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00:00:01
Stop Trying to Make Your Messaging Perfect (Do This Instead) w/Caitlin Cassady
28 Plays2 years ago
In this episode, Dan Sanchez talks to Caitlin Cassady who is the Director Of Strategic Communications at Formation.
They discuss:
- What to do rather than perfect your messaging
- How to collaborate with others without watering down the messaging
- How to integrate your message into your audience growth initiatives
They discuss:
- What to do rather than perfect your messaging
- How to collaborate with others without watering down the messaging
- How to integrate your message into your audience growth initiatives
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome back to the Attention Podcast. I'm Dan Sanchez with Sweetfish, and today I'm here with Caitlin Cassidy, who is the Director of Strategic Communications at Formation. Caitlin, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Dan. I'm excited to be here. Absolutely.
Impact of Messaging on Audience Growth
00:00:24
Speaker
Today we're going to be talking about how messaging impacts audience growth.
00:00:29
Speaker
And it's funny because when i think about audience growth we're always wanting it always going for it we hardly ever sit down sometimes and think about how to apply our own marketing principles that we're doing for our product and actually apply it to the audience actually apply to the owned media that we want to grow so i was excited to sit down with kaitlyn and talking about how she's had some wins at formation.
00:00:51
Speaker
with how to get the right messaging just to market your marketing essentially. So Caitlin, how do you find that messaging applies to audience growth? What are you looking for?
Role of Storytelling in Messaging
00:01:02
Speaker
Yeah, I think that anything, any part of marketing, what's so critical for us all to remember is it doesn't matter what we're selling, what the product is, who the audience is.
00:01:13
Speaker
Whether it's a physical or a digital product, or if you're just trying to get someone to connect with you to sell them something down the road, we're all humans. So I really bring it back to the idea of storytelling. And I think that's why I nerd out on messaging so hard is that it's really about making sure that you connect with someone in the right way. And I think that.
00:01:32
Speaker
When you start to nail that down, you start to see and I have started to see this in my role is like you start to see this authentic growth of your audience because you're talking to them about things that matter to them. You're talking to them about the challenges they're having. And I think a big thing for me is knowing like the right message isn't the same for everyone. But if you are authentically telling a message that you know resonates with a group of people you're trying to attract.
00:01:55
Speaker
It's about a slow growth there. It's not a silver bullet. It's about finding that right tone and continuing to iterate on it. Awesome. A lot of the same principles from product messaging carry over to audience growth messaging for growing your channel. In our pre-interview, you gave me a line that you said there's no perfect messaging. I was like, what? Tell me
Perfection vs. Iteration in Messaging
00:02:16
Speaker
more about that. That became the basis for the show even. What do you mean by no perfect messaging? Yeah.
00:02:22
Speaker
I'm of the opinion that there's no perfect anything, so that probably skews into this perspective of mine. I love it. I think that we struggle as marketers. You iterate on things so long. You have the ability when you're
00:02:38
Speaker
you're not having a conversation like this. I think a lot of us are less concerned when you're chatting with someone about using the perfect word here, the perfect word there, because you know, in the broader context, we have a lot of time to explain things. I think when you dive into messaging, a lot of us fear that like, I only have these three lines and that's what I have to use to crack this open and get someone to engage with me. And so there's a lot of fear in getting it perfect. But I think it goes back to some bigger marketing principles of like, who are you trying to attract? What are you trying to get them to do?
00:03:07
Speaker
And again, like every human is different. So something that works for Caitlin is not going to work for Dan. And I think that's what I want to get more folks to. And what I try and work with my team on is the perfect message doesn't exist because the perfect message isn't the same for everyone. So for me, what it's really about is thinking through what do we as a company want to get across? What challenge are we solving? And once we kind of have that core piece of it, it's about iterating on it, testing it in different channels.
