Advanced Messaging Strategy: Making Your Product a Must Have
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Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing Podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner.

I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want more exposure, more leads, and more sales. I've got a really exciting episode for you today. If you...

wished, people would just line up and want to throw money at you because you are basically helping them solve a major problem that they have. But for whatever reason, you've been unable to get it. Maybe something's just not connecting with your audience. Well, this is where messaging strategy is the key. And what we're going to talk about today are some really fascinating concepts that

I think conceptually will resonate with you at a core level, but there's a good chance you're probably not doing this right. And my guest today, Caitlin Burgoyne, is going to actually reveal behavioral science techniques and messaging and positioning techniques that will allow you to take the way you talk about your product to the next level so that customers say this is a no-brainer decision. I think you're going to find today's episode absolutely fascinating.

By the way, if you're new to this podcast, be sure to follow this show on whatever platform you're listening on. Let's now transition over to this week's interview with Caitlin Burgoyne. Helping you to simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide.

Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Caitlin Burgoyne. If you don't know who she is, she is a buyer psychologist who helps online marketers sell more with science-backed principles. She's also the founder of Why We Buy, a company designed to help businesses grow by embracing behavioral science. Her main products include painkiller messaging systems and wallet opening words. Caitlin, welcome to the show. I'm really excited you're here today.

Michael and hello everyone out there in podcast land. I'm super stoked. Today we're going to be exploring messaging strategies to make your products more desirable. And before we go there, I want to hear a bit of your story. How in the world did you get into messaging and all the stuff that we're going to be talking about today? I love this question because my story is really kind of what led me to this place and getting excited about buyer psychology and ultimately how people tell their own stories in a way that actually makes people want to buy their stuff. So

Let's just say that I've been in the game for about 15 years, started my first agency back in 2010, then started a sister agency, sold that and decided, hey, like I want to get out of this like selling time for money game. I got excited about the whole build an online business world. And I was like, I'm going to build a tech company. How hard could that be? Well, it turns out that's actually really hard, Michael. Really, really hard.

So we built Bendy, we raised venture capital. We were kind of like, there was lots of hype around the company. Inc magazine was saying we were the next LinkedIn for women and inside everything was going badly. So for the outside looked great. We're getting thousands and thousands of new users and people are coming into the product, but they weren't sticking around. So we were good at marketing, good at acquiring customers, not so good at getting them to stay. And the

we learned that we hadn't built the right solution, right? Like we were really good at understanding what the buyers, who we were going after and crafting like the right message to attract them. But we didn't actually build the thing that they needed and they wanted. And so-

Like, you know, fast forward, company fails. I go personally bankrupt because I invested everything in this business and I'm trying to figure out what's next for me. Well, I was pretty lucky because my lead investor was a VC firm that had a bunch of other companies who had the kind of the opposite problem that we had.

in that they were amazing founders, had built world-changing technology. Their clients were NASA and Tesla. And they were really great at building products. They really struggled at figuring out how to get people to care about those products, how to get people to discover them and be interested. And so the VC came to me and they said, will you do some consulting? Will you work with our teams? And I said, yes, because I really, really need money. So I got back into marketing consulting.

And I would sit down at these boardroom tables and I'd talk to these visionary entrepreneurs and I'd ask them the question that we marketers need to know, which is, "Tell me about your customer."

And I was blown away how often they were not able to answer that question very effectively. You've seen this, right? Oh, yeah, for sure. So they would like either get into like these nitty gritty details of the persona, but then you'd see fights happening like between the different leaders on the team. But one person was like, yeah, but like our actual buyers look like this. Or one time a founder looked at me and he said,

Our ICP or in the kind of like startup world lingo or ideal customer profile is any business that sells online with between 10 and 500 employees in the B2B space. And I was like, what? That's not like that's not an ideal customer. That's like basically everyone. And so this led me to realize I was like, oh, wow, there's this massive gap between people who are building solutions and their understanding of their customer. And why is this happening?

And through that, I learned about this framework called Jobs to be Done, which I know we're going to talk about and we'll touch on it then. And it kind of led me to start thinking about understanding market behavior and market demand in this completely different way.

And that led me to saying, hey, I'm going to start an insights agency that helps teams figure this stuff out. And I started kind of like building the inroads for that. I was doing a bunch of consulting, speaking, putting on workshops for teams. And then I decided that I was like, okay, I need to build pipeline for this. Once I actually want to start working with a lot of companies on this specifically, kind of this productized service. And I was like, I'm going to run a newsletter. I'm like, okay.

