Show. 👀 Don't tell. 🙊

Getting creative with your product messaging

Deciding the narrative of your product and finding ways to tell that story is one of the top jobs for a product marketer.

It’s also the third part of your product marketing framework. 

Tell the story

You’ve nailed understanding your customer. You’ve smashed the competitor analysis. And now it’s time to devise your message (or tell the story...)

We will cover how to start working out your product message in future posts, but first I want to give you one of my top tips for how to tell your story. And it’s based on three simple words. 

Show. Don’t tell. 

This is a piece of advice I got from an agent about an early draft of a book I’ve been working on, so I can’t take any credit for it, but it’s so applicable to product marketing that I had to share it. 

I’d written something like ‘Mr Smith was clearly in a rush.’ 

But there’s a better way of writing this sentence. I could have gone for something more interesting - and less ‘on the nose’ -  like ‘Mr Smith darted across the road, unaware of the double decker bus that had just missed him by half an inch.’ 

There’s a way of letting the reader know something, without having to literally say it.

Applying this to product marketing

Similarly, there are better, creative ways to get across your product’s message, without having to explicitly spell it out for the consumer. 

As well as avoiding being literal, it’s important to not just repeat your message again and again, or louder and louder. You can’t just say you’re a product for creatives. Or bludgeon users with the never-ending message that you’re the best product in the market. 

Unless you’re Apple, who have the money to do this, and show no signs of stopping this approach until we all surrender and admit that, yes, the iPhone is privacy friendly. (This billboard below went on like this for a further 17 miles.)

Saying your product is the easiest, cheapest, or fastest in the marketing doesn’t necessarily make it true. You need to show it. Prove it. 

If you’re cheaper, then how about providing a comparison calculator? 

If you’re faster, then maybe create a video that compares your onboarding experience with a competitor’s. 

At Whereby, where one of the key reasons for buying is that it’s the easiest product in the category, we realised we had to focus on using video content and getting people into the experience ASAP to show this off - rather than trying to explain it all with words.

So when you’re working on your next messaging campaign, think about how you can say something to your customers without actually saying it. 

Let me know how you get on in the comments box below. 👇👇👇