00:03:36
Speaker
not being so tied to like, let's get it to a hundred percent and then we'll, then we'll release it to the world. Like let's get it to 80%, put it out there and get some feedback and continue evolving it. And I know that's a bit of like just startup mentality too. When you've got a tiny team, you really can't get things to perfect, but it's really been working for my team. We've really seen some great feedback and we've been able to iterate on our message formation over the past, I say six months. It's, we've really seen some steam around it and it's really,
00:04:06
Speaker
kind of helped me nail into this idea that we got to stop thinking about perfection in messages and start thinking about the iteration in messages.
00:04:14
Speaker
I love it. I love pulling from startup world all the time. I don't know about you, but when I start digging, usually when I'm trying to troubleshoot something that's going on in marketing and you're going deep and then deeper and then deeper, sometimes I found like I'm not even a marketing world anymore. I've gone so deep. I'm now an entrepreneur world, right? You're like, wait, like we're even trying to figure out what the market is right now. I don't even know if the right, do we even have the right product for the right person? Like what are we doing right now?
00:04:40
Speaker
So I find a lot of marketers end up becoming mini entrepreneurs, maybe intrapreneurs or something like that in their pursuit to build good marketing. And I love what you said, like there's no perfect messaging. It reminds me a lot of Toyota's kind of famous phrase that kind of kick started like the whole lean manufacturing movement, like always better, never best.
00:05:02
Speaker
Right. It's kind of become like a life motto for me, partly because I never, I'm like, it's, I just have to get over it. Like it's never going to be perfect. Just publish and move on. Maybe, maybe the next one will be a little bit better. Right. Yeah. I think that's the thing we forget is that there is always going to be another shot at this, like putting something out into the world. Like it can be so scary.
00:05:23
Speaker
but it can be amazing too. Like you gotta just publish and see what happens. I'll give you an example. We
Industry Guide Launch and Adaptability
00:05:29
Speaker
actually just last week launched this massive industry how to guide formations in an emerging category. So we're really educating the market even on like why they even need to think about us right now. It's not a rip and replace kind of sale. It's a like, this is a fundamentally different way of putting your like loyalty offers on a market. And we've been writing this guide for months with any massive piece of content like that.
00:05:52
Speaker
And we've been going back and forth on a couple pieces and we did finally get down to it where we're like, this is really good. And we know the core message, like our intention and our vision with this is really strong.
00:06:03
Speaker
We have to just publish it and go for it and see what the world thinks. And we came to an agreement as a team where we're like, let's follow the model of like, we're going to revisit this next winter and decide what is version two of this? Like, what have we learned by putting version one out into the world? Which like, again, is scary as shit. I spent four months of my life like helping rankle and pull this together. But I know the message is good, probably not perfect. And I guarantee I'm going to start getting some feedback on little nits here and there.
00:06:32
Speaker
But that's okay, that makes V2 that much better. And it'll be just as exciting to be able to launch that out in the world next year and understand like, hey, we had a whole year's worth of information to learn from. It evolved our message. It helped us hone in on a couple areas of our message that maybe we just didn't even understand before because we are in an emerging space. And something that massive is big where you're getting the years worth of feedback. But when you even think about like that core message of our company, like we're now disseminating that on all of our other owned channels.
00:07:01
Speaker
So how my team is using that in social posts, how our head of product and product management is using that as they build out future like release iterations, it all matters. Like it's all those little tests that you get. And that I think is where it gets into like messaging is not perfect because the people you sell to and the world we live in is constantly changing. So like, let's get out a really good version today, knowing that there's always going to be a shift tomorrow.
00:07:25
Speaker
So what does a proper messaging cadence look like? Because messaging isn't just a one-time story you posted. It's not just a one and done thing. It's an ongoing thing. It has multiple
Messaging Framework and Cadence
00:07:36
Speaker
facets. So what does it look like? And paint up a little bit of a picture by giving a case study of what you've done.
00:07:42
Speaker
Yeah, I have a couple different, a couple very strong opinions about what messaging cadences or frameworks look like. I have to steal a quote though from my boss. When I was actually joining Formation, he told me that he's a huge like 90s hip-hop fan.
