Messaging is notoriously difficult, but maybe not in the way you expect.

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I used to think of messaging as something Don Draper-types could only dream up after an undetermined number of whiskeys and mid-afternoon naps. Unsurprisingly, I also thought of myself as a budding Don Draper-type (though I was probably more Pete Campbell).

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In practice, I thought nailing the tagline was the most important thing, so I would slave over just a few words. The breakthroughs would feel good, but I could never come up with anything better than a shallow pastiche of the headline of a buzzy Silicon Valley brand, like the painted wooden facade in an old Western.

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Now I think of messaging like an engineering problem, a bit like building a bridge. You’re trying to build a structure between the problems your audience faces and what your software does.

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Not enough metaphor? Well, that bridge crosses something called the chasm of indifference. If you only talk about what your product does, most of your prospects will fall into the chasm. They won’t care about what you’re saying, they won’t believe you, and they won’t remember you. There’s so much marketing noise everywhere we go, we’ve all turned down our hearing aids.

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To cross the chasm of indifference, you need to build a bridge from the unique aspects of your software to the single most important benefit it brings to your target audience. There are a few steps that go into making the bridge structurally sound, which we’ll go through in a minute.

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But first, let’s watch some dodgy bridges collapse.

Messaging, done wrong #1

I once got asked by a client to enter a Facebook competition. Before I go on, it’s important to stress that this was many years ago, and I’d like to distance myself from the event as much as possible.

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Anyway, the prize was $150, and I was near-broke at the time, so instead of insisting that, as a professional, I should be guaranteed fair payment for delivery of my service, I gave it a bash. I was one of three people who entered, and I lost to the strapline, ‘That's one small step for a man, but one giant leap for your company.’ I can’t even remember what my strapline was.

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This section is called, ‘messaging done wrong’, but this is not an example of messaging. It’s just words. Words that carry no information about what the product does or how it solves a problem can never be messaging, no matter how much they make you want to punch the air and holler “Boo-yah!”

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For more reasons than one, I think of this episode as a career-low, so let’s hurry on to my second example of what not to do.

Messaging, done wrong #2

Sometimes things just don’t click like you expect them to. I had started freelance copywriting for a new client and was struggling with the new site copy I’d been asked to put together.

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It was complex. There were several key audiences I was speaking to, each of which required different messages. Worst of all, there didn’t seem to be a way to fit all their interests into the same strapline. If I was in a film, I would be looping crumpled pieces of paper over my shoulder and into the bin. In reality, I was just hitting backspace a lot.

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In the end, nothing really stuck, and we went for a line that I wasn’t that happy with. I can’t even remember what it was…

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A few months later, my client decided to do a complete rebrand with a big agency. They would refresh all their marketing, including the messaging that I had put together. I felt like I had failed, but with no better ideas, I could only go to the meetings and see what the agency came up with.

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Turns out they didn’t come up with anything better than I did. Reading through the concepts, I could see all the dead ends I had reached a few months before. It occurred to me that the brief was too big: we were trying to speak to too many people at once. Our messaging was speaking in all-user emails, not hand-written notes.

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What I assumed was my lack of ability, turned out to be a lack of perspective. I hadn’t thought to put the crowbar down and think about whether all the pieces of what we were trying to communicate would fit. Sometimes, when you find yourself trying too hard, it’s because something’s wrong. How can you strip back to the fundamentals? I always find less is more useful.

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Messaging, done right, finally

I’ve written about some of my past failures, not just because they’re amusing, but because I hope you’ll be able to recognize my mistakes and learn from them.

Chances are, you’ve probably fudged your messaging at least once before. Maybe you’re not that clear on how to do it right the next time.

The real answer here is not to build standalone messages (like a tagline or a mission statement) but to build a sales narrative that presents a logical and emotional argument for buying your software to overcome your buyer’s big problem.

You’ll be able to use this sales narrative in lots of different places: your site, your pitch deck, and your content. If you build a good sales narrative, you’ll also put this argument into the mouths of customers, partners, and anyone else that’s prepared to talk about your software.

