Let’s say buyers are making a decision to purchase lab equipment.Do they want ease of use, current functionality, or future capabilities?Are they trying to position their company for efficiency or growth?The more closely the product marketer can align with the customer’s goals, the easier it will be to facilitate a buying decision in your favor.Demonstrate how your product can contribute to their profitability, efficiency, or competitive advantage.What words do customers use to convince themselves to make the decision to buy your product?Here is an example of almost verbatim promotional material from one of my clients, modified slightly to camouflage the company and industry.Do customers really talk that way?Think about talking with customers and revise the statement in the prior paragraph.What analytical capabilities are important to the target customers and how does that relate to their goals?What is the importance of channel integration or subject matter expertise?If you can’t answer these questions, customers will be thinking, So what?Who cares? That makes it really hard to help them make the decision to buy your particular brand.Different market segments have different expectations regarding online purchasing, immediate availability, access to complementary products from other manufacturers, or related services such as installation and repair.Simply focusing on the benefits of specific product features ignores these factors.Build a case internally to be present where and how customers want to buy.Product marketers will always need to balance science and art.A fresh perspective on how customers buy may yield new insights into improved marketing.Envision a conversation where you help customers make buying decisions by focusing on their goals, the preferred process for purchasing, and the mental framework of words they use to argue in favor of the decision.That is needed, but what’s often absent are the styles, categories, and types of messaging required for market success.Establish messaging as a separate deliverable.Messaging is a summary answer to the buyer’s primary and secondary buying questions, a.k.a.Content, in turn, is the actual words you use, both written and oral, along with support visuals, to persuade a person to do business with your firm.Content can be delivered in the form of documents, audio, and video.Determine the right styles, categories, and types of messaging needed for market success.The two primary messaging styles are descriptive and persuasive.As an example, descriptive product messaging is the typical what and how content in a product brochure.What does the product do?What are the key benefits?What features are included/optional?Persuasive product messaging is the why content.It provides relevant, differentiated, provable, and understandable answers to the buyer’s primary buying questions, a.k.a.Create and deploy your messaging.Yes, it’s more work and you already have too much to do.We increased our pipeline by over 20 percent and our win rate by over 10 percent, We were able to take 15 percent market share from our biggest competitor, I now have a lot more credibility with the sales teams and spend less time supporting them, Almost overnight we were able to communicate significant competitive advantage.Customer validation also applies to product marketing.Experience is a harsh teacher.She has visited me many times in my career.This experience is how I learned that customer validation also applies to product marketing.In particular, it is equally important to test and confirm marketing materials and messages as it is to test product concepts and designs.Prior to development, we conducted a number of interviews with teachers.Elementary school teachers lacked confidence in teaching science.The teachers were education experts, often possessing master’s degrees.They were also subject matter generalists who were able to teach a single class about math, reading, writing, social studies, and history.Elementary school teachers were universally pressed for time in their day, often finishing work up at home in the evenings.They were spread across many responsibilities with twenty to thirty students each.My company used this research to create a powerful curriculum planning application to complement its science lessons.The teacher loaded the program on their computer and would check the national science standards that he or she wanted to cover in class.The application then assembled an entire lesson plan to match.The company announced the new application with great pride at a small, education conference and trade show.The marketing materials prominently advertised that this science program, Saved teachers time. It flopped!Reception to the announcement and the product was lukewarm.Something was wrong.Yet all the research said that, Not having enough time in the day, was a major pain point for educators.Not able to reconcile this point, I embarked on another round of interviews, this time to review the company’s marketing.I gained great insight into our messaging with just a handful of discussions with elementary school educators.First, the message has to match where the customer is in the buying cycle.Will I be able to implement this curriculum successfully in the classroom?Second, I learned that teachers found the marketing materials offensive.Therefore, not only was the company’s marketing focused on the wrong message in the buying cycle, it also offended the very audience we were looking to persuade.As a result, we changed the main message to engaging students in science which went to the heart of the primary buying motivation.We then focused the secondary message on ease of implementation, which conveyed a similar idea as timesaving without offending.The national level education tradeshow that followed the messaging change was a great success.Fortunately for the company, the messaging error was picked up and corrected early.Nevertheless, I learned some valuable lessons, the most important being to test your marketing message with real customers.With the Internet, testing messaging is now easier than when I learned this lesson.Nevertheless, even with this convenience, I still have to speak to customers to understand why one message works better than another does.Before I launch a product now, I always first test my message.The best product marketers strive to live, breathe, and think like their customers.Business buyers don’t buy your product.Product marketing is less about what you sell and more about who purchases it.Understanding your customer is what matters most, mainly what they care about and how they purchase and consume products.Only at that point should you strategize how to position, package, price, and sell to your customers.Great product marketers map their marketing strategy and sales initiatives around their customers’ buying journey.Most importantly, they strive to live, breathe, and think like their customers.Create a memorable story.The best product marketers create an emotional connection with their audience by casting their customer as the story’s main character and speaking in their customer’s voice.They search diligently for the perfect tone of authenticity that resonates best with their customers and focus their message on solutions, benefits, and value without superlatives and buzz words.Think Apple’s iPod 1,000 songs in your pocket or Southwest Airlines You are now free to move about the country.