So why do people actually care about getting customer insights? Why do they care about doing research? Well, nobody actually cares about doing customer research. What they do care about is knowing why their customers make decisions so that they can then figure out how to get their customers to buy from them. And so I was like, well, what other ways can I help people to figure out how customers make decisions? And I was like, nobody actually cares about research. It's a really hard thing to sell, which I had been learning

But what they do care about is understanding their buyers. And I was like, another way to understand buyers is buyer psychology. And so that led me to launch my newsletter. Now at this time, a global pandemic happens and I get pregnant.

And my husband breaks his neck. Oh, man. The world is completely wild and crazy. It was an insane time for everyone, particularly insane in my household. My husband had been working offshore. And so when the pandemic happened, all of his job prospects dried up. So it's just me and I'm eight months pregnant. And

And we end up at this time where I'm like, the world's going crazy. I'm lucky my business is still doing well. I'm still doing tons of training. I'm still doing consulting, all of which I'm doing virtually. But all of these people start reaching out to me about the newsletter because we'd quietly built this audience of like 10,000 entrepreneurs. And they started asking me, can we market in your newsletter? Can we run ads in your newsletter? And I was like,

nah, that seems like a waste of time to me. And then I was like, finally, a big, big brand that all of the listeners probably know reaches out and they're like, we really want to run ads in your newsletter. And I was like, well, I'll take a conversation. And then as I had the conversation, I was like, oh, this is a bigger opportunity than I realized. And so at that point, I was like, you know what? Screw the insights agency. I'm going to focus on building a media company.

And then fast forward, you know, five years, I've built Why We Buy to 63,000 readers, 280,000 across different social media channels, all around the core promise of like helping you to understand your customers so that you can market more effectively. Love that. Okay. So we're going to talk about product positioning and messaging strategy and all that kind of stuff today. Okay.

So for those that maybe we'll define what it is in just a second, but why? Let's start with the why. Why is messaging strategy so important? Said a different way. If people do what we're about to talk about well, what's the upside? Yeah, so it's incredibly important. And this is the thing. So in my newsletter, we teach people all of these kind of like

These little cognitive biases, and we give examples of how you can apply different things. So a lot of the marketers and listeners, they'll know about things like scarcity or social proof. They'll know about all of that. But guess what? These things don't work if your messaging doesn't.

work. So if your messaging is broken, like you can try all of the techniques touted by all of the marketing gurus out there and you're still not going to get success. So ultimately messaging is everything. So like, let us start off by defining messaging because this is confusing, particularly for people in our world, you know, marketers, because we, when we talk about messaging and copywriting and positioning, oftentimes it's like all tangled together, but really it comes down to the way I like to frame it is that the

If you think about a movie, right, a movie might be a horror movie. That's the position. That's the category that it's in. Right. And the plot, kind of the story of the movie, that's your positioning. And then the script is the actual words. That's what the actors are saying online. So the thing about messaging is like you can change the words you use, but your underlying message, it shouldn't change.

Your underlying message, it's about what you are and why people should care. And so you think about some of the brands we love, right? Great example of this, Amazon, right? What's the first word that comes to mind when you think about Amazon? It's like fast, right? Fast change.

cheap at my door. Like they've gone through that's based on their positioning and their strategy is we're going to talk about how fast and easy it is. And we're going to do everything we can to make it fast and easy. Another one that I love is Volvo, right? When you think about Volvo, there's lots of car categories, like lots of cars out there and they all compete on different things. Volvo competes on safety.

Right. They put out messages about how safe the car is and the words they use to describe it change, like the actors are using in their ads, all of that changes. But the underlying message is we're the safest car to put your family in. Right. And so I think that when people are struggling, when their marketing isn't hitting, they think it's as simple as changing the words on the page. But oftentimes they need to go so much deeper and they really need to figure out how do we position our company so we actually stand out and we're different.

And then once we figure that out, well, what's the key message we want people to know about us? And then you share that message hundreds of different ways through your copy. So, you know, when you get this stuff right, like you stop selling the wrong thing, you stop having launches that don't work out. You're writing copy.

it becomes 10 times easier because you know what you want to say. Getting people to buy your thing for them, it feels like it's a no-brainer because they know exactly the problem that it solves for them and you get a lot more clarity on what you want to buy next. So getting it right, massive impact.

I love that. And a lot of people listening are like, ooh, that's, I want that. As a matter of fact, I can't imagine anybody that does not want that because I think there's a lot of opportunity for everyone that's listening, whether you are working for a business you do not own or whether you're an entrepreneur and you're struggling to get whatever it is you sell sold. That's really exciting. And I'm really excited to unravel this. So you've developed a strategy that we're going to be talking about today. What do we need? Where do we need to start?

Let's just say I'm sold. Caitlin's concept sounds very interesting to me. We haven't even unraveled it, but the value proposition here of having people kind of say no brainer purchase would be the dream for my business. So where do we actually need to be beginning?

