Why Your Marketing Messaging Isn’t Landing—and How to Fix It
Find out why your marketing messaging isn’t landing and get actionable tips to connect with your audience, boost engagement, and sharpen your brand...
Hey there! 👋
Messaging is how you explain what your company, product, or service does in a way that makes people care. It’s the words you use to connect with customers on your website, in an email, or during a sales call.
When your messaging is clear and compelling, everything else in marketing gets easier. More people understand what you offer, why it matters, and why they should choose you.
Subscribe to the monthly newsletter for marketing and research strategies and insights ➡️
But for small marketing teams, messaging often gets pushed aside. You’re juggling too many things, and refining your message feels like a big, complicated task. The good news? You don’t need months of work or a branding agency to get it right. You just need a practical, repeatable way to clarify your message and actually use it.
That starts with understanding the foundation: positioning vs. messaging.
Positioning vs. Messaging: What’s the Difference?
These two often get mixed up, but they serve different roles.
- Positioning is the foundation. It defines how your company, product, or service fits into the market—who it’s for, what makes it different, and why it matters.
- Messaging is how you communicate that positioning to your audience. It’s the language you use to make your offering clear, compelling, and relevant.
A Quick Example
Imagine "FitFuel," a healthy meal delivery service. Here’s how their positioning and messaging might work:
- Positioning: FitFuel is the go-to choice for health-conscious professionals seeking premium, customisable meal delivery made from organic, locally-sourced ingredients.
- Website messaging: Discover the perfect balance of health and convenience with FitFuel. Our chef-crafted meals feature organic, locally-sourced ingredients, customised to fit your dietary needs and fitness goals.
The positioning defines FitFuel’s place in the market, while the messaging brings that positioning to life in a way that speaks directly to customers. Without a clear positioning strategy, the messaging would feel scattered. Without strong messaging, even great positioning wouldn’t connect with customers.
Now, let’s get into how to actually develop messaging that works—without overcomplicating it.
1. Build Your Messaging on What Customers Actually Say
The biggest mistake in messaging? Guessing. The best way to know what will land is to listen to how your customers talk about their challenges and the value they get from your product or service.
Start Inside: Align Your Team First
Before you start tweaking your messaging, get your team on the same page. A positioning and messaging workshop can help surface the best ideas and prevent mixed messages down the line.
Try these exercises:
- List all potential benefits and differentiators—what really sets you apart?
- Draft positioning statements and refine them from the customer’s perspective.
- Role-play customer scenarios to test different messaging approaches.
- Review competitor messaging to find gaps and opportunities to stand out.
This internal alignment is critical, but it’s only half the equation. The real test is what your customers actually think.
Listen to Your Customers (Not Just Your Team)
Messaging that sounds great in a meeting can still miss the mark with customers. The best way to fix that is to go straight to the source.
- Talk to existing customers to understand their pain points and the words they use to describe your solution.
- Survey prospects to learn what they already know about your industry and what would make them buy.
- Dig into support tickets, reviews, and social media to spot common questions, objections, and the phrases people naturally use.
Use Data to Back It Up
Beyond customer conversations, use real-world data to validate your messaging:
- Check your best-performing social media and blog content to see what’s resonating.
- Analyse website behaviour. If people are bouncing, your message might not be clear.
- Track email and ad performance to find the headlines or phrases driving engagement.
Bringing all these inputs together—internal alignment, direct customer feedback, and real data—gives you a messaging foundation based on reality, not assumptions.
Quick win: Find three direct quotes from customers that describe what they value most about your offering. Use them in your next email, landing page, or ad copy.
2. Make Your Message Clear (And Make It Stick)
It’s easy to assume people will get what you do—but if your message isn’t clear, they won’t take action.
Use the ‘So What?’ Test
A quick way to stress-test your messaging:
- Read your homepage, email, or ad copy out loud. After every sentence, ask So what? Why should anyone care? If the answer isn’t obvious, rewrite it.
- Focus on outcomes, not just features. Instead of saying “We offer AI-powered automation,” say “We help small teams do in minutes what used to take hours.”
- Cut vague phrases. If a sentence could apply to any competitor in your space, rewrite it to be more specific.
Quick win: Rewrite one key piece of messaging—like your homepage headline—to be clearer and more outcome-focused.
3. Keep It Consistent Everywhere
One of the biggest messaging mistakes? Saying different things in different places. If your social posts, emails, and website all describe your business differently, potential customers will be confused—and when people are confused, they don’t buy.
Define Your Brand Voice and Tone
Before you can ensure consistency, you need to document how your brand should sound. This doesn’t need to be a long brand book—just a simple guide that answers:
- How should our brand sound—friendly, authoritative, conversational?
- What are our core brand values and attributes to reinforce?
- What terminology and style guidelines should we follow?
Messaging should be flexible enough to adapt to different channels (a blog post won’t sound exactly like an ad) but consistent enough that everything still feels like it comes from the same brand.
Say It the Same Way Everywhere
Repetition isn’t boring—it’s what makes messaging stick. If you want people to remember what you do and why it matters, you have to reinforce the same core ideas in different ways.
- Make sure your website, ads, and emails all use the same core phrases.
- Train your sales and customer support teams to describe your business the same way.
- Keep a shared messaging document so everyone in your company stays aligned.
Quick win: Find one piece of messaging that’s inconsistent across your website, social media, emails, or ads, and fix it.
Messaging Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated
You don’t need a massive rebrand to improve your messaging. Small, targeted changes, like using real customer language, making your message clearer, and keeping it consistent, can make a big difference.
If you’re short on time, start with just one change. Tighten your homepage headline. Swap out a vague phrase for something specific. Align one key message across channels.