Marketing Messaging Review
Find opportunities for dramatic improvements in your marketing results across campaigns Get in contactNo one can see their own Marketing Messaging clearly
It’s impossible to evaluate your own marketing messaging accurately. You’re too close to it to see how a potential customer sees it.
Something you know to be true might be hard for them to believe. Something you know to be valuable might not be motivating to them. Something you know to be unique might seem unremarkable to them.
If you don’t know which parts of your messaging are effective and which parts are hurting your results, you’ll need a ton of resources to test every aspect to find improvements.
On the other hand, if you know exactly what needs to change, you can find dramatic improvements with relatively little effort.
Peter helped me increase my sales by 423%.
Almost no one can differentiate themselves in our industry, but now we have a marketing message that clearly separates us from competitors.
Peter brought clarity to our marketing. We’ve approximately doubled our online sales each year since then.
What is the Marketing Messaging Review?
Simply put, you get a report that highlights what about your messaging works best and what’s holding you back. And you get direct answers to any questions you have during a meeting where we go through the report.
The heart of the report are specific recommendations on what you should improve (including specific examples from your current marketing).
Here are some shortened examples of what those recommendations can be like.
Example — Differentiators are ineffective
You highlight three points of differentiation in your marketing:
- [differentiator 1]
- [differentiator 2]
- [differentiator 3]
[differentiator 1] is otherwise a good differentiator, but it’s presented in a way that only experts can appreciate. The typical customer would likely assume it simply means your service does what they expect every similar service to do. If you’d present the idea in a way that doesn’t rely on expertise, it would have far more impact.
[differentiator 2] gets a lot of attention across your marketing. However, many of your direct competitors say something synonymous. In other words, this wouldn’t stand out as unique or even uncommon for someone deciding between you and your competitors.
[differentiator 3] doesn’t get much attention. The places where it’s mentioned, it doesn’t stand out. It also comes off as marketing speak because it’s always said by you. That is, you don’t provide any evidence to back up or specify the claim, and because it’s clearly a rather vague statement, it doesn’t end up having almost any impact. You could be more specific about what it means in practice and/or use testimonials and other more trustworthy ways to explain it.
The full recommendation goes into much more detail.
Example — Benefits confound value with motivation
Throughout your marketing, you mention many, many positive things about your service. However, almost none of them are motivating for a potential client. They would certainly agree that all of those things are valuable. But in this case, those are likely not very motivating.
For example, [benefit 1] is a requirement for your potential clients. That is, they won’t buy any option that doesn’t include [benefit 1]. However, it’s not the reason they’re considering buying your service, so it shouldn’t get nearly as much attention as it does now.
Or [benefit 2]. It’s valuable for the client organization. However, it’s likely not especially important for the individuals your marketing reaches. [benefit 2] may even seem like a downside for some decision makers because it requires them to do extra work.
The full recommendation goes into much more detail.
Example — Examples are missing relevance
Some of the examples you use in marketing don’t seem to match what your target customers are likely to think about.
For example, you use a prominent example on your website where you show your product used in [manufacturing use case]. Yet, that seems like an almost opposite situation to what [primary target customer] is likely to experience day to day.
There are many similar examples throughout your campaigns. The intention may be to reach a wider audience. However, if that’s the goal, it doesn’t show in any other way. For example, you ran a campaign in [industry magazine], yet used an image of your product being used to [use case in a different industry].
Some of the examples are great, and you could emphasize them more. For example, [specific image] on your about page seems to show the most common use case. It even highlights [differentiator].
The full recommendation goes into much more detail.
Peter has helped us clarify our messaging and focus on the most impactful aspects of marketing. We’ve been able to focus on doing marketing and sales, instead of spending time on polishing strategy or general pondering.
Even though I have coached thousands of business owners in developing their own marketing and message, I turned to Peter.
The [new messaging] helped us not just define our product’s greatest benefits, but also wording it in a way that put them into perspective for the buyer to understand.
How does the review work?
The project can take as little as ~1.5 hours of your time.