When marketing folk talk about the importance of storytelling, this is what they mean. Stories or narratives are memorable because they make sense to us on a level that data, facts, and taglines can never reach. (Though these elements can make stories more memorable and compelling.)

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But good marketing stories aren’t built on winding narratives and incendiary plot twists. Instead, they’re built on relentless prioritization, simply because people have very little patience and always absorb information in order. From the top of your homepage to the bottom. From the first word of a sentence to the full stop. As much as you’d like your three benefits to appear together on your homepage, one must come first.

This is not an argument for clickbait. This is an argument for grabbing and holding your audience’s attention from their first introduction to your brand, through to them becoming a customer.

The alternative is that your audience…

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1. Thinks your software is not for them and moves on
2. Doesn’t understand what you do and moves on
3. Loses interest and moves on

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Killer messaging is most important for early-stage businesses because they have no safety net. You’ve got little brand recognition, no real reputation, and every misstep amplifies your inexperience.

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When your buyer needs to win over their team, their boss, and the finance director, you need to give them every opportunity to talk with confidence about what your software offers. Your competitors are a safer bet and “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM,” as the saying goes.

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So how do you put together killer messaging? Excuse me while I abandon that bridge metaphor and start talking about pyramids.

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We’re going to build a pyramid that begins with your product’s competitive advantages at its base and steps up to the big problem you promise to solve for your customer. Gravity exists for this pyramid too. If you start by trying to pin down your headline message at the top of the pyramid, your argument will topple!

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But before you haul a single stone block to your construction site, you need to be clear on the big problem your target customer will solve with your tool.

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Write a problem statement that paints a picture of the situation your prospects find themselves in now, show why the problem exists, how it’s getting worse, and - if possible - make a clear link with revenue forfeited or costs saved. Because you’ve interviewed customers, you’ll have all this information at your fingertips.

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I’ll use another example from Cloud IQ, a platform which uses AI to help ecommerce businesses trade more efficiently.

Now let’s make a start at the bottom of the pyramid. Without writing any fancy copy, bullet out in a few words what the competitive advantage of your software is. What do your customers value most about your software that they would struggle to find anywhere else? Add a sentence to give more detail on each point, without worrying whether the copy sounds good.

These are the first building blocks of your pyramid. I’ll call these your ‘Tier 3 messages’. You may have more messages at the bottom of your pyramid, but for simplicity’s sake, I usually lump for three.

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Now let’s jump up a level. Introduce two blocks that demonstrate the higher-order benefit of your Tier 3 messages. Or, in plain English, when you ask ‘so what?’ of each of your Tier 3 messages, the next row of blocks above will be your answer. Resist the temptation to judge the copy, these are just messages for now.

These are a little more complex than the Tier 3 messages. But again, you’ll add a description of the benefit to the customer underneath the main message. Having two clearly defined Tier 2 messages bridges the gap between what the product does and the contextual benefit to the end user.

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For example, instead of talking about being able to launch marketing campaigns quicker with automations, you’re now focused on communicating the revenue growth your audience can experience without having to make additional marketing hires.

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Being specific helps your audience understand that your software solves their specific needs and that you can resolve their challenges better than any other tool out there.

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Alas, most software businesses don’t make it this far. Many others stop here. They’ve connected what their platform does to the benefit experienced by the customer, so job done, right? You can do better.

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By adding the final, uppermost block to the pyramid, you’ll describe the ultimate knock-on benefit to your customers’ life. This benefit is the solution to the big challenge we outlined in the problem statement.

This is a one-two punch. You’re showing the ultimate benefit of your software, which is aspirational and easy to relate to. But you’re also grounding this message with a description of how exactly the platform works, and what makes it unique. Both messages rely on one another, and together they are difficult to ignore.