I love this question. And I also love that you say dream because I think that so oftentimes people actually start in the wrong place. There's this kind of like mantra out there. It's like, you know, sell the dream, sell the transformation. But like that doesn't matter if you're not solving the right problem. So what I believe is

is you need to start by identifying a real problem in the market because here's how demand works, right? We buy things because we have specific jobs that we're trying to get done and we're looking for a way to get those jobs done, but we're stuck. Something is in our way. There's some type of struggle.

And we buy products to help us overcome our problems. Yet so oftentimes we'll see these big grandiose promises being touted by brands. And if you're saying something, you can make a really compelling promise, but if it's not rooted in a painful problem, people are still gonna ignore you. The example I often give is like, I love Hinge. Hinge has such a great message. Now, I haven't been on the dating apps. I was fortunate enough to be my husband before dating apps came along because I've heard that they can be a real pain in the butt

But like with dating apps, for example, like Hinge's tagline, it just really speaks to the underlying problem. And they say the dating app meant to be deleted because they understand the problem that people have. It's not about selling like, you know, Hinge could easily say, look at you walking down the beach with your loved one. Look at you at your wedding. Like they're selling the dream. No, instead they focus on the pain.

And when they focus on the pain, it helps them to differentiate from the other ones out there that all have the exact same message, which is this big promise-based message. So start by identifying a painful problem that exists in the market that you believe you have a unique way of solving. And this part is important because...

The best products, the best solutions, they're opinionated. There's a point of view on this problem and why it needs to be solved and how your solution is different. And when that point of view is lacking, when you kind of don't figure that piece out, it's harder to make the rest of this work. So you start with the problem and solve.

This works on a psychological level with how humans work. So we have a bias for negativity. Like we pay a lot more attention to negativity than to positivity. It sucks, which is why our news, our feeds are full of all of these horrible stories, but it's a human survival technique, right? Like we pay attention to the negative things. So tapping into the problem allows people to recognize that you're, you're selling them a solution to a problem that they know that they have. And yeah,

There's some great examples of this, like Hinge is a good one. My other favorite is Snickers. Do you remember Snickers' famous tagline? Well, I only know it because you told it to me during the pre-call, so why don't you reveal it? So the "You're not you when you're hungry" tagline, right? So how did Snickers figure this out? They figured it out by doing market research, understanding their customers. I'm a big nerd for market research, particularly customer research. I want to talk to people who are buying your thing, not just people who might potentially buy a thing in the future.

But Snickers went out and they did these interviews with buyers and they asked them a lot to try to figure how do we position our product uniquely? Now, this was back in, like, let me think of the exact date. It was like the early 2000s. So it was a different time in the world of kind of like snack options. We're like, we've got a lot of really cool snack options today. You've got protein bars and keto friendly stuff and like vitamin waters, whatever.

We didn't have all that back in the early 2000s. Snickers is the early protein bar, technically speaking, right? Because it's got nuts in it and everything else. 100%. And what they learned, they got this really amazing insight that allowed them to form a unique point of view, create unique positioning, craft messaging that works. And then that copy that we love, which is the you're not you when you're hungry, Snickers satisfied. So the point of view that they had was like, wow.

wait a minute, people choose Snickers because they're in a rush. They're running between commitments. They don't have time to stop and get a real meal, but they're hungry and they're looking for something that's going to like actually like satiate their hunger. Why does that matter? Why do they care? Well, because when you're hungry, you do dopey dumb things, right? And you could make yourself look like an idiot. Yeah. We have a, what's the word hangry or something, right? Isn't that the- Hangry. Yes. Yes.

I think Snickers might have coined hangry, but like, so they realize this real world problem, which is hunger results in dumb decisions, which make me look dumb, which at our very primal level, we're tribal beings, right? Like we survive and thrive in tribes. And when you are afraid of doing something dumb, there's this bigger fear, which is like, well, what if I get

ostracized from my community. Right. And that exists in us, even if we can't psychologically like pull that out, it's there. So Snickers is like, okay, well, when you go to the vending machine or the convenience store, like, you know, maybe you were, you're at a university and there's like a little store in the university. There's all of the, like the snack section, you've got your chips and you've got your pop and you've got your gum and your candy, but like, what can you actually eat? That's going to make you feel like you got,

a real like boost of energy and like it's satisfying. Snickers was the best choice there because it was packed with peanuts, right? That's their slogan. It's like, you're not you when you're hungry, packed with peanuts, Snickers satisfies. Like it's brilliant messaging. And they were able to show with these hilarious ads that tapped into the problem that their product in a specific use case was the best solution. And what I love about that example, and I think it's important, is that like,

A lot of times we as marketers, we think about who are our target customers and we focus a lot on the attributes of those customers. You know, their shared traits, like they're women, they're moms, they're CEOs of e-commerce companies. Like we think a lot about that. But like when you really focus on what are the actual trigger events that might move them to buy?

