Unlock the secret to resonating with your audience by finding the perfect language/market fit. Discover how to make your customers feel understood and valued, as if you've read their minds, by tailoring your communication to their unique needs and preferences.
Finding language/market fit is crucial for early-stage startups
It helps you understand and size your market, narrow in on what to build, validate demand and demonstrate traction, which can help with hiring and fundraising.
- There are real costs to not prioritizing this deeper work. If you do not have it, stop whatever you are doing and find it.
Draft some headlines
Focus on specific goals and tasks.
- Avoid vague platitudes or anything that sounds like marketing, such as “all in one,” “faster,” “revolutionary” or “convenient.” These platitudes engender cynicism, and people will not infer what they mean.
Run this quant test
Quant test your new headline(s) against your current option
- Create several copies of a simple ad design, and run that same ad with different headlines, and see which one performs best with your audience
- If you’re struggling to find product/market fit, stop hiring, stop coding and focus on language and market fit
One final warning: Your agency will hate this
They will call these messages boring, derivative, and functional
- Even Nike and Apple had to start with clear functional messaging until people understood what they could help them achieve
- Take heart, even Nike and the iPhone started out with boring functional messaging in the beginning
Use this four-step process to unlock language/market fit:
Uncover the struggles, hidden assumptions and goals via interviewing recent sign-ups
The case for starting with language/market fit
Speed
- Product build-measure-learn cycles can take weeks. You can iterate language 5X in a single day.
- Traction
- A pre-launch lead-capture site with 25% conversion is a strong signal to potential investors, plus it queues up a product waitlist of potential beta testers.
- Clarity
- A clear, validated, plain-English articulation of your value prop really helps the entire team understand what they’re building and why.
Uncover their goals, struggles and language
Find somebody who has recently purchased your product.
- Walk through their journey, step-by-step, and ask questions to understand what they were struggling to do, where they looked for help, and which alternatives they tried.
Validate comprehension
Type out each headline on a presentation slide or in a document in a large clear font
- Find somebody to test it on – it can really be anyone unless your industry has specialized jargon
- Explain that you’re working on some new messaging and would like to run it past them if they could spare one minute
- Tell your volunteer there are no right or wrong answers, just whatever the message means to them
- Open your laptop, and show it to them for five seconds, then, without warning, take it away
Attention is the first hurdle in your funnel, and probably the one with the biggest drop-off.
We switch between two modes of attentional control depending on the situation, and people have an innate preference for one mode or the other
- Goal-directed (top-down) attention: When you need to find something specific, you have a particular outcome in mind, and you’re looking for things that will help you get there
- Stimulus driven (Bottoms-up): When your mind is focused on the raw sensory input, looking for interesting things, like when you’re scrolling through your Instagram feed
How to Find the LANGUAGE That Picks the Locking (Or Why No One Wants Your “All-In-One Solution”)
Talk about what’s in your prospects’ heads
- If you could stop people in the middle of their day and snapshot-read their minds, what would you find?
- You would see anxieties, fears, doubts, hopes, dreams and struggles
- The best way to get past the attention filter is to talk about the stuff that is in their heads