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If you’ve never done messaging before, or you’ve messed it up as many times as I have, keep these things in mind when you’re putting together your own messaging hierarchy:

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1. Be very specific. Don’t take it for granted that your audience knows what you’re talking about. The better you know your audience, the more specific you can be to their situation.
2. Back it up. Your audience wants to see stats and quotes from customers before they can trust you to deliver on the promises your messaging makes.
3. Use their language. You should know the type of language your customers use from speaking to them. Sometimes you can copy/paste it. This is a handy way to win trust by showing that you’re coming from the same place.
4. 0% BS. At best loose language takes the wind from your argument’s sails. At worst it undermines your argument completely.
5. Pyramids are better than houses. When I worked in PR, we built message houses for clients. For every Tier 3 message, there was a Tier 2 message, so instead of a 3-2-1 pyramid formation, we used a 3-3-1 house formation. I prefer the pyramid because reducing the number of messages you use as you climb gives more significance to the more important messages at the top of your pyramid.

‍Introducing your Sales Narrative

Now you’ve got your message pyramid, you’ll need a sales narrative. Too much jargon? Let’s take a step back.

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Your message pyramid tells you what information you need to communicate, in priority order. It’s a hierarchy that helps you understand how your messaging works in action.

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Your sales narrative ties together all the points made in your message pyramid and your big problem as a story you can tell customers across your site, your pitch decks, and every other commercial touchpoint. It applies your message hierarchy to the real world and helps your audience understand your messaging.

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Here’s how to build a sales narrative of your own. It may help to visualize your sales narrative as following the flow of a landing page, from top to bottom, because most people find that structure most familiar. (Side note, I cut my teeth on Roast My Landing Page's resources, you should too.)

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1. Tier one message: The ultimate benefit of your product and a quick description of what it does.
2. Introduce pain: Show you understand the problem that’s piling stress on your audience’s situation.
3. Introduce tier two messages: How you solve your audience’s higher-order problems.
4. Introduce tier three messages: Present solutions to your audience’s basic problems.
5. De-risk: Introduce social proof, testimonials, stats, objection handling, ROI calculators.
6. Repeat strongest message: This is your most practical, actionable message.

With this in your back pocket, you’re able to quickly produce landing pages, pitch decks, one-pagers, and other customer acquisition journeys.

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But this isn’t just a win for marketing. With access to the sales narrative, everyone on your team is going to talk about your company in the same way. That means no one’s wasting opportunities communicating the wrong messaging or fiddling with twenty different decks that barely see the light of day.

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While messaging docs tend to live untouched on the company shared drive, a tight sales narrative makes your business’s comms practical, consistent, unanimous, and focused on converting new business.

Introducing De-risking

You probably noticed that I snuck in a layer of information to the sales narrative called ‘de-risking’. De-risking is everything you do to settle your audience’s nerves or compel them to get in touch by backing up your messages with proof.

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This usually means introducing evidence that you’ve delivered on the promises made by your messaging before, with testimonials and performance-focused stats. But you could also build a case for your expertise in the industry, or double down on how your product is uniquely positioned to solve your audience’s problems.

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Let’s look at the different types of evidence that add weight to your argument, and the pitfalls that come with each.

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1. Customer testimonials: These should be from customers that closely match your ideal customer profiles and describe how your software helped them to overcome their big problem. Try to introduce testimonials that cover all Tier 2 and Tier 3 messages and encourage your customers to be as specific as possible.
2. Customer logos: Sometimes the more impressive you think the list of brands you work with is, the more confused your prospects will find it. A list of smaller brands in a niche that’s more relevant to them will mean more to your target audience than sharing that you work with teams at Uber, Facebook, etc.
3. ROI stats: Outline a clear link between the benefits offered by your software and the revenue these benefits generate or the costs they save.
4. Other stats: How do your customers measure the success of your software? Use these stats to demonstrate its influence. While ROI stats help your buyer sell the tool internally, these stats usually have more significance to the people who use your tool every day.
5. Case studies: The best case studies combine all the above, and bring detail, credibility, and relatability to the claims made by your messaging. Collecting different content formats, such as video, gives you more fodder for ads and landing pages.

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Your sales team would call de-risking ‘objection handling’. For marketing, this task is more complicated than batting back hesitations with a prepared script. Most prospects with objections don’t verbalize them, they simply leave your site and disappear into the ether. The customer interviews you ran earlier should have helped you identify these unspoken objections so you can manage them on your site and with your content.

Introducing Mission

I’ve not included anything about introducing a company mission into the sales narrative, because I don’t think it’s strictly necessary to sell software. However, depending on the nature of your business, a company mission could be a very good idea.

