Messaging is a key part of any great sales or marketing campaign. But any message that is not adapted to context is as good as a flyer lying facedown on a pavement.

In order to find sufficient demand in the market, you must craft an effective approach to communicate your product’s value.

The right messaging makes everything easier. It attracts the right people to your product. People who get it right away and don’t haggle the price.

When you nail your messaging, your marketing becomes significantly more effective.

In this blog, I will describe what message-market fit is and why it is an essential part of your outbound sales strategy.

What is message-market fit?

Context matters.

Think about all the times you have decided to reply to a cold message on your email or LinkedIn; what was it about the message that clicked? Was it timing? Was it framing?

Messaging success is highly contextual—you want to be able to speak to your consumer in a way that resonates with them. Sometimes, that resonance might even be different from how you see your own product or service.

Message-market fit means content that is adapted to your prospects and has relevance based personalisation.

The winning combination for a good market-message fit is a message that contains the following:

Value for the customer – What problem are you solving?
Relevance – Why does the customer need your product?
Point of view – What sets your solution apart from the other ones?

Why do you need message-market fit?

The written word is much different than the spoken word especially in cold-outreach. In cold calls, you can adjust your approach midway, but not in cold outreach.

While crafting message copies for email, LinkedIn connection request or a LinkedIn message, it is important to get the content right and to do so systematically and not just based on ‘what seems to be good.’

You can easily ‘fall in love’ with your own content, even if it’s bad content. Nobody is immune to the trap of liking their own content, so how do you check yourself and make sure you’re creating a copy that is objectively good and can be systematically improved over multiple iterations of itself? Impose a structure and know the why of it.

What this means is writing a copy that fits the needs of your audience and showcases your product in a way that speaks to them is key. You will not hit the nail on the first time so rewrite the copy till you have it. Then A/B/C test multiple versions on a sample audience to find out which one resonates the most.

How to get to message-market fit?

Now that we know what is message-market fit and why you need it, we will discuss a simple 3-step framework for finding your message-market fit.

Step 1: Know your prospects

Do your research or get B2B data from a reputable on-demand B2B provider to really know your prospects.

Knowing your ICP is a crucial first step as this will form the basis of your sales cycle. If you create your ICP carefully, you are already halfway there to knowing your prospects.

Next, focus on specific parameters like company data, prospect data and contact information to prepare personal notes on your prospects.

Company data: This is all the information pertaining to their company such as:
Industry – what industry do they belong to (e.g. Manufacturing, Healthcare, Technology)
Size – how many employees does their company have (e.g. 11-50, 200-500, 1,000+)
Location – where is the company physically located (e.g. North America, London, African Anglophone countries)

Prospect data: This is all the information on them personally such as:
Job title – which job title(s) does your prospect have (e.g. CEO, Head of Sales, Director)
Department – which department(s) do they work in (e.g. Accounting, General Management, Marketing)
Tenure – how long or short have they held the position (e.g. >3 months, 1+ years, 10+ years)

Contact data: This includes crucial information such as:
Full name, Email address, Phone number, Social media.

There are six categories of data you can look at such as demographic, descriptive, firmographic, technographic, chronographic and psychographic data. The more information you have on your prospects, the better your email copies will be.

The more information you have on your prospects, the better your email copies will be.

How should you get this data?

There are multiple sources of information where you can get data on your prospects to fuel your personalised marketing campaigns such as:

Social media
Your prospects are quite likely to have a social media presence where they may be on a variety of platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter or YouTube. Although Twitter and YouTube have their place, a very popular platform is LinkedIn where users include information about themselves in order to create their profiles.

Using search functions along with filters, you can create a list of contacts that would fit your ICP. To open up other communication channels outside the social media platform, you will need extra information or you can also use web plugins, which hubsell offers, where you can export the data and get the relevant missing information you desire.

Websites
In the digital age, a website is as important, if not more, as your physical store. Most businesses keep their websites updated with new releases, about the company, hiring status, organisational charts, etc. Surfing company websites of the desired accounts can also be a great source of information on your prospects.

Moreover, your website can also be a great source for B2B data. Through publishing content such as blogs, guides and whitepapers, your website can attract visitors who show a clear interest in the topics that are being discussed. There are many metrics that can be tracked on your website such as traffic volume, traffic source, website conversions and much more. Records of each visitor can be created from either website tracking tools or gated content where they must provide basic contact information to download the material.

There are also website platforms that can offer further insights into companies including funding and investment information about private and public companies (e.g. Crunchbase), and reviews from customers and employees (e.g. G2 or Glassdoor).

Paid vendors
If you want to save time and cut to the chase, you can purchase the data you need from various places. You can acquire data from a freelancer who can scrape data from the web, purchase from a pre-existing database, or use an on-demand data generator like hubsell.

The main differences between these are in price and quality. Depending on how your strategy to generate leads will determine which source would be best for you. You can work with a powerful on-demand B2B data provider like hubsell to get you the B2B contacts that fit your ICP with data points across 25+ fields to make your emails personalised as can be.

When you know your prospects well, writing a message tailored to their needs becomes child’s play.

All you need is to align your product benefits to their needs and personalise the message. Let us explore that next.

