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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. Probably one of the most common questions I get asked from other marketers is, Emma, how do I convince my leadership team that using a clear, simple, jargon-free approach is the way to go in our messaging? I can’t tell you how many times people have asked me this. People who take my training course, so individual marketers at companies, even folks I speak to after conferences when I’ve just given a keynote. They’re like, “Emma, I’m totally on board with everything you just said about how messaging should be clear and simple and human, but no one else in my organization thinks that they love their jargon. What do I do? “ And if you’re in this situation, my heart goes out to you because I know how tough it can be to be the one marketer who’s flying the flag for clear, simple messaging and you’re effectively swimming upstream against what everyone else wants, which is the big buzzwords, the AI powered this, the fancy technical jargon that they think is going to make their products sound super, super innovative and exciting.
[00:01:21] Emma Stratton: It can be really tough to be up against that. So if you’re facing it right now, I want you to know that I feel for you that I’m rooting for you and I have some ideas of some suggestions, ways you can maybe try and convince or influence teammates, colleagues, leadership to take a jargon-free approach, to take a punchy approach to messaging. So that’s what I’m going to be talking about today. My first suggestion is actually quite simple and this suggestion really highlights how when we use jargon and all the big marketing buzzwords, we end up sounding like pretty much everyone else because most companies like to do this too. So a really simple thing you can do is take a slide and grab some copy, maybe some headlines from your website and from some competitors’ websites and throw them all on the slide or the page and then ask leadership or your colleagues to guess which one is yours or which one is not yours and see what they say.
[00:02:25] Emma Stratton: Now, I actually did this once a while back with a very popular rising startup and I did it with their whole cross-functional leadership team, including their sales leader who was really savvy. I put it up there honestly wondering if they would be able to pull out their own messaging and I thought they would, but no one was able to do it. And I remember the head of sales being particularly like shocked that he had gotten it wrong and it really made an impact on them as to how generic their current messaging was. So this is something you could do as well, put some headlines up from you and some competitors, get them on there, ask them to say, “Which one is us?” And they will likely not be able to do that. And when they don’t, you can say, “Look how much our messaging sounds like everybody else’s.” And they’ll say, “Yeah, I do see that.
[00:03:17] Emma Stratton: “ And then you could also say, “Do you also see how it’s not super clear? It all saying the same thing but not saying a lot. We have an opportunity here to be more clear, to be more specific and to be more differentiated. Shouldn’t we go for it? “ And hopefully they’ll be like, “Yes, let’s go for it. “ So that’s one way of going about it, just showing how undifferentiated it can be when you use all the typical expected jargon. A second example is something I do when I consult with teams. Part of my collaborative working session where we work on potential positioning and messaging routes, I always bring in customer insights from the research, phone calls, Zoom calls that I’ve had with customers and I pull specific quotes that I find really interesting so that they can see them because I think it’s really important for leadership to be connected to the customer and see actual voice of customer in front of them.
[00:04:15] Emma Stratton: So what you could do is actually grab some voice of customer quotes to show the disconnect between how customers talk and how we are talking. Now this disconnect pretty much exists in, gosh, so many companies messaging and it’s really easy to do where you write messaging like a tech company with a voice of a tech company talking about all the techy things and the innovation and whatnot and your customer is not a tech company. They don’t come from a startup, that’s not their world. And so your messaging doesn’t really vibe with their view of the world. Okay You’re effectively speaking a different language and this happens quite a lot. In fact, just the other day I was consulting with a company that works in the sports and entertainment industry and they do data analytics and data intelligence. And so all of their messaging was like for a data scientist, right?
[00:05:13] Emma Stratton: Getting really deep into the nuance and data nerdiness and really their customers spoke the language of sports and entertainment. They don’t understand all that deep data science stuff. And so we had to really bridge that gap so that instead of sounding like a data scientist, they sounded more like a sports and entertainment person, effectively closing that gap between the two. So that’s what the second idea is about is revealing that gap between how we talk and how our customers talk. A way that I’ve done this in the past with my clients is actually just create a really simple table and on the left I say what we say and on the right, I say what they say where we say accelerate digital transformation, they say we need to reign in all our data and put it in one place. Okay, that’s just an example. So on the left is the fancy kind of jargony language that we use and on the right is how the customers say it.