they're hungry and they're on the go and they need something to fill them up so that they don't look like an idiot. Then you can position your product around that event and that job to be done as opposed to thinking, you know, we only sell to like 18 to 22 year old university kids, which is not the case. Lots of people buy Snickers with the exact same job to do. This is really fascinating because I like this example. You're not you when you're hungry packed with peanuts, Snickers satisfies because you're

So many marketers try to not be the ringer of the negativity bell. They try to be optimistic, right? They try to do focus on the desired outcome, right? But they don't necessarily target the underlying challenge. And some of us feel a little kind of

weird and not ideal to want to like remind people of the stakes, right? Of what's at risk here. And what I'm hearing you say is behavioral science shows that if you want to move someone to action, you have to remind them of what's at stake. And that's something that's really important in messaging. You can spin it positively. You're not you when you're hungry. Doesn't say you're a jerk. Eat Snickers. You're not you when you're hungry.

You know what I mean? But it kind of implies it. It's kind of implying you don't want to be that side of you. It's very creative the way that's done. I love that. But speak to those out there who are a little adverse to try to really shake the negative bell here. I love...

I love that you're bringing this up because this is something that, you know, this is an objection that we need to overcome when it comes to selling painkiller. And you, you know, marketers know, like we need to know what our objections are so we can overcome them. One of the things that we talk about and I talk about a lot in my social content weeks teach in painkiller is think of an event diagram with two circles, right? You've got the promise and you've got the pain in the middle. That's the painkiller. And that's,

No promise matters if people don't feel the pain. So you can run ads all day long that are super positive to, again, going back to the dating example, like you can run ads all day long in front of a 41 year old male who maybe you think is your target customer for like your dating app, but he's happily married. He's not going to care. He's not going to pay attention. Ultimately, without pain, promises are ineffective.

So you need to understand the pain. It doesn't mean that you have to use this fear-mongering language. And examples like Snickers is a great example of how you can kind of subtly tap into this. One of the things I love about that particular campaign is that like that came out and they were already the world's number one chocolate bar, but they were slipping and they'd slipped a lot. They saw 16% market share growth within one year of that campaign. And they're still using it like 17 years later because it's so effective.

And other examples that are kind of like the play to this, right? Nike, just do it. One of the most iconic brands on the planet. We all know what they're selling us, which is being an athlete is hard. I want to quit. I don't want to get up and run the 27K, but I know that it's going to be worth it. So I'm just going to do it, right? So like so many messages all have done this incredibly effective job of flipping a pain into a reality.

into a promise. And so you do not need to do that weird internet marketer thing where you're like, your life sucks. You're going to be broken, poor and desolate on the street. No, you don't need to do that. You can take a note from Hinge, from Nike, from Snickers, and you can turn this pain into a promise that's really compelling and positive. The problem I see a lot of people make

is they focus too much on the promise and they make these big lofty promises. Things like, here's how you could make $10,000 a month or like lose 20 pounds in 30 days without dieting. And it's like, that all sounds great. Not only do we not believe it, it's not actually getting at the root of my problem. If I thought I could do that, like, you know, I'm a mom, a busy entrepreneur. If I need to lose weight, talk to me about the problems that I have because I know those intimately, right? Don't just show me a promise that isn't real.

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Are you ready to thrive with AI? Join me inside the AI business society by visiting socialmediaexaminer.com slash AI. So let's say we've got a sense of what we believe the, uh, the problem is. Um,

And we all know we could probably like do a little work on figuring out how to message that. But I think we're going to get to that a little deeper in your process. What do we do next? So remember how I said that like I started off with this idea of building an insights agency and I call it insights instead of research because like people are allergic to the R world.

People seem to believe there's this common thing that's thrown out there by skeptics of research. And I actually used to be one of these people before my company failed and I went bankrupt. I'd actually said this myself. Henry Ford said, if you were to ask people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. And this is often like people will talk about Steve Jobs didn't do research. In fact, Steve Jobs did incredible amounts of research. And that Henry Ford quote, this is my favorite one. People will use that as an excuse not to do research. Like, I'm going to show the market what they need. Like, I don't need to talk to customers. Right.

And that was actually never said by Henry Ford. It was a quote from Yacht Magazine that was like, if Henry Ford would have asked what people wanted, they would have said pastor. Henry Ford never actually said this at all. And yet many, many people will use it as an excuse to not do research. And so I'm very careful with not using the R word because I understand messaging and I know what's effective with people. But the first step in this, guess what?

It's doing research. You need to go out and understand a few things. So what you really want to get your kind of like head wrapped around is what is the job that customers are trying to get done? And what are the things that they're encountering? What's the context of their situation? So to go a little bit deeper into jobs we've done, it's this innovation framework. It's really helpful for marketers. But the basic idea is people don't buy products and services because of who they are.