00:07:57
Speaker
and he told me that like what he wants us to get to is this idea that we have this core messaging for the company and then everyone else who is working on messaging your content should be able to remix it in some way and i just loved that i wish i'd come up with it i kind of thought about just stealing the idea for this podcast but i'm not going to give him credit where it's due but we've really taken that to heart and so
00:08:19
Speaker
I mean, God, you can search and find all sorts of different like buyers journeys messaging frameworks out there. I personally love foresters messaging framework. And so why I think it's really good is that it's very high level and it lets you build out what you need. Like I think some of the other messaging frameworks dive a bit too deep where you're kind of talking before about like you start to go down this rabbit hole of like marketing and messaging and all of a sudden you're an entrepreneur.
00:08:43
Speaker
I think some of those frameworks are too detailed and they don't let the marketer actually really envision what it should look like in their company. I'm actually unfamiliar with the framework. Can you share it with me in the audience? Yeah, absolutely. So the framework is simple. It fits on one slide, which I love. It starts at the top with what's your message and vision. So it does start with corporate positioning. It then dives into a couple of different areas where it looks at
00:09:09
Speaker
What are your segments? What are your audiences? How does that flow into different product lines? How does that flow into different product positioning? So it's this messaging framework that really takes your vision of the company in that corporate positioning and flows it all the way down to like, how should your product positioning be out there? Like what words are you using in your demo videos?
00:09:28
Speaker
So it really gives you this flow and why I think it's so powerful and like why I'm such a fan is that a lot of times you see this problem with messaging where people in different parts of the organization own different pits. So naturally product marketing is going to own product positioning. A lot of times strategic communications or corporate marketing will own like a company vision. There's this massive gap sometimes if you don't have good team alignment of like, how do they flow together? And so what I really like with foresters is that it does,
00:09:58
Speaker
It forces you to gut check yourself almost. It's like, does this all flow together? If we can say yes, we can go from that top mission and vision and take those steps all the way downward. That to me is where you have this really strong messaging framework, which then gets into a bit more of your question around the cadence where like,
00:10:15
Speaker
I think once you have that, it's so much easier, especially as a leader, to let your team free a little bit where you're like, you have the backbone of your messaging. Now let's go start testing it and market. Let's get that big piece. So again, for us, we built this massive guide, this industry guide that takes all of those messaging components into
00:10:34
Speaker
into perspective. From there, I can say to my team, let's go see how this one message works with this audience. We have a community, it's called the loyalty innovators community, where we talk with folks that are maybe not formation customers yet, but we're talking to them about just these bigger
00:10:50
Speaker
like messier problems in loyalty marketing, we can go see it there where I'm like, hey, let's go see how this resonates here. Cause this is core to our message, but kind of, you know, a little bit more on the educational piece, as opposed to someone who's in a sales cycle where it's like, yeah, let's dig deeper and use like a different part of that messaging. Kind of getting back to our, the original like topic of this of like, how does that messaging drive audience growth? I think that's the piece is where when you have that really strong framework, all of those different messaging pieces and the cadences that go out,
00:11:21
Speaker
It helps you build the audience in a more organic way because you do get to test it for some of these little subsets of your audience where you're like, I do think this will resonate better over here versus over here. So you're not so tied to like one message, which again, I think there's no perfect message.
00:11:36
Speaker
it lets you be flexible in how you engage with people. And to me, that's the basis of audience growth is trying to get people to emotionally connect with your brand. Like that's, that's the end goal no matter what your brand is. And I think a strong messaging framework actually lets you do that more authentically because people aren't afraid of deviating a tiny bit as long as they know kind of like what their boundaries are.
00:11:59
Speaker
So let's
Applying Messaging Framework to Podcasts
00:12:00
Speaker
see, how would this apply to something like a podcast? Now, I assume you wouldn't change the mission and come up with a new mission and vision for something like a podcast, but you want to grow an audience, this specific channel chosen as a podcast, maybe with like a social channel for promotion. How would you start to branch off like the mission and the vision of the company to form messaging that's specific to this podcast that you're building? I'm sure there's a lot more inputs you would want to have. We could just pick some of those up as we go.