Brands that need a company mission tend to be those that have a positive environmental or social motive at the core of their business’s reason for being. Usually, they’ll want to change the way things have always been done or meet the needs of a group of people that have previously been left out in the cold.

Introducing a mission also offers a handy alternative to the short-termism of our approach to messaging so far, which has focused on solving a specific problem for a well-defined (and at first, limited) audience. Now’s the chance to talk about your business’s longer-term ambitions, along with the size and shape of the total opportunity you see.

While it might convey why a customer needs your product, a compelling mission helps differentiate your brand, build customer loyalty, attract talent, and give your employees a sense of purpose. It also helps you pitch stories to journalists, who are usually more interested in the broader social context of your business than its commercial offering.

Creating a mission statement is tough because most are eminently forgettable. Up to this point, most of the messaging process has been expert-level paint-by-numbers: we’ve been linking what we know about customers to a logical narrative sequence that we expect will convert them. But now’s the time to let your creativity off the leash.

To give this a little direction, let’s draw from Chip and Dan Heath’s Make It Stick, one of my favorite books. The brothers dedicate 300 pages to explaining why some messages stick, and why others fall away. Throughout the book they develop the acronym ‘SUCCES’, which despite committing the sin of dropping the final S, is a helpful framework for testing whether you’ve got a mission statement that’s built to last.

Here’s the framework, along with some stories to help you remember it. Some are mine, some are from the Heath bros.

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S is for Simple: Each message should make one point, no more

In 2019, the UK’s political situation was a mess. Conservative prime ministers had come and gone, failing to deliver on their promise to deliver Brexit. The flagship slogan of new Conservative leader Boris Johnson was to ‘Get Brexit Done’, while the opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn waffled, ‘It’s Time for Real Change’. Johnson’s manifesto was 64 pages long. Corbyn’s was 107. You already know where this is headed: Johnson won 365 seats compared to Corbyn’s 202.

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U is for Unexpected: Be surprising to get attention, be interesting to hold it

Sony was going through a tough time at the start of the 1950s. Its rice maker product was a flop, and the company made ends meet by repairing short-wave radios. Sony’s lead technologist recognized the potential of transistors to make a smaller version of the radio. But instead of calling it a ‘transistor radio’, he called it ‘the radio you can carry in your pocket’. This vision was unusual and compelling enough to convince his team and investors that it was worth spending the next few decades pursuing.

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C is for Concrete: Make your message tangible to magnify the pain of the problem and the relief of solving it

An elementary school teacher in the US struggled to explain prejudice to her class the day after Martin Luther King’s assassination, so she decided to help them feel it instead. For just a day, those with brown eyes got preferential treatment over those with blue eyes. Unsurprisingly, they got the message quickly. The lesson? If your mission is grounded in a troubling and familiar reality, then it’s more likely to be understood.

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C is for Credible: First-hand accounts with small details build credibility

A psychological experiment simulated a trial to decide whether a mother was fit to look after her seven-year-old son. Two groups received the same testimony, but each account gave a different level of detail. The account with the least detail saw the mother recount that her son would brush his teeth before school. In the other account, she would describe how her son brushed his teeth with a Darth Vader toothbrush, along with other details. Those details won her custody of her son. Being specific wins. And being specific comes from knowing your audience well enough to talk about their day-to-day life.

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E is for Emotional: You’ll only remember what you personally care about

Wait, what does ‘emotional’ mean in a B2B context? Let’s tell it like it is: you work for a business that sells to other businesses. I don’t think Whitney Houston ever sang about that. Though that doesn’t make working in B2B an emotionally numb experience. There’s the relief that comes with hitting targets, the pride that comes with a successful negotiation, and the resentment that comes with a lack of recognition. These are all things we care enough about to lose sleep over. To be ‘emotional’, your mission needs to reflect a personal battle your audience goes through every day. ‘Save time’ doesn’t cut it.

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S is for Stories: Make your audience the hero of their own story

What makes a good story? Once upon a time, I wrote short films. All the screenwriting tutorials I watched on Youtube said that stories should follow this arc: situation, challenge, struggle, resolution, new situation. It’s great advice. But you won’t be using it to tell a story about your own company, oh no. Instead, you’ll tell the story that your audience wants to tell about themselves. Within the past five years, industries have emerged that are entirely built on these stories.