We don't buy, I'm not a, you know, I'm a 40 year old woman, entrepreneur mom, but that's not why I buy things. I buy things because I have a specific job I'm trying to get done. And when you understand the job and all the nuances, the complexities of it, like what is pulling them towards a new solution? Why do they want to make a change? What problems are they struggling with? What's pushing back on them that's stopping them from making progress, right? When you understand the nuances of the job,

then you can get really effective in designing better solutions and also us as marketers in marketing those solutions better.

So, what you want to do is you want to start with research. And what you're really trying to figure out is like, what jobs are people trying to get done? What are their pain points? What are their desired outcomes? What objections do they have to solutions? And what other competitors are they using today? Because your product and solution doesn't exist in a vacuum. You need to really go in and understand the competitive landscape. So, it all starts with research.

And I know that people get worried about research. They feel like it's going to take a lot of time. But what we teach them to do is what I call fast as bleep research. And it allows you to go off and actually mine kind of like watering holes where your ideal customers hang out online to better understand them.

So this used to be kind of, even this type of research used to be a lot faster than like running surveys or doing customer interviews, but it's gotten way faster. So like one of my favorite places to gather customer insight is from Reddit. People have real conversations there. They recommend things that they like. They talk about things that they don't. They go into like insane detail about their problems of their life. And it's all just there for you to mine for insight. And before you used to kind of have to go

and you'd have to copy and paste things. And it was like kind of a pain in the butt. But now with ChatGPT, you can actually just say, hey, I'm building a solution like this. I want you to go off and like help me do research around, you know, this problem set. Look at these sites. And it can actually go with like my Reddit for insights. So it's,

It's a really cool time to be able to deeply understand your customers. And even if you're in the earlier stages where you're still building something new, you're figuring out who the customer base is going to be, it's got to start with research. And when you don't, you make really expensive mistakes. And coming back to kind of a buyer psychology principle, there's something that

a lot of founders struggle with and I have 100% been there. It's called sunk cost fallacy. Yeah. Sunk cost bias for sure. Yeah. So once we've invested a lot of time in something, we want to make it work, right? We'll keep investing time into it. We already have. You could start with research and what I'd call fastest F research and you can actually go out and get so much closer to a solution that works and a messaging that's effective before investing and sinking a lot of time into something by doing this research. So

people think they're moving faster by skipping research, but they're in fact actually slowing down. Okay. There's a couple of things that I want to reiterate that you said that people might've missed. First of all, understanding who the competitors are through the lens of the prospect or the customer is really important because you might not perceive this is the competition, but the customer might. And that's important because the

When people try to frame something new, they put it through a frame of reference that they're familiar with, right? And a lot of businesses don't realize this. They say, oh yeah, this is something that's never existed before. Well, if it's solving a problem, then there is something that's existed before. It's just not the way that you do the solution, right? So for example, if you have one of these little robots that,

vacuums your house, you know, there's little ones that I'm talking about. Well, the competition is actually a person vacuuming the house and it might be a housekeeper, right? And that's the competition. The competition is whoever the customer thinks the alternative solution is, right? Or maybe it's a broom, right? I mean, you want to talk about that a little bit? I would love to. So like, this is a great example. So going back to kind of like our weight loss example, like lots of lots of people want to lose weight. It's a massive multi-billion dollar industry.

but one new solution that happens to do one small job very effectively recently came out and has crushed a lot of people in this space. So thinking about the job to be done, right? You might want to, let's say you want to lose 10 pounds before your next vacation. That's the kind of like your overarching job, but like to get that done, you have to do a bunch of different things. And one of those things is you need to actually, you want to try to like fight your cravings and not overeat because that's one of the things that,

allows us to gain weight, right? Like we're eating more than we should because we're hungry and we're craving these delicious things. So there's this other little kind of job, which is like, help me to like fight cravings and not overeat. Well, this new line of medications came onto the market called Ozempic and WeGoMe, I think is another one. And with that one thing that they were able to do that job so well, when people are taking these medications, they're not hungry. It reduces their cravings.

And suddenly Weight Watchers, which has been around for decades, is like struggling and filing for like chapter seven bankruptcy and gyms are empty. And like the reality is gyms never saw this solution that was originally created. As a competition, but it is right. Yeah.

