Exercise 3: Strategic messaging

We’ve gone from inputs (the specifics from chapter 8) to alignment on a strategic narrative in the previous chapter (chapter 9), and now we’ll look at customer-facing outputs in the form of strategic messaging that will help build your super position.

This final exercises is more of a copywriting activity where you turn your bigger narrative into some very specific web and brand copy. If your narrative was more about story 1 — what’s new and why they should check you out, your strategic messaging on your homepage is more about story 2 — why you’re useful and why they should choose you.

In the previous two positioning exercises, if you were working with your team, there would inevitably be a strong focus on collaboration and consensus — collaboration to tease out your strategic specifics as each function saw them, and consensus around how that came together as a strategic narrative.

This chapter, however, is more about how you creatively and concisely capture what has been discussed so far. While you inevitably need to get agreement on the homepage direction you choose, don’t make this a design-by-committee exercise.

This is where you need to give your creative folks (especially your copywriter) the freedom to execute in a coherent way that — yet again — nails your specifics.

That’s not to say that this is the “creative” work that happens after the “strategic” stuff is done. Far from it — strategy is about choices, and this is where you actually have to make those choices. You have to spell out the choices you’ve made for all the world to see on the homepage of your website. If you hedge, hesitate, or water your positioning down, have you really made the hard choices?

(This is why nailing your narrative first is so important, by the way. You can test the narrative with prospects, understand what works and what doesn’t in real time, and then write your homepage with confidence.)

It’s also important to resist the temptation to make your big story 1 vision front and center. Again, that’s what your strategic narrative is for. Instead, this is where the folks closest to customers need to put things in the language of your customers. No exceptions.

With all that in mind, to get you started, here’s a simple customer-facing positioning and messaging exercise to get you (and your team) thinking.

Five-minute messaging

Let’s look at your website for a quick example of how you can apply your positioning and the specifics you’ve landed on.

Open up your homepage and look at your hero. Now think about:

• What’s your category?
• What’s your ideal customer?
• What value is most important to them?
• What do they replace when they choose you?

Are those things obvious in the first scroll or two of your website? Would a prospect recognize themselves in what they see?

Now, to be clear, this is copywriting 101 — it’s not really market-unlocking positioning, much less super positioning.

But this is a positioning crash course after all, and it’s a handy exercise to see how you can connect some of these big questions we’ve been talking about with the words prospects see on a page.

Big ideas; tiny bandwidth

At the end of the day, for your customers, that’s what this work amounts to:

• 10 slides: Hearing your big idea through the equivalent of 10 slides from your strategic narrative.
• 10 scrolls: Or scrolling through 10 sections (max!) on a web page.

(Or, more likely, just hearing a simple hook from their colleagues or from your marketing!)

That’s a very limited amount of bandwidth, which is why it’s so important to nail your story 2 specifics in your messaging, especially on your website. And if you can, even in the most basic terms, simply teasing out some of those specifics can help you come up with a homepage hero that packs a punch.

Your turn

• Does your current homepage hero section answer those questions above?
• If you strip away the design and imagery, what does your homepage actually say? How specific is it?
• If you do the same for your peer competitors, what specifics are they hitting? What does that say about their deeper positioning strategy?

Cluely vs. Granola

How do other startups use specifics in their homepage heroes?

Let’s look at two similar buzzy AI note-taking startups, Cluely and Granola.

The stunt-marketing geniuses at Cluely (no shade, that’s how Salesforce started) have, as of writing, this as their homepage hero:

• Headline: Invisible AI That Thinks for You
• Subhead: Cluely is an undetectable desktop app that gives you the answers you didn’t study for in every meeting and conversation.

Meanwhile, Granola, a popular app in the same space, has:

• Headline: The AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings
• Subhead: Granola takes your raw meeting notes and makes them awesome

Which one do you think is stronger? Cluely is leaning heavily on their story 1 big idea (“AI That Thinks for You” and ‘cheating’ by not studying), while Granola is more focused on their story 2, X-for-Y positioning specifics (“AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings”).