00:12:25
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I think for me, it's always a lot. I think the research part, like the investigation part always takes longer than I anticipate, no matter how many times I do this. I'm always like, oh yeah, we've got a lot of this information. And then you realize like, no, everything I read like sparks another question and then I have to go deeper. So I do think it's that piece of like, let's go investigate what we've got. And then it comes down to some core marketing principles of like, who's your audience?
00:12:52
Speaker
What are you trying to get them to do and what are the triggers that you think will get them to take that action? Whether it's a sale, whether it's listening to a podcast in this instance. And so that's for me is thinking through like, okay, so if we have the theme for the podcast, we have our core message. What are some of the subsidiary messages? Like that big message should be your umbrella, but like, are there five or six sub topics that really make sense?
00:13:16
Speaker
Let's start trying to promote some of those on social and see is one tapping in like is one driving greater engagement than the others. All right. We're on to something here. Maybe we're going to start shifting, you know, 30% of our messaging to that one message, 40% and see if we continue to grow there. So that's where I think of it from an iterative standpoint is like.
00:13:36
Speaker
When you have the mindset where it's like, we walked in on it, we're going with it. That's it. You don't get to have those on the fly decisions of like, wow, this is working really well. Let's try this deeper. And so I think that's where it can be really powerful to say. If social is our channel, I mean, think about how fast social analytics are. Like we can go in every day and see who's engaged with which piece of content. And so that for me is where I really start to think it's, um, it's powerful that you could pull the information.
00:14:05
Speaker
but kind of to your point earlier about like publish it and go. Like it lets you do things like that where like you can start publishing pod. Like in this instance, I would look at it as like, all right, we have the message. Let's publish the first couple of podcasts. Let's get those messages out there. Let's get some feedback on it. And then that starts to evolve future conversations that we're going to have with people.
00:14:26
Speaker
So when you say you have the message, what does that mean? Is there a specific document that has the holy grail of the message? And if so, what are the different labels within that document?
00:14:37
Speaker
Yeah, yes, there is a document. I'm a former journalist, so I can't not have things written down. For me, it's a document. It's preferably like a Word doc or a Google doc, not a slide. That does not work for my brain when it comes to messaging. So I do start at the top of like, what is our, what's our mission? And then I also want to set out like, what's our point of view? And the point of view to me is part of the message where you're really talking about
00:15:05
Speaker
what's happening in the world today? Because I think part of good messaging is thinking through what's the challenge your audience is facing? Why is the status quo not working for them anymore? And then it's about educating them on like what comes next. And again, educating could be come listen to this podcast, because we're going to teach you some cool stuff. It could be come download my guide, you know, like that piece is can be flexible. But within that,
00:15:30
Speaker
messaging doc, you should have that POV of like, what does the world look like today? And why is there a better option? So those are the two big things. Like, I think if you can get those written down and get some good team agreement on this, because this shouldn't be written by one person. Like I often end up being kind of like the, the driver of this program when it comes to messaging, but there's inputs from so many other people on the team.
00:15:57
Speaker
executives, your CS leaders, your product managers, like there's a ton of people that have really good insights and you should not be creating this in a silo. If you don't have a lot of people arguing with you when you start to put those down, you're doing it wrong. So I think that's where it gets to is like, get those first two. Like if you have those in Word doc, you can start thinking through like, how am I going to make those remixes? Like, how can I start to evolve this into different channels and conversations?
00:16:24
Speaker
Interesting. Do you have people approve it before they go out to make sure that it stays aligned to it or you just kind of like trust them and let them go? A little of both. I would say I start with like, let's have the conversation. Like I've recently onboarded a new content marketer. And so she and I have had a lot of conversations about like, how do, what is our tone? What is our message? How do we get things out there? She's now pretty much at the point where I could be like, yes, you've nailed it. Go run. That's why I hired you is that like you get to go own some of these other channels and start building our audience there.