But it's their absolute competition because it actually helps them get the overarching job done, right? Which is to lose that weight. And so now gyms need to think, well, what else do we have to offer? Why else do people come to the gyms? There's other reasons people go to the gyms. People go to the gyms for that social connection. They go to try to like meet somebody. They go because they're trying to build muscle and they're trying to like, it's not just about losing weight. And so I think that when a new competitor comes on the scene or even when you just open up your eyes and see who your real competitors are,

You need to then think about, OK, how do we now shape our message in today's landscape? How do we become more competitive? Now, if I was a gym owner, I'd be putting together a lot more community events. I'd be putting a lot. I'd be really focusing on kind of like small group training. I'd be doing anything that kind of differentiates from that promise of like come here, lose weight, because that's not the promise that's compelling anymore. If you want to lose weight, there might be easier ways to do that.

But if you want to, you know, meet your next romantic partner, if you're in a new city and you want to hang out with other healthy people and you don't know anyone, now suddenly they've got a new offer. So it's like,

Like you need to be watching the market as it evolves, but also just recognizing who your real competitors are. Right now, there's this huge shift happening in the online course world. And a lot of course creators are like, whoa, like my sales are way down. Well, guess what? ChatGPT is your new biggest competitor. A lot of people don't want to go through and watch a 40 hour video training when they can go to ChatGPT and say, write a sales page for me. Will that sales page be good?

Absolutely not, unless they know how to prompt it. Give us a little couple of tips on the jobs to be done thing. Like most of us that are listening already have or work for a business and maybe we've not identified that job to be done. Do you have any tips on how to identify that? The best way to do this, now this is assuming that like, you know, we're in a best case scenario, is you go off and you talk to people who are your customers now who are buying the thing that you want to sell more of or people who are buying from a competitor. Now, again, that could be a direct

competitor, somebody who does the same job the same way that you do, or it could be a indirect competitor. And what you're trying to learn from them is like the nuances of what it is they're trying to get done. So if you think of it like the buyer journey, like every buyer journey kind of starts the same way, which is something happens in your prospect's life that triggers them to realize, oh crap, I have a problem and I need to solve it. This way of thinking comes from Bob Mesta, who's one of the co-creators of Jobs to Be Done, a mentor of mine. He

talks about this thing called the timeline and he goes the best way to figure this out is to sit down and talk to customers and kind of help that get them to recreate that timeline from oh crap i've got a problem i need to solve and they move into this stage of what he calls passive looking where they're like starting to notice solutions that they would have ignored before because they didn't have a problem before right remember my initial thing you don't have a problem you're not looking for solutions promises don't aren't effective

So they start to notice things. Usually then something will happen that will push them to feel some urgency around this. It's like, oh, I need to solve this problem. Like, you know, I'm starting to feel like the frustration and the side effects of not solving it. And then they'll go into actively looking. This is where most marketers spend almost all of their spend, which is like, I want to get people in front of people that are already searching for keywords like ours. I want to get in front of people with ads like that are looking for solutions. But oftentimes people,

there's an earlier time you can get in front of them, which is like understanding what the trigger events are. But so then they start like actively looking for solutions and then they go into consideration mode. They've made a short list of things that they're going to try. They buy something, they try it and they determine, did this work for me? Did it get my job done? If yes, great. If no, I'm going to fire this thing and look for something new to hire. And

And really, the insight of understanding the job comes from doing these interviews with customers to recreate this buying journey. Now, not all of us have the ability to go out and talk to a bunch of customers to kind of figure this out. And again, another good way to do this is to start with research.

research and to go to these online watering holes where people are talking about your competitors or if you're big enough talking about your product and they're sharing, you know, I started trying this thing because they're giving you the answers or explaining what they were trying to get done and piecing it together that way. That can be another option. I would say that if you're listening, there's some great literature on like a job statement and the job statement is basically like, I want to, and then like the thing,

that they're trying to get done and then like the context right let me give you an example here you had a teeth whitening one is that one worth talking about yeah let

Let me share that one. So, you know, most marketers would say, OK, we've got this. Like, let's say we need to sell this teeth whitening kit. The big promise is you can whiten your teeth in 48 hours. Right. It's like, well, who are we going to after with this thing? They might go, OK, well, who cares about teeth whitening? Probably like young girls. They tend to have more pressure on them to like to be attractive. But if you really kind of pull back the lens, be like, well, what's the actual job?

that this thing's doing, right? The overarching job might be help me feel more confident, but then you kind of dig down a layer. It's like, okay, how, how do you do that? And then the supporting job is,

is brighten my smile, right? Help brighten my smile before an important event this week because it's a 48 hour thing. So now it's like, okay, it's like, oh, so the reason people are buying our thing is help me brighten my smile for an important event this week. Well, that unlocks a whole bunch of insight as to like how we would market this thing and who we would market it to.

So people who are in the dating game, people who have a big presentation coming up where they need to be in public. Or speakers. Yeah. Or like people that like, you know, are graduating and they're going to get professional photos done or weddings. Exactly. Yes. University pictures, high school graduate pictures.