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Take, for example, the story that’s powering the creator economy:

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1. Situation: You work full-time at a job that pays well but doesn’t exercise your creative muscle.
2. Challenge: The economy takes a dive and you worry you’ll be made redundant.
3. Struggle: You pour time and energy into building a side project you hope will become your main revenue stream and satisfy your creative impulse.
4. Resolution: You build a product people love and are willing to pay for.
5. New situation: You work on what you want and pay yourself more than you could ever make working for someone else.

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If you’re the company that’s best at telling the story your audience is telling themselves, then you’re much more likely to make them care about you and your mission.

What does SUCCES(s) look like?

Mental health company Sanctus’ mission is the only one I can remember off the top of my head, which makes it a rare and brilliant thing. The team wants to ‘Put a mental health gym on every high street’.

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Are they going to achieve that? Maybe not, but that’s besides the point: it’s simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and tells a story about mental health’s under-appreciation compared to physical health. In other words, it slaps hard. Your mission should do the same.

Introducing your Product Narrative

You’ve got your sales narrative in place, and you’ve outlined your company mission. Now let’s focus on clearly communicating how your product works, and why your audience should care.

Because I’ve developed this approach for early-stage startups, I’ve made a couple of assumptions. You’ve either launched a product that lacks the full functionality of some of your competitors and you’re playing catch up, or your product’s features are unique and you’re struggling to convince your audience to take a chance on something genuinely different. Maybe it’s a bit of both.

Whichever way you look at it, early-stage marketing is an uphill battle. That’s why you want to play to the one strength you can count on: clear communication to the audience that matters. But instead of straightforwardly communicating features, we’ll return to the painful situations your audience is up against that make your features so necessary.

Here’s the framework we’ll follow to develop a simple product narrative:

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1. Call out the painful situations your target audience encounters.
2. Introduce how your software resolves those situations.
3. Introduce an ‘only we can say this line’ for each feature.

This is basic storytelling, and there’s a writing technique out there that achieves a similar effect called ‘but, therefore’. It’s what South Park’s writers draw on every episode to build tension and intrigue and get viewers invested in the outcome of the drama. Here’s a before-and-after example from an episode of South Park:

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Using boring old ‘And’

Stan and the boys learned what veal was made from, and then kidnapped all the baby cows from their ranch, and then negotiated with the FBI for their release.

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Using ‘But, therefore’

Stan and the boys went on a school trip to the slaughterhouse, but they are distressed to learn what veal is made from, therefore they decide to kidnap all the baby cows from a ranch to protect them. But they are caught by their parents, therefore they decide to barricade themselves in with the baby cows and negotiate with the FBI for the release of the cows.

The second story is more interesting because ‘but’ and ‘therefore’ add tension to the plot. Instead of being a succession of banal events, the setbacks and solutions transform the story into a bucking bronco.

How to apply this to your product narrative? First, land your audience in the middle of the sticky situation they need to resolve. This is the ‘but’. Then you’ll show them how to resolve that situation, and what the outcome of that is (the ‘therefore’). Giving your product messages a sense of time and place makes them a whole lot more compelling than using the feature and benefits template most software businesses seem to use.

We’ll use a slightly different version of the South Park storytelling method to build these messages. Instead of using ‘but’ and ‘therefore’, you’ll use ‘when I want; I want; so I can’, a method developed by Intercom’s product team. Unlike Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny, your audience won’t be guided by a narrative arc that’s outside of their control, so we’ll put them in the driving seat. 

Here’s an example:

"When I want to introduce a new marketing platform, I want the process to take no longer than a day and require minimal technical skill, so the platform starts to add value right away.”

You’ll want to write a one-line story for each situation your software solves, then rank them in the order of importance to your audience. Each of these messages can be written up for your product page like this.

When you’ve created messages and copy for each feature or situation, you can use these in priority order from top to bottom on your product page or wherever else you need to share what your software can do.