00:16:54
Speaker
And I now know that she's like really gotten dialed in on what our message is. And from an iterative standpoint, you're iterating once a year or do you, do you take a look at it more, more often than annually?
00:17:05
Speaker
You know, it's so formation. I'm just coming up on my year mark. So it's been a lot. It's been like more of an ongoing process. I'll answer more broadly in the sense that like in the past, I do like to look at like the formal messaging doc once a year as really a good gut check of like, what have we learned? Cause I do think those feedback loops, and that can come from anywhere that can come from your sales team, from your execs who are out on market hearing from VCs and analysts from your customers. I really like to keep that feedback loop open. And so I think sometimes.
00:17:35
Speaker
especially again at a startup where things are moving fast, you'll see that like short form content, like I'll start to be like, Oh, some of these blogs are really resonating. And it's actually big evolved the messaging a bit here because we learned some new things. We do need to go back and revisit that core document and say like, Hey, we need to update this. So.
00:17:53
Speaker
I make it a point to always go back at least once a year, but I do often find that it's two or three times a year. I recognize
Refining Messaging Based on Feedback
00:18:01
Speaker
that something has started to shift and I go back and look at it. And sometimes it's realizing where you're like, actually, no, we're still pretty solid. It's just that like we've expanded how we talk about things, which is great. And then there have been other instances where I've gone back and be like, okay, you guys, we all need to sit back down and assess. Is this shift the right one? And if it is, that's awesome. But like, let's again, I think that's the big thing with messaging is that
00:18:23
Speaker
It's easy to say like, oh, that's just communications job and be like, it just lives in the bucket over here. But in fact, your company together should all be telling the same story just from everybody's different voices. So I do really think alignment on that messaging is how you get to better audience growth because you're creating consistency across all those own channels.
00:18:41
Speaker
the devil's advocate a little bit on getting a lot of voices to speak into the messaging. One thing that I found, I agree, because if not everyone's bought in on it, it's kind of like no one's going to use it and it's pointless, right? Yeah. One thing I have found with having a lot of cooks in the kitchen is that it pulls messaging to be vanilla, to be a little bit more safe. Yes. Right? Which, you know, can be a little boring at times. How do you keep it to be like to be a really strong message that is a little bit more passionate than
00:19:09
Speaker
something where consensus just drives it to a mediocre message? That's a great question. And I've seen that happen many a time where it does, it starts to drive it. I think the other thing you get with Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen is it becomes, it's a bit of a Frankenstein because everyone's trying to use it for their own purpose. And so it just becomes this amorphous blob of messaging. One of the ways that I've figured out over the course of my career to make this
00:19:34
Speaker
work is that you do have a point in time where input is done where you're like okay we have to like bake this and go because there's always different ideas that you can bring in so giving people a hard stop I think gives you a good point in time for people to really sit down and think about it and give you their most honest opinion like you don't get the throw away conversations then if you're like you have one week let's do this
00:19:56
Speaker
I think the other thing, I mean, in a perfect world, you have an executive who has a really passionate outlook and then pushes for that. That doesn't always happen. So that's more of a happy messaging experience. When you don't, when you have executives that are pushing you more towards that vanilla, in some instances, I've
00:20:15
Speaker
done tests with it and shown that it wasn't attracting people. And so it became a bit more of an onerous process, but we actually put the really bland vanilla messaging out and then came back with data and was like, we did nothing. Like no one cared. It didn't break through the noise. And so then we've ratcheted it back up to where we originally wanted it, where it did have that passion. Excellent.
00:20:35
Speaker
So if somebody's just getting started and maybe is looking into this framework in order to create the messaging, let's just say they have a good sense of like a first pass on the message. They're not happy with, totally happy with it. It's not perfect, but they've gotten some buy-in, they've made this document. What are some steps they can take to actually make sure it gets implemented?