Remember, your story 1 drives people to your website, and your story 2 helps them choose you. Here, Granola’s approach is more specific, and therefore gets closer to my needs if I’m their ICP.

Again, closeness wins, and I can more easily position Granola in my mind because I know what it is (“AI notepad”), who it’s for (“people in back-to-back meetings”), and what it does (“takes your raw meeting notes and makes them awesome”).

That’s the power of specifics.

Cluely, on the other hand, isn’t as clear about who it’s for (meetings… but also conversations?) or what its value is (do I really want an AI that thinks for me? Is that a meaningful hook?). It also has a vague offer about “answers [I] didn’t study for” — but who is studying for answers in a meeting?

(I know, I know, it fits with their cheeky “cheat on everything” shtick — stay with me!)

For me, based on this little homepage hero test, it’s hard to understand what position Cluely are trying to build in the mind, simply because it’s much less specific. It doesn’t feel as close as Granola.

Reaching the mind

But here’s the twist: Cluely are going for reach, not niche. They’re trying to get close to more people, even if it’s not as close as Granola.

This is the classic niche vs. reach tradeoff, and this is where what matters isn’t the individual webpage — it’s the GTM system you’re designing.

In this sense, Cluely gets points for being very specific about their brand-building system and the very considerable reach it generates. That is, they’re being specific with their strategy, even at the cost of the specificity of their messaging.

They (in)famously use controversy (“cheat on everything!”) and stunts, including a Times Square billboard that reads:

hi i’m roy im 21 this was very expensive pls buy my thing cluely.com

…in stunningly vanilla centered-black-text-on-a-white-background.

No marketer who wanted to still be employed tomorrow would get away with proposing that, which is why it stands out (and why it’s the founder that can pull it off).

And marketers looking in from the outside still approach it with a direct-response mentality of ‘does it convert?’ but that’s the wrong question.

The right question is: have they built a coherent system?

Cluely, for their part, have a specific goal for their system in mind: to drive short-form videos about their product and company. It’s no secret — Roy, the aforementioned founder, spells it out on X all the time. It’s those second-order effects that then drive interest in the brand. The company’s antics become the story. That puts them back on people’s radar in a story 1 sense. ‘We’re the cheeky startup that wants to help you cheat on everything!’

This tends to drive traditional B2B marketers up the wall because, again, they’re so used to the middle ↓ positioning prong (‘It doesn’t say what it is!’ ‘Who even is this for?’ ‘It must convert terribly!’). But those objections completely miss the point.

In fact, thinking only in those terms is probably a severe restriction on your ability to build a super position.

Positioning is more than messaging specifics or first-order, direct-response specifics. That’s all the product of narrow attention. You have to consider the whole you’re building, too, as we discussed last chapter when looking at the R/L/R jump.

That final “R” means brand — that integrated whole where you are the best choice for Y. To build that position in the mind of the buyer, you need to reach those minds, and Cluely are very good at that part at least.

Let me be super clear that I have no idea if Cluely’s approach will work — people have to actually use and like the product, too. But they’re very specific about the system they’re using, and the attention that generates is undeniable.

(Well, they were very specific about the system they’re using. About 5 minutes after publishing this book, Cluely pivoted their messaging to vanilla — and I mean vanilla — B2B. Their website hero headline became “#1 AI assistant for meetings” with the subhead “Takes perfect notes, answers questions in real-time, and makes you the most prepared person on every call.” I’m sure they’ll have iterated many more times by the time you’re reading this, and perhaps by then they’ll have their story 1 and story 2 approaches working together!)

Super positioning through superior distribution

Let’s stick with distribution for a moment, because it shapes what you say across your customer-facing assets.

Building a super position often involves unlocking distribution in a new or novel way, and Cluely’s ability to unlock short-form videos is one variation on a theme that has been a part of B2B go-to-market (GTM) for a long time.

