s so great about it. And of course you should upgrade to this feature or what have you. They don’t know that. So we’ve got to help paint that picture for them and give them a little bit of the why.
[00:13:40] Emma Stratton: So whenever you’re working with business buyers, not so techy users, you want to be slightly higher in altitude. Another time when you want to go slightly higher in altitude is when you are writing messaging for a new or emerging product. So it’s a new category or it’s a new technology that people don’t know. They’ve kind of never used this before or maybe it’s like a new behavior, a new way of doing things. That’s when you want to go a little bit higher in altitude. You want them to understand why they should even go about it differently. Why take this different approach, help them understand what this new way of acting or doing could do for them and their life. And finally, when you’re writing messaging for something big like a company or a suite of products or a portfolio of products, when you’re trying to kind of cover a lot of ground in your messaging, you’re also going to want to go higher in altitude because you’re going to want to encompass many things.
[00:14:44] Emma Stratton: And so you’re going to have to have a message that sits above it and kind of talks about the why above it all. So these are all kind of times when you want to go slightly higher in altitude. So an example of a higher altitude headline would be something like build a workforce that’s ready to take on anything, which is, I saw it on SAP’s website. So that’s an example of high altitude, right? So that’s something that’s sitting above all of their different products that are all kind of helping businesses move forward. So we’re talking high altitude. We’re talking about a workforce and being ready for the future. That’s very high altitude and broad. So that’s an example of a higher altitude message. Now on the flip side, let’s talk about times when you want to go slightly lower in altitude. So again, not necessarily going straight down into the weeds and just rattling off technical documentation, but it’s about going slightly closer towards the technical side of things.
[00:15:45] Emma Stratton: And you want to do that when you’re talking to your technical audiences or your sophisticated tech users or sophisticated experienced tech buyers. Now, this is one that a lot of people over the years have kind of, when I give speeches or talks about value and leading with value, there’s always a couple of folks that raise their hand and say like, “Hey, I’m a marketer marketing towards developers and they hate marketing and they hate fluff and they don’t care about the value and I just got to get straight to the features.” So they’re kind of saying like they don’t care about the value. And what I always say is, yeah, they actually do care about value. We all care about value. We all want to know why we should do something. It’s just that the why that a developer has or a technical user has is really different from the why of a CEO or a lawyer, a different audience.
[00:16:44] Emma Stratton: And so you just need to think about value from the lens of lower altitude. And I’ll give you an example of that in a second. So technical folks, we don’t want to waste their time talking about why they should care about something. We kind of want to get into it and really show them what they’re going to be able to do. We want to bring to life, here’s what you’re going to be able to do. So that’s really the focus here. Another time when you want to go lower in altitude is when you’re writing messaging for a very well known and understood product. For example, CRM. At this time of recording this podcast, there’s probably a bajillion CRMs out there in the world. It’s a very competitive market. And so it wouldn’t make sense for me to waste my precious messaging explaining why you should want a CRM because that is understood.
[00:17:38] Emma Stratton: People know what a CRM is, they’re looking for the right one for them. In this case, I want to lead with a slightly lower altitude message where I get a little bit more detailed and choose a detail that is what differentiates my CRM for other CRMs. So this is where you want to narrow in. You want to choose kind of what makes us different or really kind of put a stake in the ground there and get a little bit more detailed with a lower altitude message. So it helps with differentiation. And finally, if I’m messaging something small, like a capability or smaller product or maybe a feature even, you want to go lower in altitude because we’re messaging about something quite small, quite defined, and so we don’t want to kind of be like, “Hey, this little feature is going to help you grow your business or drive productivity.” We want to be more down to earth and keep it more clear on what you’re going to be able to do.
[00:18:32] Emma Stratton: Here’s something new you’re going to be able to do with this feature. So an example of a lower altitude message is simply merge the highest quality code. So that’s just a line and I just saw it on GitHub’s website a little while back. And that’s an example of a low altitude value. So to say that a developer doesn’t care about value is untrue. It’s missing the real point, which is a developer cares about a lower altitude value. So merging the highest quality code is valuable to them. And it’s different from saying accelerate app development or grow the business with great new products. It’s really focused on what matters to the developer and what they care about, and it is at the right altitude for them. So Altitude is really about thinking where your audience is at and meeting them at their eye level. That’s a great way to think about it is you want to meet them at their eye level.
[00:19:35] Emma Stratton: So how do we do that? Well, for most aspects of messaging, the way to do it is to really get to know your customers and understand them. So first of all, you want to be clear on who your audience is. It sounds so basic, but it’s something that just comes up again and again. Are we clear on who we’re speaking to with this message? Are you clear on who the audience is for whatever this messaging is that you’re writing? You want to get very clear on them. And is it a distinct group of people or are we trying to speak to absolutely everyone at the same time, which I will talk about at a later episode, but you want to get very clear on who are we talking to and hopefully have some definition there and understand who this audience is and who aren’t. That’s not the right grammar.
[00:20:26] Emma Stratton: Who isn’t your audience, right? You want to get clear there? If you have multiple audiences, multiple personas in the mix, then you want to think about, okay, who are the most important ones of the group? Who are the ones that are actually likely kind of reading all the websites, making the short list, championing this product to get it through? Those are the people you want to kind of skew the messaging towards and kind of think about them when it comes to altitude. So when you’ve gotten really clear on who your audience is, then you really want to think about them and their level of experience. So you want to ask yourself, how much do they already know about my product and the problems it solves? Are they very aware that they’ve got a problem? Is it something that is staring them in the face and is really annoying them and is pushing them to find a new solution?
[00:21:25] Emma Stratton: Or are they maybe not aware that this is the problem beneath the other problems? Do they fully understand what my product is? Have they heard of it before? Are they coming from a similar solution or do they not know that my type of product exists? Are we totally new to them? Are they coming from spreadsheets? So these are all questions you want to ask. You want to get a really good sense of who your audience is and where they’re coming from and how much do they know. And then you want to meet them where they’re at. You don’t want to insult their intelligence by kind of rehashing stuff they already know. So this is something I see a lot in messaging where we spend a lot of time in a preamble kind of laying out the state of play of business like the dreaded in the ever increasing digital world or like with rapid change or data is everywhere.
[00:22:27] Emma Stratton: These are kind of statements that everyone knows. You don’t need to waste breath on it. Jump into the story a little bit later. So they already know all that stuff like yes, that’s given to them. Don’t bother kind of starting with that in your messaging. Go straight to the point of where you want to talk about value or what is your take on things. You want to meet your audience where they’re at. I think that is kind of a phrase that I’ve always kept close to me throughout the years with messaging is like, can I meet my audience where they’re at? Can I meet them at their eye level and not kind of over complicate things and send a message that goes over their heads and not insult their intelligence by saying something that they already know, right? How can you meet them where they’re at?
[00:23:22] Emma Stratton: Now, next time I’m going to share a process. I’m going to build on what we’ve talked about here and I’m going to share a little process that incorporates altitude and brainstorming to really help you take that next step of writing messaging that hits the right altitude. So definitely check that one out as we build on this idea of altitude and meeting your audience where they’re at so you can write a message that truly resonates. 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.