Step 1
Fill the form at the end of this page. It does not commit you to anything.
Step 2
We’ll have a quick call to discuss any specific messaging concerns you may have. This is also a chance for me to take a look at your messaging to make sure I can provide recommendations with massive upside (before either or us commits further).
Step 3
I will review your most impactful marketing materials. We can select them together, or I can suggest materials to include. Common options include your website, landing pages, ad campaigns, email marketing, brochures, presentations, and/or packaging.
Step 4
You get a written review of your marketing messaging across different channels and campaigns. It highlights any weak areas and gives specific examples of each identified issue. (See examples above)
Step 5
We’ll have another call where we go over the recommendations and any questions you may have. By the end, you’ll know exactly what you need to work on to see a dramatic improvement in your marketing results. Those changes will directly improve your marketing results across channels and campaigns.
In case you’re interested…
How I got into marketing messaging
I started two companies and got bored with both as soon as I figured out the marketing part. Then my wife asked, “Why don’t you go into marketing? You don’t talk about anything else anyway.”
Around the same time I heard of direct mail advertising in the US. The idea that you could send a letter to someone who’s never heard of you and have them buy something worth thousands of dollars seemed like a magic trick. I like to figure out how magic tricks work, so I dug into copywriting.
To my surprise, copywriting was natural to me. I was soon writing sales pages for marketing companies that already had good sales pages. They would test my page against theirs, and when mine created more sales, I got paid. (I never lost, although there was one tie.)
My good results were not thanks to eloquent prose. I’m not even a native English speaker.
Rather, I was able to write effective sales pages because I understood what people needed to see, so they wanted to buy. In other words, I understood what the marketing message had to be, and that’s far more impactful than the exact word choices.
From copywriting I moved to conversion rate optimization. I got to see how almost any little change would sometimes make a meaningful difference. However, only a few things made a meaningful difference consistently: who you talk to, what you say to them, and what you ask them to do.
In my view, marketing messaging includes all of those. That’s why it’s been my primary focus since 2012.
In just 4 or 5 months we were so far behind in work we had to hire more people to cover the work.
We’ve always known that we need a marketing message that tells concretely, yet interestingly, what [our service] is about, but developing a clear message hasn’t worked out. The result was a better way to explain what we basically already knew ourselves.
Peter first improved my messaging, so it became clearer what to focus on to stand out as the best option for my potential customers. He has guided my marketing strategy and given clear guidance on how to implement things. I have broken my revenue goals multiple times since then.
Investment with exponential ROI
The investment depends on how much marketing content you’d like me to review and in what detail. The price starts at $1,497, which is enough for most companies.
If you choose to continue working with me, the full investment in your Marketing Messaging Review is applied toward the additional services (up to 20% of the additional service’s cost) that we start within a month of the Review’s delivery.
Guarantees
Significant impact
The Messaging Review will highlight opportunities that can realistically have a significant impact on your profit. If I’m not 100% confident I see such opportunities, we won’t even start.
No sales pressure
You will not feel pressured into continuing to work with me. I won’t even bring it up beyond asking, “Would you like to know how we could continue?”
Schedule The Marketing Messaging Review Start Call
This call is confidential and does not commit you to anything.
We will discuss your messaging, marketing results, and overall goals. We will also look at your current marketing materials. I can then tell whether I see opportunities that could significantly improve your marketing results across channels and campaigns.
You can also ask any questions you have.
If at the end we’re both happy to continue, we’ll agree on the schedule. Often the whole project is done in less than 10 days — and it usually takes ~1.5h of your time (including the 30min start call).
Within 2 weeks… I got more clients paying for my high-end program than I did in the previous 6 months.
Talking with Peter, after so many years of hype and over-promise with other marketers, is like landing on a sane, calm, more intelligent planet. I’ve always wanted a “me” for my own marketing, and I found him in Peter, the marketer’s marketer.
I was stuck trying to develop my [messaging] on my own. I couldn’t quite see what would excite a client enough to hire my company. [Now] I can see it in people’s eyes that they understand how beneficial my services could be to solving their issues.