For example, HubSpot used agency partnerships, Loom used the viral growth loops that came with video sharing, and Squarespace tapped into an emergent mass channel (podcast ads) to just kind of be everywhere, all the time.

We’re not going to focus on the distribution side of GTM in this book — we’re more interested in the fundamentals of your narrative and messaging. Getting those right, however, helps you know who to sell to and how you might reach them.

That is, specific positioning unlocks — and needs to be matched by — specific GTM motions. Tight positioning unlocks tight, sales-based distribution. If you’re an early-stage startup with limited resources, knowing who to focus your limited sales resources on is essential. And broad, brand-driven positioning like Cluely requires broad, social-media-driven GTM. (If that’s what you’re good at — and they are — then you almost have to go broad.)

So when you think through the three big prongs of super positioning (→ ↓ ⟲), also think about how it ties into your GTM motion and distribution, too, and be careful before you dismiss a startup or competitor for being too broad — they might be playing the story 1 game.

Validation before distribution

Let’s get back to the exercise and your customer-facing messaging, especially your homepage.

You’ve got a narrative — that’s awesome. Now, how do we turn that into something that builds a position in the mind of the buyer?

First of all, make sure you test it on prospects before steaming ahead with a full-blown rollout. You won’t know if it truly works until you’ve put it in front of folks and watched their eyes light up (thanks, Wes Kao) and pulled their wallet out, metaphorically if not literally.

Remember, it’s behavior change that matters at the end of the day, not just a mildly interested response or polite agreement with what you’re saying. We want people excited and ready to do things differently with our product and playbook because we truly are insanely different.

Once you’re confident you’re on the right track, it’s time to expand your experiment to your major marketing touchpoints, the most visible (and contentious!) of which is usually your homepage.

The job of your homepage

We’ve talked about hooks and narratives, but let’s reset for a moment here and think about just how blunt you have to be to capture someone who’s giving you, at best, 30 seconds of their attention as they scroll your homepage (and not 30 minutes of a pre-qualified demo call).

Let’s set the scene with this tweet from Bryan Casey, VP of Inbound at IBM:

Across dozens, maybe hundreds of distinct pieces of user research, the most consistent piece of feedback is to literally just say what the dang product is and does. Forget positioning. Benefits. Use cases. Client pain points. At least up front. Job 1: what the hell is it?

“What the hell is it?” indeed, a question far too many SaaS & AI homepages have failed to answer in the past.

I also like to remind folks that your homepage doesn’t have to do everything, either. Product and industry-specific solution pages exist, too. Sometimes, I’ll tackle a set of pages where the thrust is:

1. Homepage: What is the value you offer.
2. Product: How your product delivers that value.
3. Solution: Why that value matters for a specific industry, role, or use case.

How do you currently structure your site and messaging?

Your turn

• Briefly review or audit your web messaging. How “story 2” is it? How clear are your product descriptions? How specific is the value you describe?
• Does your current messaging follow on from the ideas you fleshed out in your narrative, or does it need a significant revamp?
• What sort of messaging do customers see across your ads and other forms of outreach that might drive them to the website? Is there a consistent thread through your organic social, paid ads, homepage, and narrative?
• What content do people who actually become customers consume on your website? (This is an attribution question, and attribution is notoriously difficult, but at least having a sense of what buyers — not random visitors, actual buyers — actually read/scroll can give you a sense of what sections and pages are actually seen!)

Outcomes-first messaging

Here’s a quick guide to applying your narrative to your homepage.

Homepages have to be brutally concise — 10 scrolls ain’t much. And the second most important question they need to answer (after “What is it?”) is “What’s in it for me?”

That means leading with value and outcomes supported by the nuts and bolts of how it works.

Again, like your narrative, how good that messaging is depends on the ingredients you have. Hopefully, after the narrative exercise, you’ve got a lot of solid messaging ingredients to work with. Now it’s time to marry those with customer outcomes — quotes, numbers, and, of course, logos. That’s your proof, and the more tangible, specific, and quantifiable it is, the better.