That leaves us to summarize your product. The simplest way is to describe what it is, and who it’s for. Then you can add a line underneath to convey the main benefit of the product to your target audience.

Cloud IQ is: ‘The AI Marketing Platform for Growing Ecommerce Businesses’

The benefit Cloud IQ brings: ‘Cloud IQ gives time-poor ecommerce marketers access to AI conversion optimization tools, so they can find opportunities to reduce margins with the resources they have today.’

Your product summary is a colder, more direct version of your benefit-focused Tier 1 message. It’s good to have this in your back pocket because it’s sometimes more appropriate to simply describe what your product is than to weave a story about its benefits.

For example, if a prospect asks, ‘What does your product do?’, you tell them, and they walk away without knowing for sure, they certainly won’t have the confidence to introduce it where they work. 

How to do message testing - and whether you should

As a marketer at an early-stage startup, the simplest way to test your messaging is to simply put it live.

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You’ve listened to customers, you’ve positioned yourself against the competition, you’ve mapped out how all the messages fit together, you’ve sketched out your long-term mission, and you feel much more comfortable talking about what your software does. That alone should give you the confidence to put your messaging live right away.

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However, if you’re still not sure, there are a couple of simple ways to get feedback on your messaging before launch:

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• Share a version of your site’s homepage with customers that features the new sales narrative. Be sure to send this to the type of customers you want more of. Ask them how clear, compelling, and complete each of the points are, along with what’s missing.
• Use a message testing service like Wynter and pay to put your message and audit questions in front of a group of relevant folk from your industry. You’re most likely to get honest and detailed feedback this way, but it’s not cheap.

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There are a couple of simple ways to track message performance after launch, too:

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• Launch your new sales narrative and see how conversions from site visitor-to-lead and lead-to-customer improve.
• Launch your new sales narrative and get feedback from your sales team on the quality of conversations they’re having.

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As time goes on, you’ll naturally forget to credit the steps that led to the creation of your messaging, and you’ll begin to take the bump in new business your improved messaging initially brought for granted.

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This is good and bad. It’s good because you’re open to the idea that your messaging can be improved as your audience and their priorities change, and bad because you may start to fiddle with your messaging without considering how it all fits together as part of your strategy.

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If you’re wondering whether to do a message refresh, ask whether you have enough new information to back the change. If it’s because audience or competitor behavior has changed, it could be worth revisiting, but if it’s just ‘for a refresh’, it’s probably best to leave it be.

Introducing Content Pillars

Finally, we’ve made our way back to talking about content. How long did that take?

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A solid content strategy requires some significant foundational work. I’m writing this book partly in defense of that foundational work, which I see so many other guides glide over in favor of surface-level tactics and anchorless ‘content ideas’.

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For early-stage startups, taking these guides seriously can be damaging. Their context-free view of the ‘average business’ encourages folk to spend precious time and resources on campaigns that don’t work - or worse - appear to work at first, but never generate revenue. But because we’ve been thorough so far, we know our efforts will be worthwhile.

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So, on to content pillars. Because putting pure commercial messages in front of an audience over and over again is a great way to bore them senseless, we need to come up with other talking points our audience is more likely to care about. We call these talking points ‘content pillars’.

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Here’s a simple way to distinguish between commercial messages and content pillars, using a very B2B example of an AI-assisted legal contract review tool:

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• Commercial messages: What your business wants to talk about. e.g. ‘We offer an automated process for contract review that any legal team can handle with ease.’
• Content Pillars: What your audience wants to hear, that you’re uniquely well-placed to talk about. e.g. ‘This is the most efficient way to structure a legal team.'

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The two are more closely linked than you may think. Usually, the talking point introduced by each pillar offers a view of a world where your software is necessary. For the above example, legal practices that want to structure their team more efficiently will inevitably consider how they can best manage contract review, the most mundane and least profitable of all their services. If your audience buys into your view of the world (because it’s pretty similar to their own view), then they are more likely to consider buying your software.

Now let’s build some content pillars. We’ll put your Tier 3 Messages at the base of each pillar. Because these are the tangible benefits only your software can offer, we want to position our talking points as close to these messages as possible, without being salesy.