Step 2: Map value to features

Nail your value proposition in the context of your buyer’s needs.

Your prospect does not care about your product if it does not directly solve their needs. So, map specific features of your product to the value that they give to your customer.

A good value proposition addresses the following key aspects:
What you’re selling (description of product/service)
Who you’re selling to (target market)
Statement of benefit (onus on value)
How your product delivers its value (primary differentiation)

The simple answer to the questions ‘what’ you’re selling and to ‘who’ seems clear—for eg. a task management software built for HR. Its value is clear, right?

Think again.

What you need to consider is ‘why’ your consumer needs your product and ‘how’ your product delivers its value i.e. point of differentiation.

In this example, the core problem being solved is complexity. HR manages many hires at once and that leads to complexity of management and oversight.

So why does an HR person need your product?
To simplify their daily activities.

In our example, the core problem of complexity can be solved by visual dashboards that can be easily updated by multiple users.

This is what we call ‘value-feature mapping.’

Armed with this knowledge, you can construct a message that will convey this value in a simple and specific way.

This brings us to the last part of getting a message-market fit that works for you: value-driven content.

Step 3: Create value-driven content

Leverage the power of simplicity and context.

Last step is the actual email you will send to your prospects. This is where the magic of value-driven content comes into play.

You know by now that personalisation sells but this goes beyond just first name in subject lines.

Enter hyper-personalisation.
Meaning personalising your message to a much larger extent than what is conventionally understood by the word.

Behaviour-based automation

hubsell’s workflows allow you to automatically send content to recipients based on a trigger – it could be after filling in a sign-up form or after entering into an email list or any other trigger specified by you. The pre-set sequence is such that consequent actions completely depend on the recipients’ activity. This allows you to send behaviour-based personalised emails, effective for both engaging and nurturing contacts

Some examples of behaviour-based automation trigger are:
opens (yes/no/number of times)
clicked (yes/no/number of times)
LCR accepted/not accepted

List Segmentation

The idea behind any email personalisation strategy is to treat your contacts as an individual and target them specifically by customising the email content based on their persona. To achieve this, you should segment your lists keeping in mind the common binding factors, such as location, online behaviour, purchase history, gender or other touchpoints.

Dynamic Content

Dynamic content allows you to personalise parts of a message that changes based on user behaviour or data you have about your subscribers. These hyper-personalised dynamic emails can be created by changing the content based on the segments that you had created with contacts that share common geographical location, purchase history etc. It saves you the time from writing separate email campaigns for each section of the audience.

To get the best open and reply rates, you need to personalise your messages for the recipient. Dynamic and static placeholders can be used to do that.

Here are some examples of dynamic and static placeholders commonly used by hubsell in our campaigns for customers:

First name:
The first name placeholder is common in any message automation software. It is simple to use and it is the first and basic step in message personalisation.

E.g.:
‘Hi {{firstName}}’
‘Therefore, I believe your company, {{firstName}}, …’

Gender:
The gender placeholder is valuable in messages written in languages that have different pronouns based on gender. Messages written in English would not need the placeholder. But, messages in Latin or Germanic languages can use it to their benefit.

E.g.:
‘{{#if (eq gender ‘male’)}} sentence with male pronouns {{else if (eq gender ‘female’)}} sentence with female pronouns’

Departments:
Department placeholders are one of the most used by our customers. That is because they show sentences based on the department of the prospect. Companies that reach out to multiple people in different departments can use it effectively.

E.g.:
‘{{#if (eq department ‘sales’)}} sentence with sales objective {{else if (eq department ‘general management’)}} sentence with ROI objective’

Title:
The title placeholder is another way to personalise the message. Decision makers are proud of their position and will feel important because you took the time to research and include it in the message.

E.g.:
‘As a {{title}} you understand these challenges…’

Weekday dynamic:
Weekday placeholders are extremely useful in putting down your CTA. You are able to suggest a possible day for the prospect to contact you depending on which day your email is being sent which increases the chances of your prospect positively replying to your message.

E.g.:
{{#if (weekdayIs ‘Monday’)}}Let’s chat on Wednesday{{else if (weekdayIs ‘Tuesday’)}}Let’s chat on Thursday{{else if (weekdayIs ‘Thursday’)}}Let’s chat on Monday.

Number of employees:
The ‘number of employees’ placeholder will generally only be used if you are targeting different company sizes. It allows you to tailor your message to adapt to each of their expectations.

E.g.:
‘As a big company with {{companyId.size}} employees you require complex solutions for your x complicated problem’

Knowledge about your prospects, value driven propositions and dynamic message templates are powerful tools to achieve message-market fit and supercharge your marketing campaigns.

Key-takeaway

Message-market fit means always keeping context in mind. Your description of your product or service should allow your prospect to immediately understand the gist of what you do and why they need it at this moment in time. Always talk about a problem that you’re solving in their lives or a solution that they’re likely to be looking for, rather than blatantly listing features.

End game: Your message needs to resonate, get them curious and want to learn more.

New readers

For those unfamiliar with hubsell, we provide an end-to-end B2B prospecting solution with on-demand generated B2B data and multi-channel personalised outreach automation software to generate qualified sales leads.

Book your discovery call today to see how you can scale your opportunity generation