When it comes to these pages, specifics really do sell, and the best way to ensure you’re hitting those specifics is with a checklist.

So here’s our first checklist, one for your homepage:

Homepage messaging checklist

• Does your homepage tell readers specifically what your product is and does? (Seriously! So many SaaS sites fall at this very first hurdle. And no, “Save time and make more money” doesn’t count.)
• Does your homepage tell prospects why they should choose you over the competitive alternative for their job to be done? (That may be the status quo like spreadsheets, or it might be a specific incumbent or peer competitor.)
• Does your homepage match your GTM motion? (High-awareness PLG products may push users into the product ASAP, sales-led folks often need to do more explaining upfront.)
• Does your hero section capture the BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) value proposition of your first narrative slide, perhaps in 3 short bullets?
• Does your homepage show or visually represent the product in some way? (That’s what you’re selling after all — don’t get so caught up in benefits or abstract imagery that you neglect the product itself.)
• Does your homepage capture a single, key, compelling reason to buy? (What’s the hook? Have you validated that with customers?)
• Do you connect that value prop with how the product works, perhaps as a three-step ‘how it works’ or some sort of flow from start to outcome?
• Can you drive the point home with from/to, before/after, or with/without language to contrast the status quo or incumbent with your new way?
• Do your testimonials and social proof reinforce the core message you’re trying to communicate in a crisp, concise way?
• Do you land on a big call-to-action (CTA) ‘closer’ that tries to get folks to take a clear next step (usually a demo)?
• Do you have a secondary CTA for folks who aren’t ready to commit to a demo at this stage? (Think: short explainer video, mini demo video, etc.)

There’s a lot of goofy The Ultimate Absolutely Guaranteed High Converting SaaS Homepage Template™ fluff out there, which is premised on the fact that if you somehow take a (very biased) average of what the SaaS industry does with their homepages and make it even more generic, somehow that will be high converting.

There’s something to be said for templates to ensure you’re covering the bare basics, but beyond that, what “converts” is meeting your prospects where they’re at with your specifics that are relevant to them.

“Can we test that?”

If you’re proposing customer-facing changes, someone will inevitably suggest we “test” the changes.

Founders and marketers alike can have very different definitions of what that means. Sometimes people will talk about “testing” in a completely vibes-based way. They mean “Let’s roll it out and see what happens” in a very informal way over the months ahead. And that’s fine — that’s often as good as you can do in startups. There’s almost never enough traffic to meaningfully A/B test variations, especially in low-volume/high-value situations. (And even if you can A/B test, you probably shouldn’t unless you can measure the cost and outcomes of the testing program itself.)

Nevertheless, a select few people have visibility into a broad range of A/B test outcomes, and one of those people is Casey Hill from DoWhatWorks. On LinkedIn, Hill writes (lightly reformatted):

Why do your website copy tests rarely move the needle? It’s an important question. Studies from teams like Optimizely (as well as our internal data) show that a large portion of copy tests have minimal impact. So what are the 10% that are effective doing differently?

Let me interject here — Hill’s observation gets to the heart of what we’re trying to do with your messaging here, and it’s make an impact.

Some folks like to say your positioning is what you put on your homepage, and while there’s some truth to that if the strategic specifics underlying your business have changed.

If they haven’t, tweaking copy alone is not “positioning,” and is unlikely to have much impact at all. Unless, as Hill writes:

A lot of it comes down to whether your changes check one of these two boxes:

✔️ Provide new information

✔️ Provide clarity

Good headers and subheaders, for example, clearly articulate what the product does.

Good: “Shop securely and choose to pay in 4 interest-free payments, in full, in 30 days, or over time.”

Poor: “Stop chasing transactions. [brand] turns customers into diehard fans—obsessed with your products, devoted to your brand, fueling your growth.”

Good: “Easy-to-use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more. All in one place.”

Poor: “An all-in-one finance solution to cover everything from HR to accounting.”

The poor versions leave you with more questions than answers, while the good versions clearly state specific capabilities.

