What is messaging?

“Carly, I’ve bought so many courses and invested in so much coaching over the years. Still I get stuck with the same questions: How do I speak to my Right Fit client? What are their problems? How do I communicate what my offer is, and what the true value of this work is? Basically: what do I need to say so that my Right Fit client decides they’re ready to work with me?”

I get questions like these all the time from the business owners I work with and support through our programs. Actually, I’ll bet that if you’re here reading this, you’ve asked similar (or verbatim) questions in the past, too. 

The answer to these questions comes down to your messaging.

Not marketing. Not content. Not copy. Messaging.

The word “messaging” is thrown around a lot in the online space, often used interchangeably with “marketing,” “content,” and “copy,” or even sometimes the extra confusing phrase: “marketing messages.” But messaging is not marketing, it’s not content, it’s not copy, and it’s not “what you talk about in your marketing” (aka “marketing messages”).

In fact, conflating messaging with those things is part of what makes it so dang difficult to speak directly to your Right Fit client and invite them into your work.

Today on the blog, I’m sharing what messaging actually is, how to use it, and the 3 signs that tell you that you’ve finally got your messaging nailed.

What is messaging?

Messaging, as used in your marketing (and really throughout your entire Demand Generation System, which encompasses marketing, lead generation, and sales), is a core set of words, phrases, and perspectives intentionally crafted to communicate a specific message to your target audience.

Note that there is a difference between brand messaging and product messaging, with brand messaging being what you use to talk about your business as a whole and product messaging being what you use to talk about (and sell!) a specific product, offer, or service of yours.

For the purposes of this article, we’re going to focus on product messaging. If you’re not already making the level of sales that you want to be in your business, product messaging needs to be your priority over brand messaging, as product messaging is a crucial part of how you attract Right Fit, ready-to-buy clients into your offer/s. Once you’re making the level of sales that you want to be, to clients who are reliably achieving the intended result of your offer, and you have sustained that for several months in a row—essentially “proving” that your product messaging doesn’t have any glaring issues—then you can shift your focus to the creation of brand messaging.

How and When to Use Product Messaging in Your Online Business

Your product messaging is used anywhere and anytime you are talking about a specific offer. That means you’re using messaging in your marketing content, in your sales page copy, in a sales conversation, and essentially, anywhere that you’re pitching your offer as the recommended next step.

“Wait, what’s the difference between messaging and marketing, content, and copy?”

Note that messaging is not the same thing as “marketing,” “content,” or “copy,” but it is used within each of those things. 

For example, one of the eight core product messaging foundations is the “Want,” as in: what does your Right Fit client for this specific offer say that they want? To answer that question, you’d come up with a specific word or phrase. Then when you are writing sales page copy for this offer, you would insert that specific word or phrase into your copy somewhere (and typically, for the Want especially, you’d insert it in several places). 

Another of the core product messaging foundations are the Identity Shifts (for which there are two types!). To find the Identity Shifts, you’d ask: how does the clients’ identity shift after having achieved the transformation, result, or outcome of this offer? The Identity Shifts typically create a perspective through which you speak, rather than necessarily being a specific word or phrase that you repeat (like the “Want” is). Once you identify both types of Identity Shifts, you’d then use that perspective to inform the topics you’ll choose to talk about in your marketing.

Let’s make this example even more tangible. One of my core offers here at WholeCo is EXPAND, our comprehensive business training program that equips you with the business-building acumen and deeply embodied self-trust to turn your business into one that brings you as much joy as it does revenue. (This is how you create real, lasting Sustainable Success.)

One of the two Identity Shifts in our EXPAND (product) messaging is: “my friends, family, and community now see that I am paving my own path and doing so successfully.” When I’m using this core messaging foundation, I’m not necessarily going to paste that exact phrasing into a sales page or a marketing email. However, I might use this perspective to inform how I talk and what I talk about in a sales page or marketing email or other piece of content. As just one practical manifestation, I once sent out a marketing email—in which I was inviting our audience into EXPAND—about how my parents responded when they found out I was making consistent $30k cash months. That’s me using this perspective to inform a piece of marketing content.

Again: messaging is not the same thing as marketing, content, or copy. It’s the words, phrases, or perspectives that you use within marketing, content, and copy, as well as throughout your entire Demand Generation System. Basically: anywhere that you are talking about your offer, you need to be using messaging that has been crafted for that specific offer.

“Does this mean that I have different messaging for each of my offers?”

Yep! You will have different messaging for every single one of your offers—free or paid. And you will (eventually) have brand messaging for your entire business as well as distinct product messaging for each of your offers.

The Purpose of Product Messaging & What it Needs to Accomplish for Your Business

Product messaging needs to accomplish three core aims:

1. It needs to be “sticky.”
2. It needs to filter Right Fit clients in, and wrong fit (or not-yet-Right \-Fits!) out.
3. It needs to distinguish your offers from one another.

Let’s take a closer look at what each of these mean.

Your messaging needs to be sticky.

