How to make your message simple.
Voicemail #15
Hey, friends.
I’m back, after a few chaotic weeks!
My parents were visiting. I went to Prague. I made the mistake of turning 30.
Buuuut here I am again. Back at my desk and feeling inspired.
A few weeks ago I sent you a missive with 5 tips on how to make your message more memorable.
Then, I sent you another message about the first of those five tips: how to add emotion to your copy.
You guys seemed to like that post ^ (thank you for the kind emails!), so now I want to dig into the next one: how to keep your message s i m p l e .
Why keep your message simple?
“Simplicity” is a concept that gets beat to death in B2B marketing, but it’s something all of us are terrible at doing.
It’s not for a lack of trying… it’s just *really* hard to do it, especially when you’re doing it in-house and have an emotional connection to the product. The excitement about it is a good thing — it’s what makes you authentic and keeps you going. But it also means you (and everyone internally) have a hard time seeing the forest from the trees when it comes to your messaging.
You get so wrapped up in how amazing your features are, you lose sight as to whether they need to be featured in your messaging at all.
And that ^ is how you end up with bloated landing pages that dump every feature imaginable onto a reader.
And THAT ^ is how you lose someone’s attention.
The truth is that simple messaging is largely a pragmatic choice.
If we want to be poetic about it, simplicity is the art of distilling a bunch of ideas down until you find the truth hidden underneath.
If we want to be more realistic though, it’s just about cutting away all the bullshit so people know where to focus and what to remember.
It’s an incredibly strategic choice… but that’s what makes it fun.
How do you make your messaging simple?
My goal for this newsletter is to be super practical. While I’d love for you guys to hire me, I’d rather you know how to do this yourself.
So, let’s take some ChatGPT-generated Gobbeldy Gook:
Streamline your marketing operations with DataPulse Insights™
Managing fragmented marketing data across multiple channels and trying to extract meaningful insights can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. That's where DataPulse Insights™ transforms your workflow. Our AI-powered platform unifies your marketing data from over 50 channels, automatically surfacing actionable trends and anomalies in real-time, helping marketing teams move from data overwhelm to data-driven decisions in minutes instead of hours.
And simplify it down to something a little better:
Finally get the information you need
Unify your marketing data from 50+ channels, then use AI to automatically pull out trends and anomalies in real time. You’ll know exactly where you need to focus your marketing efforts, and which decisions to prioritize.
Step 1: Dissect all of the ideas.
In the first passage, you can see that there are tons of ideas shoved into one paragraph. When I went through it I pulled out that this (fake) company is trying to tell me:
They’ll me extract meaningful insights
They’ll transform my workflow
They use AI
They gather data from over 50 channels
They give me trends and insights in real time
They help me make data-driven decisions faster
…. as a reader, I don’t know what the main message is here. What am I supposed to take away from this? The big problem here is that all of these messages carry equal weight. There’s no clear point of focus. Everything in the paragraph is a priority, so it all blends together.
Step 2: Figure out where the reader is in the journey.
Okay now, to simplify this further, I have to make some messaging decisions. I have to decide the ONE thing I want people to take away from this paragraph — everything else is just a distraction.
You have to think about where this goes on a web page. If it’s a problem statement, you probably want to focus on the problems. If you’re introducing the product, you want to highlight the value of the solution. If it’s a feature highlight, you obviously want to highlight that feature.
For our purpose, let’s make this a “solution” section, where we introduce the audience to the product as a way to solve their problem. Everything else is just fluff.
Streamline your marketing operations with DataPulse Insights™
Managing fragmented marketing data across multiple channels and trying to extract meaningful insights can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack.That's where DataPulse Insights™ transforms your workflow. Our AI-powered platform unifies your marketing data from over 50 channels, automatically surfacing actionable trends and anomalies in real-time, helping marketing teams move from data overwhelm to data-driven decisions in minutes instead of hours.
^much better!! Now I know what this thing is. I’m not drowning in everything else. It’s simple.
Step 3: Add personality.
Okay, now we have our basic messaging in place. It’s a lot simpler. We know what the goal is for this section.
Now it’s time to make it punchier by applying some creative writing techniques.
I won’t spend much time here (check out this post for more inspiration). But, here’s what I came up with:
Finally get the information you need
Unify your marketing data from 50+ channels, then use AI to automatically pull out trends and anomalies in real time. You’ll know exactly where you need to focus your marketing efforts, and which decisions to prioritize.