Those examples are very helpful — the “what’s in it for me” in the good examples are both strong and clear.

But I quote Hill here because this comes back to the core theme of this book: super positioning is about putting something new on folks’ radar and/or giving them a clear reason to choose you by being specific about what you do and how you’re different.

That’s the two modes of attention again, and I think it’s kind of amazing that this principle scales from the very micro — headline tests on a webpage — all the way up through how positioning is done (go big/go narrow) and the fundamental ideas that drive your startup.

Your turn

• Go back over Hill’s examples and note the difference between the good and bad examples.
• How does your current messaging compare? Would you be a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ example?
• How can you move from vague language to more specific value props?

Anatomy of a professionally written B2B homepage

With that in mind, let me give you a sense of how I approach homepages as a copywriter-turned-positioning consultant.

Here’s an amalgamated summary of three recent projects, to give you a taste of what works in the real world. This is the hands-on part of this chapter — see if you can take your specifics and narrative and flesh out your homepage following this structure (or be lazy and ask Claude to do it):

Hero

• An eyebrow (i.e., a tiny heading label) for the category or some context setting.
• Headline — the core hook we’ve landed on.
• Subhead — a brief product introduction that hits either three key value props or your chosen vertical(s).
• Bullets — the top three value props for your offer (if you didn’t mention them in the subhead).

Pains block (optional)

• 3x bullet blocks (an icon, small header, and two lines of copy) about the major pains your prospects face.

How it works block

• A 1-2-3 step set of bullet blocks that describes the core product flow.

Product exploration

• A set of pillar features, or
• A set of use cases, or
• A set of broader product areas as tabs or gateway blocks to specific feature pages, depending on the complexity of your platform.
• Either here (or below) there might be gateway blocks to explore industry-specific solution pages, too.

Social proof

• A hero testimonial that echoes your value prop, lightly edited for clarity and conciseness, with the relevant phrases bolded for emphasis.
• Supporting metrics or outcomes.

Outcomes

• What it means for the users, team, and/or their customers.
• Further social proof that people have had with your product or playbook.

Integrations/where it fits

• How the product works with what you’ve got or replaces other tools.

‘Whole product’ support

• It’s not just about the literal software, it’s about the services, ecosystem, partners, and other aspects of your business that come together to help your customer succeed.

Closer

• A final call to action that calls back to the hero value proposition but encourages readers to click the big “Book a demo” or “Get started” button.

That’s it! That’s your 10-or-so scrolls worth of information that hopefully helps as many people as possible take the next action (sign up, book a demo, download the app).

PLG vs. enterprise & story 2 vs. story 1

Remember, as we discussed earlier, you’ll probably lean less on story 1 narrative and more on story 2 product specifics here.

Products where the user is the buyer are generally going to lean very heavily on the product experience itself — maybe so much so that you’re encouraged to dive right in, and the product onboarding does more of the messaging heavy lifting.

More enterprise-style offers, on the other hand, are going to have story 2 specifics incorporating references (i.e., social proof and case studies), the whole product of support, resources, and the broader ecosystem, and the big picture outcomes executives and end-users are looking for. That is, the pitch is built on reassurance as much (or more than) it’s built on innovation.

Or, to borrow a quote from former Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky:

Enterprise software is insurance. Productivity software is personal productivity.

Pitch accordingly.

Feed the machine — prompt you, prompt me

Can your LLM of choice do this? In form, sure, if you can prompt it appropriately.

I’ve found chatbots actually pretty handy at creating and running through frameworks and checklists, so feel free to copy & paste the checklists and tips here into Claude (or whichever current bot has non-awful prose) and see what it spits out.

I call this the “prompt you, prompt me” approach. You prompt the AI with a framework, it creates something generic but okay-ish, that prompts you to redo it so it’s actually good, and you’re done.

I like working with LLMs in this way because they’re good at handling the known stuff, while your whole job is to handle the unknown stuff — the novel, out-of-distribution insight that drives your company, product, and positioning. LLMs are just lossy encyclopedias, after all. They’re a fantastically useful normal technology, but they don’t know what’s unique about your customers or what’s unique about you.