When I say that your messaging needs to be “sticky,” what I’m really saying is that your messaging needs to be something that your audience could (and does) offhandedly (and unironically) repeat back to you. You make your messaging sticky by ensuring the actual core words and phrases you use—especially those from the first four of eight product messaging foundations: the Want, Why, Obstacles, and Outcomes—are both crystal clear and deeply resonant for your Right Fit client. Then you repeat those core words and phrases over and over and over. 

When I’m teaching messaging, I often joke that I want you to repeat your Want and Why (the first two messaging foundations) so many times that you want to puke, and then repeat them 100 more times. I know, that’s probably more graphic than it needs to be, but it gets the message across: you want to be sick of saying the same thing so many times, and then keep saying it.

Repetition of your messaging foundations are SO important, because without it, your audience will not grasp onto what your offer is, who it’s for, how it’s going to help them, and why it matters in the grand scheme of their life. You already know that the online business world especially is noisy, and there are a lot of messages being heard by your Right Fit, ready-to-buy prospect. You repeating your messaging—using quite literally the exact same core words and phrases every time—ensures that the message “sticks” enough for them to understand and be motivated to take the next step and invest. 

I’ll be honest: a lot of online business owners initially balk at the idea of repeating the same core words or phrases every time they talk about their offer…until they give it a go at my recommendation and within a couple of months not only have made more sales, but have people in their audience repeating their words back to them, and doing so unironically. 

Repetition works. But only once you’ve first ensured that your messaging is actually crystal clear and deeply resonant for your Right Fit, ready-to-buy client.

Your messaging needs to filter prospects in or out, depending on whether they’re a Right Fit.

I’ve heard so many business owners complain about “freebie seekers” over the years. Heck, I’ve even been one of them, earlier on in my business! While I dislike classifying a real, living human being as a “freebie seeker,” there are absolutely people in the world who might fit some aspects of your ideal client but who aren’t yet ready-to-buy. (Therefore, they are not a Right Fit client, which necessarily includes purchase-readiness.)

However, complaining about so-called freebie seekers does nothing for you. Using the plethora of “freebie seekers” in your audience as a sign that something needs to change, and then creating (actually) aligned messaging for each of your offers, does. 

Many of my clients are surprised to find out through our messaging work that their messaging (or lack thereof) so far has actually been working, just not in the way they want it to. What I mean by that is: their messaging has been attracting exactly who it’s speaking to, but it’s not speaking to their Right Fit, purchase-ready clients. Having an audience full of “freebie seekers” therefore is a (very common) indication that your messaging needs work, as it’s your messaging—or, again, your lack of intentionally defined messaging—that attracted these non-purchase-ready people to your audience.

I recently worked with an online business owner who teaches people how to set up their own Virtual Assistant business. Prior to working together, they were commonly using the phrase, “Do you want to work from home?” across their marketing and copy. (Note: this phrase isn’t really messaging, though it was used often enough by this business that it was “standing in place” of true messaging.) This business owner was frustrated, because they just weren’t making sales. 

However, let’s think about this so-called “messaging”: it’s speaking to someone who wants to work from home, but hasn’t already decided what work they want to do at home. That means that this business owner was not only having to sell her audience on her specific offer, she was also having to sell them on her specific answer to “what work they want to do at home.” Sure, she was attracting people into her audience who wanted to work from home, but very few of them actually wanted to be a Virtual Assistant. Or, if they did like her spiel about why being a Virtual Assistant is such a great work from home situation, they, themselves, weren’t actually motivated to make the Virtual Assistant business work, they were only motivated to work from home. I think I’m safe to assume that all of you business owners know that unless you actually are motivated to make your chosen business work, it’s really dang hard to make it work (and really easy to want to give up on).

In this case, their messaging was “working” in that it was attracting exactly who it’s speaking to: people who aren’t actually Right Fits for her offer as they were nowhere near purchase-ready.

A few common signs and symptoms that you’re using messaging that is attracting wrong fits or not-yet-Right-Fits are: 

• You have an audience full of “freebie seekers” and/or are inconsistently or rarely making sales
• You’re talking about and/or actively selling your work consistently but rarely, if ever, making sales
• You’re consistently hearing price or time objections in sales conversations

When one (or all) of these “symptoms” are consistently occurring, it’s almost always a sign that you need to rework your messaging so that it will preemptively filter out these wrong fits and not-yet-Right-Fits, before they ever even enter into your sales process.

Your messaging needs to distinguish your offers from one another.

Not only is your messaging responsible for preemptively filtering out wrong fits or not-yet-Right-Fits, it’s also responsible for filtering Right Fit clients into right-for-them offers.

Most online business owners have multiple different offers. As the business owner, it’s your responsibility to create messaging that is differentiated enough that your prospective clients can determine—on their own—which of your offers is the right one for them, right now. Note that this isn’t really a conscious process on their part, it’s something that happens unconsciously, simply through reading or hearing the words you’re using for each offer and “naturally” gravitating toward one specific offer. I put quotes around “naturally,” because, though it is a natural process on their part, it’s only through very intentionally crafted messaging on your part that this sort of intrinsic magnetization can happen in your audience members.

