We’ve all seen it. That boring, rinse and repeat of B2B messaging that probably talks about saving time, cutting costs, or how “AI driven” something is. I’m losing interest just writing those examples.
No team sets out to write boring stuff for their campaign, user conference, press release, etc. but it happens – and for some specific reasons:
Shallow audience understanding.
Buyer demographics, and even those slick persona-styled buyer profiles are not enough to write well for an audience.
If you can’t empathize with your buyer or speak their language, your storytelling will be F’d. You need to talk to the humans who buy your product. What gets a real reaction out of them? What makes them zone out during a zoom call? What topic would make them lean forward in their chair fast?
Copying a competitor (even if you don’t mean to)
It happens a lot: an exec or a board member is hyper focused on a competitor and then the Comms/marketing team gets pressure to react to whatever that company is saying. While the intention might not be to copy another company, any messaging work that starts from the frame of a competitor is going to sound like someone took the competitor’s messaging, tossed it in an AI with the instructions “make this sound more like us / different.” It’s going to be crap.
Focus on YOUR story. What’s interesting about YOUR product and YOUR company?
Storytelling by committee.
This is what happens when the good intention of getting buy-in goes sideways. If you have more than 2- 4 people trying to craft a story, it’s too many. (That includes people in an approval chain.)
The more people who get involved in the creation and editing process of brand/product messaging, the more ‘safe’ or ‘unobjectionable’ it will become. You’ll end up with a form of lowest-common-denominator copywriting that will have the same excitement and narrative tension as the manual for building furniture.
Checklist for more interesting stories:
- Emotionally understand your audience.
- Understand your business and what’s genuinely interesting about it.
- Let the writers write and streamline the approvals. (Pro tip: You can (and should) inform people about messaging without taking their edits)