All of these are trigger moments. So now you can get really smart with your marketing spend because you can get in front of people before those moments are happening. Graduation is a particular time of year. You can run a big campaign, right? Online dating, everyone who's newly single, like Valentine's is a weird time for them where they're like, I'm like, I should be dating by now. You can run a campaign. So there's, you know, weddings, obviously. There's so many. Once you get clear on the job, instead of just thinking about what do we sell?

Like, and you know, who might want to buy it? You can run one ad. So you and I were chatting before and I said like, the cool thing about understanding the job is that it allows you to figure out like, how do we craft a message that gets in front of people with shared interests?

trigger events, right? And so if the people are trying to brighten their teeth before an important event, maybe that important event is a date. You know, dates are a very, very common one. And you could run one ad that would probably be compelling to like that 25-year-old girl and that 72-year-old newly single man who's a widower who's going on his first date and terrified because he hasn't been in the game for a long time. You could run one ad that would speak to both of them about the confidence that they can get,

by brightening their smile. So when you really understand the job, it just unlocks this clarity around who you want to serve that makes the most sense that you can actually do the best job for and what message is going to be most compelling with those people. Okay. So I'm going to try to summarize. We've been talking about your method called the painkiller method. And the first part is really to understand why people buy. And we know that generally people buy because

of loss aversion or something triggered them that, that they don't want to happen or that has happened. For example, in my case, slightly high cholesterol got me buying oatmeal. That's a great example. And now I'm eating it every day. Right. And all the other stuff that comes along with that. And then after that,

we got to put ourselves in the position of the customer and ask, all right, what does that prospect or customer believe the alternatives are, which are quote unquote, the competitors. Right. And then we start talking about, all right, the positioning of this, like what is the job that they need to do? They are effectively hiring a product to do a job. And sometimes they are firing a product to do a job, which I love and understanding some of those triggers and pain points and your unique value proposition requires you to go out and do some research and

And some of that research involves obviously going to like Reddit forums and mining reviews and testimonials from competitors or your own data. And we didn't, we kind of talked about this, like identifying that ideal customer in this case, the graduate, for example, with the white teeth.

or the person who's newly on the dating scene. I love your brain stuff because like people who share common jobs to get done and common problems often share common traits, right? So my friend Amanda, she created a company called House of Y. She sold it, but it was a CBD gummy business. And if you know anything about the

CBD gummy world, there are a lot of brands out there and a lot of them sell one product and then host a hundred different benefits of that product. Kind of like it can help with arthritis, can help with sleep, it can help with stress and help with all these things. Amanda was like, nope. She's like, I'm creating products. I know specifically who they're for. They're for women like me who are busy career moms who need support in these specific areas. They are struggling with stress.

they are struggling with sleep and they don't feel very sexy. She's like, those are the three things that I'm going to focus on. I'm going to create a specific product for each of those. So here's the thing that I love to like frame around. Like when it comes to figuring out who your best fit buyers are, people who have common jobs and common problems

related to getting the job done? Well, they often share common traits, right? And so Amanda was able to create this gummy brand that stood out in the sea of like kind of CBD products because she was really focused on these three specific jobs, getting better sleep, having better sex, being less stressed. And she knew that there was a particular type of buyer that really struggled with those things and that she understood them and could speak to their problems. And so when it comes to choosing your best fit buyers, it comes down to like,

OK, what's my point of view on the problem? And how do I design a solution that works really well in a specific context? Because we can't solve everyone's problems. They're different. Right. So figuring out the best fit buyer is really important. So to messaging, you talked about this Trojan horse concept. I would love you to talk about that a little bit.

For sure. So here's the thing. Like one thing that I see people make the mistake of a lot. I've talked about my own mistake with this earlier. They know what the root problem is or they know what the big thing is that people are struggling with and they want to sell them a solution to that.

But guess what? Sometimes people don't know that's the problem. You want to sell a solution to the problem people already know they have and the one that they actually care about solving. So I call this the Trojan horse technique, right? So basically sell what people want

and then deliver what they need. And to be honest, this is what Painkiller is. I understood that the biggest problem that a lot of teams had was that they didn't understand their customers because they weren't doing research. But as much as I kind of would put that message out there, it wasn't getting picked up.

People just are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. But, you know, Henry Ford didn't do research. Steve Jobs didn't do research. I'm a genius. I don't need to do research. So it's like, I need to stop selling them the thing that they need, you know, their root problem. And I need to start selling them what they want. And what they know is that their sales pages aren't converting. Their emails aren't converting. When they talk to potential customers, they get confused. They don't know what they're all about. They see people not buying their thing that they know would be a perfect fit for their thing. And yet their message is falling flat.

So Painkiller is essentially a research tool wrapped in a messaging tool because I knew that that's what people realized that they needed and that I could deliver that outcome for them and they would care about it. So when you think about your product, a lot of times we're too smart and we're looking at things from our own angle and we're not understanding what the customer's problem is. This is fascinating because I've got some examples from what we do with one of our big products, which is Social Media Marketing World.