[00:06:12] Emma Stratton: So it can be really good to focus in on problems. So how does the customer talk about their problems and also how does the customer talk about the benefits that they get from our product or the value they get from our product? There again, the language that they use will likely be very different than the language your company is using when it comes to benefits and value propositions. So a really simple table, here’s how we talk on the left, here’s how our customers talk on the right. Also, you can just maybe grab just some excerpts from customer language that really, really illustrates your point about how simple they talk about things. Another thing I’ve done is ask customers, how would you describe our product? What words would you use? And I also say to them, “If you were to refer or recommend our product to someone else, how would you recommend it?
[00:07:03] Emma Stratton: “ So those questions can give you some really good language that quite frankly, you probably might want to consider using in your benefit and value messaging because it’s going to be aligned with the customer language, but asking those questions and getting those words, they will likely show that disconnect between here’s how we talk about it on our website, but in actuality, here’s how our customers actually think about the benefits we give them and the problems we solve. And it can be really enlightening, right? I think you can’t argue with the customer and that’s why I always lean on customer data whenever I can, whenever I get in these conversations around should we use jargon or not because it’s like, “Hey, it’s not what I think. It’s what the customer thinks.” And this messaging is actually for customers and prospects. It’s not really for us, it’s for them to help them understand that we can help them and help them move forward in the sales cycle.
[00:07:59] Emma Stratton: So it’s for them, not us. So we really want to align with what they think. The third way that you could go is a bit more labor intensive, but it is to do some actual message testing with prospects or customers. So it might be as simple as taking existing messaging that’s a bit jargony and taking it to maybe a customer or two that you have a good relationship with and asking them what they think. Does this resonate? Is this how they would characterize the benefits of the value? Or you could even take it to some prospects, someone who would be an ideal prospect and ask them, “Give it to me straight. Candidly, what do you think about this messaging? Do you understand it? Does it make you want to learn more? Do you have any questions? What do you think? “ I guarantee they will have questions, okay?
[00:08:49] Emma Stratton: Customers always have questions. It’s really hard to cover it all in messaging. So if you put that forward to a couple customers that you know, or even some prospects that represent your best fit customers, they might have questions, they might have call-outs and again, you can bring that forward to your leadership team. You could say, “Hey, I’ve got some data here that says that this value proposition that we’re going with isn’t landing.” Kind of piggybacking on that same idea of message testing is to actually go to your sales team. So whenever I do messaging consulting, I always have special sales sessions where I just speak to sellers and just ask them all these questions about what they’ve learned from prospects and what lands and what doesn’t and what’s flopped and what gets people’s eyes to light up. Because let’s face it, salespeople, whether you give them messaging or not, they’re typically trying their own messaging all the time, whether it’s in emails, outbound, phone conversations, they’re trying stuff, throwing it at the wall, seeing what sticks and running with what does.
[00:09:56] Emma Stratton: That’s a ton of experience, insights, anecdotal evidence and I always want to tap into that because that’s a lot of really good insight that can help you jump ahead in your messaging. So I will ask them, “Hey, do prospects resonate with our messaging? Do you use our current messaging in your sales conversations? And if not, why?” And often if the message is very jargony, they’ll be like, “Oh no, I don’t really talk about that. I talk about this because that’s what they actually care about or I talk about this and their eyes light up.” So they know they have some really good evidence from their own experience. So you might be able to tap into that and say, “Hey, sales has said this has not been landing. However, they think this does.” And I typically find that sales are pretty plain speaking down to earth with their messaging and that’s what prospects really resonate with.
[00:10:54] Emma Stratton: Okay. So we’ve done three, which are really kind of around looking at the competition, looking at customer language, and then actually doing some messaging testing. The fourth one is a favorite of mine because it kind of taps into that human emotion of kind of like FOMO, a little bit about grass is always greener, a little bit of envy, but it’s about talking about what your competitors are doing. Most people who I work with, they will tell me about a company that’s either in their space or in an adjacent space that they admire or they wish their marketing was like theirs. There’s always someone that they look up to who they think is doing a great job with their marketing and they’re jealous. They wish that they were like that. I don’t think I’ve met a company that didn’t have a company like that in their sights, some that they were kind of jealous of and they really admired their marketing.
[00:11:54] Emma Stratton: So if that’s the case at your company, it’s likely that they have decent messaging. That’s what I find. People really tend to be jealous of companies who are super simple, super single-minded with their messaging or even have some personality. People like that. Of course, but then when it comes time for you to work on your own messaging, you get scared and you don’t want to go out on a limb and make those choices that seem maybe a bit scary or a bit risky, but then you see another company doing it and they’re standing out because of it and you get jealous. I see this happening a lot, but you can use this to your advantage. You could point out to one of those brands that they admire and say, look how different their language is from ours. Look how simple their headlines are. Anyone can understand it.
