Is Your Messaging For Your Internal Stakeholders, or Your External Customers?

With so many voices to consider within your organization, aligning on a coherent messaging strategy can feel impossible.

There’s your product, sales, and customer success teams. Your C-level leadership team. Your own internal marketing staff. Your external agencies, consultants, and freelancers.

So many different perspectives, each taking a turn looking at and reviewing your messaging strategy and marketing materials. And each saying: “Wait a minute! You left out (insert favorite selling point).”

What’s lost in this ongoing internal feedback loop? The customer POV.

We get so fixated trying to please our internal stakeholders, that we lose sight of what’s going to matter most to the people we’re actually trying to engage with our messaging.

We gloss over critical questions like:

• Who’s going to be reading this?
• Why do they care?
• How do we make it more about them, instead of about us?

We tend to go with what we know. We know what the product, sales, and customer success teams like. We know what the C-Suite likes. We know what our own marketing team, agencies, and freelancers like.

But we may not have anywhere near as clear an understanding of what our customers like.

Usually, it’s because we never ask.