Here’s a recent client example to show you what I mean by filtering Right Fit clients into right-for-them work: this business owner is a coach and healer who uses various modalities such as EFT (“tapping”) to support their clients to—these are my unsexy, non-messaging words—essentially become who they really are and live life fully as that person. This business owner was frustrated because they seemed to only attract clients who wanted to book single, one-off sessions. Rarely would people buy a larger package, and if they did, they’d typically only go for her 4-session package, instead of her longer, multi-month package. This had gone on for long enough that she began to believe people just didn’t want her larger package, and that maybe she should just focus on short, low-cost offerings instead of the real, in-depth transformational work that she loves doing.

When I looked at this business owner’s messaging, it was all about “getting unstuck,” “breaking through blocks,” and “shifting into the direction you want to go.” None of this messaging is intrinsically “bad,” per se, but notice who it’s speaking to: people who feel stuck and blocked, and who want a breakthrough or a shift. None of this messaging is speaking to someone who wants a full transformation, it’s speaking to people who are looking for a breakthrough, typically in one specific area of their life. (We call these the Solution-Oriented vs the Transformation-Ready Client.)

This is another example of what I mean when I say that, typically, your messaging is “working,” it just might not be working in the way that you want it to. Your messaging is responsible for preemptively filtering your prospective clients into right-for-them offers. When your messaging is really working, you’ll find that the prospects you’re meeting with—or, depending on your sales process, who are directly purchasing an offer—are consistently “Right Fits” for the specific offer you’re selling (and are more likely to reliably achieve the result or transformation of that offer). Subsequently, you’ll very rarely deal with true “objections” in a sales process, or “crickets” during a promotional period.

In order to accomplish this aim of having your messaging filter Right Fit people into right-for-them offers, you need to first ensure you’re creating the right type of messaging for the specific offer you’re selling, and then ensure that the messaging you’re using for that specific offer speaks magnetically and transparently about what will be achieved through said offer. As an aside, this is where it’s really important to not overpromise in your messaging, not only for the ethical implications, but also because: if you overpromise beyond what you can reliably deliver on in the messaging for one offer, it’s significantly more difficult to differentiate your various offers, because it’s likely that the (overpromising) messaging you’re using for one offer overlaps with what is actually being delivered in another offer.

How to Know Your Messaging is Working

You’ll know your messaging is doing its job when:

1. You have the exact words, phrases, and perspectives clearly written out in the behind the scenes of your business—I like to have a “masterdoc” for each of my offers, which includes all 8 messaging foundations for that specific offer—and you are confidently able to use these words, phrases, and perspectives every single time that you talk about your offers.
2. You’re repeating those words, phrases, and perspectives often enough that people in your audience are offhandedly and unironically repeating them back to you.
3. The prospective clients you are attracting are Right Fits for the specific offer you are selling. 

If you don’t have your messaging clearly written out, in such a way that you and anyone else in your business (e.g. copywriter, social media assistant, etc.) can readily reference and use every time you or they talk about a specific offer, then you need to work on your messaging.

If your audience isn’t already offhandedly repeating your core messaging foundations back to you, then you need to work on your messaging (and/or you need to repeat it more frequently).

If you’re attracting wrong fits or not-yet-Right-Fits into your sales processes or offers—e.g. people who have price objections, who want to rush through the process or skip over steps of your offer, who aren’t maintaining responsibility for their own success, etc.—or you’re not attracting any prospects (or very few), then you need to work on your messaging.

Every business owner needs messaging.

I’m running a 2-day virtual retreat on October 23 and 24 (with global time zone friendly sessions!) where we’ll not only craft all 8 core messaging foundations for one of your offers, but I’ll also show you how to utilize these messaging foundations across various parts of your business (e.g. sales page copy, marketing content, etc.). This is perfect for you if you have an upcoming promotion that you want to really hit out of the park and attract Right Fit, ready-to-buy clients into—such as a Black Friday sale or a January launch—or if you simply have realized (maybe even through this article) that your messaging just isn’t doing much of anything for you, and you want to make more sales of all of your offers to more Right Fit clients.

This 2-day retreat is called Clearly Magnetic Messaging, and registration is only open for a few more days! Register here.

Clearly Magnetic Messaging is a great starting place, but if you want to not only craft repeatable and resonant messaging that attracts Right Fit, ready-to-buy prospects, but also learn exactly how to use that messaging through every single part of your Demand Generation System and, ultimately, turn your business into one that brings you as much joy as it does revenue, then come and join me inside of EXPAND.

EXPAND a comprehensive business training program that equips you with the business-building acumen and self-trust to be the true leader of your business, which also includes over 20 opportunities for individualized and/or 1:1 coaching and consulting support from me. Learn more about EXPAND here.

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