[00:12:43] Emma Stratton: Look how complicated ours are. Look how short the words are that they use. Look how long the words are that we use. Look how short their paragraphs are. Look how long our paragraphs are. Look how they talk about emotion. Look how we ignore emotion. Look how they use bits of personality in their voice. Look how we sound a bit dry and corporate. So doing a side-by-side comparison with a competitor that they like is also a good way to kind of maybe make them think that there’s an opportunity to make a change. Now if neither of those four work, the fifth one is my ultimate suggestion and that is get them a copy of my book and force them to read it. It’s an audio. They can listen to it in double speed. It’s also a very short book, but to be honest, I wrote that book because so many people told me about this issue that they were having about getting their leadership on board and I saw this problem everywhere and like every industry I’ve worked in, it’s such a big problem in my eyes.
[00:13:48] Emma Stratton: I really wrote this book with the goal of creating change in the industry to really shift the way people thought about messaging and going from sounding super innovative and techie and like the smartest person in the room to sounding simple, human and relatable so that people are able to understand why these solutions matter quickly and more easily. I really wrote this book because I wanted more people to understand why this approach is the way to go and why it serves customers and how it will ultimately serve your marketing and sales efforts. It’s why I wrote the book and to date I’ve sold thousands and thousands of copies of the book and it makes me really happy when people email me all the time and say, “Hey Emma, we’ve adopted your approach at my company. We’re using Make It Punchy. That’s how we do everything now.
[00:14:45] Emma Stratton: Thank you for helping us out. “ And it makes me so happy because that’s really a big part of why I did it. The other side of why I wrote the book is because I wanted to help individual folks just like you to have a resource to up your messaging skills. But also it was really about changing the conversation around messaging and making it so that everyone’s like, “Duh.” Of course you want simple human messaging and of course you want to avoid all of that silly jargon business. So get them to read the book or maybe someone in your organization has read the book that could convince them as well. Let me know. I’m happy to send you a copy. The book is a good way to do it and also Punchy training, right? I come into companies and I teach marketing team sales teams how to write in the Punchy method.
[00:15:34] Emma Stratton: So that’s something else you could do and I would love to do it. So those are five ways that you can kind of try and shift and influence your leadership or your colleagues to take a more simple human approach to messaging rather than the old jargony techie fluffy route that so many companies do. However, with the best will in the world and trying all of these things, it still might not work. And that’s because sometimes these beliefs about using jargon and all the marketing fluff words are ingrained in the culture and the leadership actually wants that. Leadership believes that that is the best way forward to use those big words and to layer on the jargon nice and thick. And sadly, this is a fact of life. And if this is happening to you, I think it’s really important to try your best, but to accept if it’s bigger than you and it can’t really be shifted to kind of acknowledge that and maybe think about making a change because I know sometimes you might be the only person in the organization that wants to avoid jargon.
[00:16:44] Emma Stratton: Everyone else might be totally gung-ho. You may not feel like you have the standing or the influence to really change things and that is okay. It’s not your fault. It’s just the way things are and it happens. I’ve seen it happen myself. I will say when it comes to being a company that doesn’t use jargon and uses clear, punchy messaging, that should really come from the top. It really should be leadership setting that tone and it trickling down and everyone following leadership’s edict of simple human messaging. I’ve trained large well-known companies that have decided that, and it’s because the CMO decided we do not want to use jargon anymore. We need to relate to customers. And so they’ve brought me in to train all of their teams because now everyone’s sort of being measured on that. And I’m always happy when companies make that decision, especially when they’re in areas like cybersecurity.
[00:17:42] Emma Stratton: So I just recently trained a company, a big cybersecurity player, and they want to avoid unnecessary jargon. Now, when I say jargon, I’m talking about unnecessary jargon. So kind of over the top technical speak that goes over your reader’s heads, which is too low altitude like we’ve talked about in past episodes and also the marketing jargon and the fluff that is so common, just avoiding those words and instead going for words that actually convey the meaning you’re trying to put forward and help someone understand really quickly and easily why your product could matter to them and that is the goal of messaging. So my friend, if you are kind of in this challenge right now, I am rooting for you and I really hope some of my suggestions help you out. If you try them and get a result, reach out to me on LinkedIn, DM me.
[00:18:37] Emma Stratton: I would love to hear about it and maybe share your victory story in a future podcast episode. So do get in touch if you try it and it works for you. Best of luck with these and I will see you next time. 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.