We know that the reason people come to the conference is because what they want is they want to learn strategies specifically to help them become more valuable to their boss. Okay. And be more valuable in their career. But what they need, which they don't realize until they get there, is that they need community.

And they need to be around like-minded people. And they like to be in a space where everybody understands their struggle. You know what I mean? But we found that if we tried to just position it all about the networking and all the stuff that happens outside of it, it didn't sell tickets. When instead sold tickets was going there for the training. But what sold returning tickets is coming back for the connections that they make.

So that's why we've learned over time that what they want is professional development, but what they really need is connection. And we subliminally market the connection, you know, but we lead with the training. That's kind of what you're talking about, right? 100%. You are selling them what they want and then you're giving them what they need. We do the same thing with Unignorable, which is a personal branding challenge that I ran. It was like people, their biggest struggle was that they didn't feel like they just felt

they knew that they needed to be consistent, but they weren't being consistent and they weren't being consistent because it wasn't fun. Like it really sucks to go out there and post on social media and try to like develop like your thought leadership and get people to pay attention and get ignored. And so it wasn't fun and people would quit. And so they'd like start and it was lonely. And so like, we were like, okay, like I,

know that that's what they need and we designed the whole challenge around making it more fun and we did all these really cool things like we've got a top hooker challenge which is like every day you can go and post the hook for the post that you're gonna write and like what do you think of this hook how would you rework it to make it better and then every week there'd be rewards for the top hooker of the week all of that's fun but what was actually happening too is they were learning how to

and develop taste for what does a good hook look like. And it's so much easier to help other people rewrite their stuff than to write our own. So they were seeing, oh, I'm actually good at this. It's just hard when I'm doing it for myself. And so that's what they got. But what we sold them on was what they wanted, which is I'm going to build my personal brand so I can build my business and be wealthy. And that's what they want. But what they needed was the fun.

Well, and this is the key. If you're just delivering what they want and you're not giving them what they need, you're probably not going to get a repeat customer. And I think that's the underlying part or even a referral to another customer. Talk to me about testing because a lot of people are going to want to run tests. What's your philosophy? You have this cool triple P thing that we were talking about. Yeah. So like, here's the thing, as much as I would love for you and I to be able to be super smart and sit down in like a laboratory and like do all of this research and like write this messaging strategy and be like,

This is it. You could put it out in the real world and it doesn't connect because again, the messaging strategy might be right, but the words might be wrong. So going back to that, like Snickers campaign, like they might've been bang on about the fact that like, we're going to position this as like the healthier, more protein baked, like an alternative in the snack aisle. We're going to position it as like a alternative for like a meal when people are in the run. That's all right. That's all the strategy part. Right.

But they could have come up with like this terrible slogan that didn't hit, that offended people. And the underlying strategy could still be right. So I'm all about testing with your pitch. Right. So we have something we call the triple P pitch. I think for a pitch to be effective, it needs three things. It needs to make clear what the problem is, make a potent and persuasive promise and ultimately

Almost the most important thing, provide proof. Because there are so many people out there that are making bigger and bigger promises. And I'm being like, why aren't people buying my things? Like, I've got this huge promise. And it's like, well, have you actually shown me why I should believe you? Is the proof there?

So, you know, to make a pitch really effective, it's got to top into the problem. It's got to, you know, tease out that potent and persuasive promise and you need to show proof. And so the goal is once you figure out the messaging strategy, go out there, start writing the copy, write kind of a pitch, share it, put it on your hero section of your website, do cold outreach to potential clients, send an email, test this and see what's working because you need that feedback loop. And one of the beautiful things about being in the online world is how quickly we can get that feedback loop going.

Caitlin, this has been a fascinating exploration into behavioral science and messaging and positioning. I know we've just scratched the surface of what's available in that mind of yours. If people want to connect with you on the socials, what's your preferred platform? And then if they want to do business with you, where do you want to send them? So on socials, I would go to LinkedIn. I'm spending a lot of time there. I spend a lot of time on X2, but it's weird over there lately. So LinkedIn, look for Caitlin Burgoyne. And if you want to learn more about

buyer psychology and understand your customers better, go to learnwhywebuy.com. Caitlin, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today. Thank you, Michael.

Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over at socialmediaexaminer.com slash 672. If you're new to the show, be sure to follow us. If you've been a listener for a while, would you do me a favor and let your friends know about this show? You can connect with me if you want to tag me on Facebook, LinkedIn, or X. And also do check out our other shows, the AI Explored podcast, which I'm having a blast with.

and also the Social Media Marketing Talk Show. This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. The Social Media Marketing Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner.

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