There are a million different ways you could take this… but I just tried to make it more personal and conversational.
Quick question: Would you like videos explaining this ^ process?
I'm thinking of starting a line editing series. But, I'd love to know if that's actually what you want.
If yes — hit reply and let me know. My top tip for simpler messaging: be ruthless.
I'm not a big fan of messaging pillars.
Blasphemous, I know.
But, after a few years of trying to make them work... I just don't find them particularly useful when it comes to actually writing copy.
Personally, I find the idea of pillars disrupts from the overarching company narrative. When you try to have one message with four pillars... you end up with five different messages. I think it's a classic example of not being able to edit down your ideas.
If you want your message to be simple, you have to be ruthless with your edits.
Copywriting great Joanna Wiebe drilled into my head that you should always follow “the rule of one” when you’re writing or messaging:
ONE Reader
ONE Offer
ONE Promise
ONE Transformation
ONE Call-to-Action
^You can’t be afraid of making some hard decisions.
This week’s writing hack: anaphora
This week’s rhetorical device is inspired by David Perrell’s newsletter about how to write with more passion.
He briefly mentions how repetition is a great way to add pacing and push the ideas forward… and I want to expand on that by talking about a specific repetition technique called anaphora.
Anaphora is the the repetition of words at the beginning of successive clauses. The repetition can give a certain phrase power… but also create a sort of meditative trance-like state.
One of the best places to look for examples of anaphora is in Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech. Hell, he uses anaphora in practically every paragraph of the speech. Frankly, it’s a masterpiece in this technique.
Give King’s speech a watch to see how unbelievably bone chilling this technique is. However, here’s a few pull quotes from it, in case you don’t have 17 minutes to spare right now.
He starts out with 3 sentences about how, 100 years earlier. Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation — the executive order that ended the Civil War, and which gave the Confederate states 100 days to free their enslaved people.
After that first paragraph though, he pivots hardcore and brings it to the reality of most Black Americans in 1963. And he has a damn good use of anaphora to make his point:
But 100 years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check.
^ keep in mind that at this point, Black people legally had the right to vote… but in reality were barred from the polls thanks to Jim Crow laws. It wasn’t until the mid-60s that things like literacy tests and poll taxes were banned, which effectively expanded voting rights and outlawed racial suppression. That’s in living memory!!
See how King’s use of anaphora here echoes that frustration? It gives the whole section a pulse in a way that emphasizes how little had changed in 100 years, and sets him up for a powerful pattern break by the end of the paragraph.
Anaphora runs throughout all of King’s speech. I could quite seriously write an entire essay on this subject alone. Hell, maybe I will. But I’ll show you one more example I like, and it’s perhaps his most famous:
I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day down in Alabama with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right down in Alabama little Black boys and Black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.
This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
^That right there is how you rally people. It almost reads like a song.
If you can find your simple message and turn it into a phrase that you can repeat over and over again, you start building something memorable.
One of my favorite examples of anaphora in messaging is a classic: Papa John’s Pizza’s “better ingredients, better pizza” slogan.
It’s brilliantly simple… but it sticks in your head.
So your homework: try to write a few headlines that use anaphora, or write a mini manifesto.
Hit reply and lmk what you come up with.
Stuff I’m digging from other people this week.
Anna Borbotko shared a tip from our co-authored article for her newsletter, Product Marketing Pulse. I really like the graphic she came up with in this post.
UserEvidence just released a really cool new feature. They aren’t my client anymore, but I just LOVE what they’re doing.
Jon Itken had a great post about shared trajectories and how to make sure your company strategy is aligned.
Jason Oakley has a walkthrough of his PMM Charter that’s so useful. If you’re a founding PMM and need to establish some authority within your company, this’ll help.
Stuff I’ve been writing this week.
I’m getting back into the groove of things.
Joe Daniels, Steve Miller, and myself have launched a new thing called BrandStack. It’s a resource collection of all of our best content. If you want a totally free, non-sales audit of your current brand, we’re happy to help.
As mentioned, I co-wrote a post with Anna Borbotko for Product Marketing Pulse. Check it out here!
Thanks for being here.
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See you next week.
Def sharing this. Love your newsletters.