Positioning, Messaging and Web Copy

Is your problem your positioning, your messaging or your web copy?

Actually, first of all, happy near year everyone! I hope everyone had a break of some sort and is having a great start to the new year.

I want to dive in my talking about a common misconception regarding the relationship between web copy, messaging and positioning that I’ve seen crop up recently.

Positioning is the foundation, messaging is the walls and web copy is the part of the roof over your living room.

Positioning is fundamental not just to your marketing communication and not just to your website. It has ramifications for product development, for your pricing strategy, for your sales outreach strategy, for which investors to seek out, for what to tell potential new hires that you’re doing and… yes, for your messaging and marketing communications.

Messaging is the foundation for all of your marketing and sales communications. It’s the story that you should be telling everywhere, not just on your website. The CEO is guesting on a podcast? What he or she says should be in alignment with your messaging. The new intern is telling classmates about your company? That should also be in aligmnent with messagine. Oh, and yes, web copy should reflect your messaging, too.

Web copy is how you communicate your positioning and your messaging publicly, at scale. It’s often the first impression anyone gets of your company. But if the roof over your living room is leaking, is it because you foundation has cracked and shifted? Because one of the walls buckled? Or because there’s a problem with the roof?

If it’s a foundation problem or a wall problem, you’ll see signs. If your problems are related to positioning, you will feel pain that isn’t related to your web copy.

Just like putting a new roof on a house that’s falling down doesn’t make sense, writing new web copy isn’t going to help if your problems are more fundamental.