That is, again, your job. They ain’t automating that. You, in that sense, are the LLM that matters, just a gooey biological one, and your brain contains the model that matters — the one that can see things that are well outside the distribution of training data the LLM was built on.

Even still, it can be hard to go from that model in your mind to concise web copy. You need prompting. And what better to prompt your specifics than the generic-in-substance-but-accurate-in-style responses you get from an actual LLM!

The value is in the vision

All of that is to say that being able to write concisely in marketing speak isn’t really the bottleneck here. It’s a skill, don’t get me wrong — I spent years mastering it for a reason. But ultimately, what matters is conveying those core positioning concepts you developed in your narrative, your hook, and your vision more broadly. That’s where the value is, and if AI helps you get there, great.

Just don’t confuse form and function — AI can’t do your thinking or ‘seeing’ for you, so calibrate your expectations accordingly.

Branding & your messaging

Let’s wrap up this run of positioning exercises with one last idea:

Message. %$^&ing. Discipline.

If positioning is about building a position in the mind of the buyer, then you must maintain absolute clarity and consistency in your messaging.

It’s very easy for messaging to go off-script in the name of “testing” or having sales or marketing folks just making it up as they go, because they don’t appreciate the fundamental position the company is trying to build.

By all means, test your pitch with prospects and test your ads within your various channels, but when you’ve settled on a message, put some guardrails around it and lock in.

And if the team pushes back, find out why. Maybe they don’t fully believe in the message you’re trying to push? If so, don’t ignore them. Your messaging has to pass people’s BS filters, and if folks internally don’t buy it, why would prospects?

Your brand messaging doc

Ensuring messaging consistency isn’t exactly the sexiest side of being a marketing leader or founder or CEO, but what’s the point of all this vision and positioning work if prospects fail to hear a consistent message?

Therefore, at the end of a series of exercises like this, I like to create a simple brand messaging doc where I essentially cut & paste the messages we’ve landed on with some crucial context that describes why we’re going with these particular messages.

This document should be both a reference and cheatsheet for how you talk about your:

• Category
• Product (as a headline).
• Product (as a sentence or two).
• How it works (one sentence).
• Your value proposition (perhaps 3x bullets).
• Your key messaging themes (these might be specific outcomes, where you fit in your buyer’s world of tech stack, or your specific playbook).
• Industry-specific language (if you sell into multiple verticals).
• Old ways/new ways of articulating your value (especially if you’re making a big shift in positioning).

Trying to do this from scratch at the start of a project can be tough, but with your narrative fleshed out and agreed upon, and perhaps your homepage copy and wireframe signed off, this should be a pretty straightforward, downhill ride.

I like to keep this pretty simple, but the complexity of your messaging docs will obviously depend on whether you’re working with a 10-person startup or a 1000-person enterprise.

Some folks like building elaborate ‘messaging houses’, but I like to remember the only messaging that matters is what buyers see.

Therefore, I always try to derive it from live assets as much as possible. Messaging houses and docs should only be considered snapshots of where you landed in a point in time. Hoping a document will manage a team to be consistent is (unfortunately) a pipe dream.

That’s still your job, and I hope this chapter has given you some inspiration to nail your messaging and start building that (super) position in the mind of your buyers and market!

Next steps

That wraps up our hands-on super positioning crash course. We’ve covered a lot of ground, including:

• Your strategic specifics as positioning inputs.
• Your strategic narrative as positioning alignment
• Your strategic messaging and homepage as positioning output.

High five if you completed any or all three steps. I’d absolutely love to see where you landed — let me know: luke@superpositioning.co.

If you’re enjoying the hands-on approach and want to keep thinking through the strategic specifics that drive your positioning, there are plenty of ideas and examples to come, so keep reading.

Next, we’ll kick off our strategy section with a look at the super positioning strategy for being super relevant — riding a wave.