From the course: B2B Marketing Foundations: Positioning

Messaging: Why it matters

From the course: B2B Marketing Foundations: Positioning

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Messaging: Why it matters

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- Imagine you're entering a high performance stock car race. In this race, everybody starts with the same car body. You have to design two things, your tires and your engine. You choose the best tires for the track and build and fine-tune the engine to perfection. Your car is running as efficiently as it possibly could. You hire and train the best race car driver and pit crew that money can buy. You're ready to win. Sadly, on race day, someone sabotages your fuel supply at the first pit stop. You pour very poor quality fuel into your fine-tuned machine. Obviously, no matter how efficient your car, how perfect your engine and tires, and how well-trained your driver and pit crew are, if you put bad fuel into your car, you just can't win. In marketing, messaging is the fuel your race car runs on. Put poor fuel into your marketing machine, no matter how well-designed and fine-tuned it is, and no matter how skilled the team running it is, it will underperform too. The quality of your B2B messaging may very well be the most important thing that determines your success in selling your product or service in a competitive market. Today, marketing has become as much a science as an art. We no longer live in the Mad Man era. We have entered the world of marketing automation, content marketing, and marketing analytics. Like the stock car owner, we spend a lot of money on our engine and on our tires, our automation, analytics, and programs. In fact, you can think of three core pillars to any modern marketing machine, automation and analytics, content and programs, and messaging and positioning. Marketers today have the unprecedented ability to target prospects, reach them in new and innovative ways, and measure and understand their progress in reaching and influencing these prospects. They're hiring teams of content marketers who, leveraging many of these technologies, can distribute content that matches buyers and influencers at every stage of the buying cycle. Our efficiency is amazing, but for our content to be relevant and for our machine to be effective, we have to have the right message. The right message is one that resonates with the buyer. One that takes the features and capabilities of our product and refines them to be value-based and different than competition. This is the high-test fuel we need for our marketing race car to reach the performance level needed to win and grow our business.

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