00:20:54
Speaker
Yeah, I would say first is just admit to yourself that you'll probably never be happy with the whole thing. And that's okay to go back to my original thesis. It's never
Continuous Improvement and Embracing Imperfection
00:21:03
Speaker
going to be perfect. And that's, that's all right. I think from there, it's doing, it's again, it's like marketing for your marketing team, like put on your own, like messaging roadshow, take it to the right stakeholders, talk to them about why this is important. Give them some data points of like where things have worked.
00:21:20
Speaker
I think that's a key step. I think one of the other things is really just understanding that like, you're not going to win every battle. You're going to have an executive at every company who does not agree with having to deal with the messaging framework. That's something I've dealt with my entire career is people are like, no, no, I know what I'm talking about. And they go do their own thing. Don't fight every battle. I think is the other, when it comes to more like the tactical, like the messaging and the writing, I'd say figure out what your tests are, like get some of those small wins. So figure out what are some of the like,
00:21:49
Speaker
short form content or quick campaigns, whether that's social or digital ads, so that you can start to put some tests out in market and understand like, how is this resonating? I think anyone who's working on a messaging framework is really, we're coming into it because we care about connecting with people.
00:22:06
Speaker
When you do that, your goal is for people, your goal is to break through the noise. Your goal is for people to pay attention. And so a lot of times we have this idea in our head and we're never 100% sure if it's going to work or not. And so I'd say validate that for yourself. Even if it's not a live option, I've done it before where like I've tested messaging programs with
00:22:25
Speaker
friendlies at my company, people I used to work with, friends in the industry where I was just like, hey, please spend five minutes and give me your honest to God raw feedback on what this felt like for you. What did it make you want to do? What were you confused about? Because I do think that's part of it is like, there can be too many cooks in the kitchen.
00:22:43
Speaker
But i think with messaging it's equally as dangerous to have one person doing the whole thing because then you're not really. Expanding into like what everybody else might feel about this you spend too much time thinking about it as a marketer and so i think that's the big thing is like go run some tasks go figure out what you think is working what you can like on paper see is working.
00:23:05
Speaker
And then come back and iterate on it, refine it. And I think that's the big thing is like, get comfortable with the fact that this is a framework. You don't have to use this three sentence vision for every single thing. Like it's like, I feel like a broken record here, but like, that's my remix idea is that like, you just, you have to have the feeling like you have to have that concept for all of your messaging. But when you think about like the way folks are using LinkedIn today.
00:23:31
Speaker
We have like a vision for what we're supposed to talk about, but on our team, we have a lot of different personalities, even just on a marketing team. So the way I talk about content that's come out is completely different than how some of the other team members talk about it. That's a good thing. We shouldn't all sound the same. And so I think that's again, like go back to that messaging.
00:23:50
Speaker
And if you're looking at your doc and you're like, I think this is pretty good, start running with it. Like, I think that's the biggest thing is like, don't get so caught up in making it perfect. Get a good enough version and start testing some things. And once you know, like, yeah, this is working pretty well. Put that framework where everyone can see it. So if they need to go back and reference it, they can. And then start running your programs. Like messaging is supposed to be a framework to go build all the other cool creative stuff that we know is going to help us attract our audience.
00:24:17
Speaker
Fantastic. Caitlin,
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:24:19
Speaker
thank you so much for joining me on the Attention podcast today. Where can people go to learn more from you and from Formation online?
00:24:25
Speaker
Yeah, so from Formation, go to formation.ai. You'll get all sorts of information. The guide that I talked about is right there front and center. Please take a look at it. If only to soak my own ego, I really appreciate that. And then for myself, please do connect with me on LinkedIn. I love chatting about messaging, writing, all sorts of other like really kind of geeky, but things I love marketing type stuff in the messaging world. So LinkedIn, Caitlin Cassidy, hit me up there.
00:24:54
Speaker
Fantastic. Again, thanks for joining me today. Yeah, thanks so much, Dan.