Next, we’ll decide what these talking points should be. Just like we did for our Tier 3 messages, we want to introduce a view that’s interesting and evergreen enough for your business to talk about continuously, and for your audience to continuously engage with. This isn’t ‘newsjacking’, you’re aiming to become well-known for each of these talking points for the long haul.

So, what talking points should you choose? Ask yourself: What is it about each Tier 3 message that makes our business uniquely positioned to deliver this benefit to our customers? The answer might have something to do with your tool’s technical abilities, your team’s expertise in the vertical your customers work in, or the energy and attitude you’re bringing to disrupt what’s come before.

Whatever it is, that benefit should become part of your talking point too, because it leads smoothly into talking about the problem your software solves. Just like we’ve already positioned your product to succeed, now we’re positioning your content to do the same. The difference here is that, while your product already exists, it’s on you to choose and produce the content you think your audience wants to consume.

There’s no getting around this: it’s tough. Many content marketers produce content that’s poorly aligned with their sales narrative and audience because they do not know how to manage this step.

I’d recommend considering the unique things your software offers alongside what you’ve discovered about how your audience learns. The unique thing you can offer is the ‘what’ of your content pillar, and your customers’ preferred content formats are the ‘how’.

Here’s an example of how a couple of these content pillars would look, using three common messages software companies take on.

These are just a couple of examples of content pillars. They might have some relevance to what your software does, or they might not. Either way, I figured it would be useful to peel back a couple of layers and show you why each of these talking points work.

1.  One-of-a-kind insights

Your software probably offers your target audience something they can’t find anywhere else on the market. Maybe that’s because it’s built for their specific use case or because you’re collecting insights that no one else has access to. Whatever your edge, you’ll want to turn this into your content advantage too.

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Whether that’s rebuilding part of your tool as a free resource (even in Google Sheets for starters), or making aggregated insights available to a wider audience, giving your audience a taste for benefits they won’t find elsewhere is a direct route to winning new customers.

2.  Mastermind subject

What’s your business’s Mastermind specialist subject? Have you got a subject matter expert with a unique view of the industry and content ideas coming out of their ears? Or maybe you’ve built a framework to accompany your software, to guide and support users as they solve their big problem?

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It’s easy to overlook the importance of internal resources, but with the right format and distribution channel, they could provide an endless stream of relevant content that your audience would struggle to find anywhere else.

3.  Rallying cry

What do you stand for? You stand for your audience, that’s what! Their grievances, their achievements, and everything in between. If you back the causes your audiences care about, they’ll back you.

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Take the example of social media managers. They offer an impressively broad skill set and meet relentless demand for content, but constantly feel the need to justify their existence to a leadership team that doesn’t understand how upper-funnel brand building feeds lower-funnel lead gen. The last-minute emails asking, ‘what are we doing for International Dog Day?’ don’t help either.

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For businesses that sell to social media managers, rallying for an improvement to (or just poking fun at) their day-to-day experiences offers a rich seam of content their audience can’t help but get behind.

Content delivery

At this stage, you should also consider how to get your content in front of your audience. That’s why I’ve stuck ‘content formats’ at the bottom of each content pillar.

Each talking point gives you a ‘right to play’ with different content formats and on different channels. If your talking point is too niche, too tactical, or too closely tied to a single channel, you could run out of mileage. Adding content formats to the bottom of your content pillars is a quick check to ensure you’re able to maximize the impact of your talking point long-term.

Knowing which content formats are suited to each talking point is, to be fair, quite difficult when you’re new to content. As always, the answer probably lies within what your customers have already told you about their content consumption habits. What competitors are up to can help validate that too.

It’s worth noting that if you don’t have enough time or resources to cover three content pillars, just focus on one or two. It’s better to go narrow and deep with what you think has the best chance of success than to go broad and wide because you want to cover all bases. That might feel productive, but it’s not.

So how do these content pillars help you sell? I think of them as the gravity that brings your audience into your orbit. By continuously putting content in front of your audience that signals that you’re well-equipped to solve their problems, you’re pulling them toward your planet. Then, when they really need that big problem solved, they burst into your atmosphere, ready to have a conversation about pricing.