The Importance of Messaging in Lead Generation

This week, we caught up with Peep Laja - CEO of Wynter, to find out how to nail product messaging. We also dove deep into how messaging can be applied to your lead generation to dramatically boost your performance.

As always, we tried to get you the info you need to transform your lead gen and skyrocket your results.

• What can we learn from the B2B world that we can apply * when speaking directly to consumers?
• What are the key things to look for when putting together messaging? Are there certain tricks you use each time… or does it depend on the business?
• What do you think is more important for split-testing… images or copy?
• What are biggest mistakes marketers make when it comes to messaging?

Check out the full conversation by subscribing to the B2C Lead Generation Podcast.

What are the key things to look for when analysing messaging?

Peep Laja: It’s universal. What makes effective messaging? The number one thing is always clarity. Do I understand it? And if I don’t understand it I’m certainly not going to buy it. So it needs to be clear.

Sometimes the product is obvious. If you’re selling pants… okay it’s pants. I don’t need a lot of explanation here. But as we get into more expensive and complicated things you need more copy. You need more room to explain it. And so the clarity of copy is number one.

The other factor is always “What’s in it for me?”

One customer we have (at Wynter) is Smart Goggles for Swimmers. You know, so basically like Google Glasses but it’s swim goggles. And they presented it in a way that was - Oh yeah, so it has electronic display, whatever gigahertz, other technical parameters.

People were like “But why do I want it? Why would I need smart swim goggles?”

Those two things, Clarity and the Why make up 80% of messaging.

When building landing pages we’ve found people tend to focus more on perfecting the images and page design and less on the copy. Do you find this?

Yeah, there might be a case where the imagery has a bigger impact, especially if they are visual products like if you’re selling clothing or any kind of accessory. The photos might do a lot of the selling, but obviously it depends on the price range.

If it’s impulse purchase price range I think photos will do the bulk of the selling. But as we’re nearing seven hundred dollar earrings or five thousand dollar watches, not an impulse purchase exactly, so once we get into that territory where the time to consider the purchase will increase it’s copy that will close the deal. Online, you don’t have sales people so copy is the sales person.

Are there any mistakes you see time and time again?

Yeah, besides lacking the clarity and the what’s in it for me, the things we’ve touched upon already, specifics versus superlatives. A lot of superlatives going out there like “We’re the best and we’re the fastest.”

Nobody believes that. It’s probably not true also. I mean might be true but I still don’t believe it.

If you go a web hosting landing page, and they say “We’re the fastest web host in the world” what is your gut reaction? It’s probably bullshit, yeah?

But if you say “On average our sites load in 300 milliseconds” your gut reaction is… oh that’s cool.

People’s bullshit detectors are very fine tuned because of all the bullshit that is our there online!

So that is something I see quite a bit. And then, length of copy. A lot of pages just don’t have enough of it. Obviously there is a fine balance between having too much and not enough, but the way I think about it is, if I’m your ideal customer and I read everything and I still have questions, you have failed me.

Your copy should be thorough enough that no question is unturned.

And then a mother huge issue is differentiation. A lot of companies talk about themselves as if they are they only ones doing what they’re doing.

“We send beautiful email newsletters.”

So does everybody else!

“We do lead generation.”

My cousin Vinnie does lead generation, come on man. You cannot state what you’re doing as if you’re the only one doing it. You need to find your differentiation.

So many companies don’t, and this is a horrible mistake.

But writing copy is difficult, right? It’s hard to not have the superlative but at the same time make you stand out?

Writing amazing copy is hard, but writing copy that does not suck is not hard. It’s pretty easy. You can checklist that stuff. 5 things that every piece of copy needs to have. Check the boxes and you’re done and it’s guaranteed to be above average. Yet online we so much horrible copy because people are not even covering basic things.

You can listen to the rest of this podcast on Apple, Spotify or watch the YouTube video.