We’ve spoken a lot about language market fit over the last month. And today, we’re wrapping it up in a neat bow for you.

Anyway, let’s dive in.

‍

Step 1: Set yourself apart & achieve success

‍

For startups entering the market, understanding how to position yourself against alternatives is paramount.

With the right approach, you can confidently differentiate your visual identity and messaging as well as uncover opportunities that allow you to outshine the competition while learning from their successes and where they’re falling short.

Here’s how to uncover those opportunities:

1. Know your audience
2. Define your direct and indirect competitors
3. Explore your competitor's digital footprint
4. Uncover your competitor's marketing strategies
5. Map out your insights
6. Create a value curve with our detailed guide on creating an effective value curve.

Read our in-depth blog on setting yourself apart from the competition.

‍

Step 2: Customer interviews

‍

When it comes to running a successful start up, understanding the needs of your customers is paramount. And customer interviews are the key to unlocking invaluable insights.

How to conduct effective interviews:

Firstly, assemble the right participants.

• People unfamiliar with your product or service - this helps identify the journey needed to communicate the value of your solution effectively
• Users of competitor products - to uncover the factors driving people toward similar solutions.
• Recent adopters of your product - to understand what led them to choose your product over alternatives they considered.
• Former users of your product - to determine the reasons behind customer churn and what prevented them from using your product.

Secondly, sample size and method.

• Interviews should aim for at least 6 participants.
• 1-1 interviews work well as the participant can answer your questions directly without the influence of other participants.

Lastly, craft effective interview questions.

• To uncover the context driving customers to hire products like yours, structure your questions around jobs-to-be-done and the four customer forces influencing their choice of solution. Click here for some example questions.
• Remember interviews are all about understanding the why behind customer behaviour. After receiving responses to your questions, follow up with a simple ‘why is this important to you?’. Digging into the ‘why’ uncovers your audience’s underlying values and motivations.

‍

Step 3: Use audience surveys

‍

How do you navigate the sea of information and data you’ve gathered about your audience to discover what truly matters?

Interviews are vital to understanding the range of problems, motivations, needs, ambitions or concerns that drive customer behaviour. However, unless you layer measurable data over the insights, you’ll be left guessing which are most important and how many people are affected by each.

Enter quantitative surveys.

How to use surveys:

• Aim for an average response rate of 10-15%, you should target a minimum of 30 respondents.
• Create multiple-choice ‘profiling questions’ based on key demographics. This will allow you to split data and look to see if there are key differences in the insights between groups that can define needs-based audience segments and targeted messaging.
• From the interviews, you’ll have uncovered information about what pushes and pulls customers toward your product as well as the anxieties and attachments that might prevent them from switching. Now you need to find out which are most important.
• To do this, use multiple-choice questions listing these various insights and ask people to pick the 3 that apply most to them. Or ask them to rank them.
• Analyse this data overall then split them by key profiling characteristics. This helps you create targeted messaging that pulls the right mental levers.
• Next you’ll want to score them so you can see which holds the most and least opportunity. Find out about how to score these results using job-to-be-done opportunity scoring in our in-depth blog on audience surveys here.

‍

Step 4: Test for language market fit

‍

Customers aren’t thinking of a list of features and services, they’re thinking about their own anxieties, doubts, goals and needs. And this is what you need to address.

This is where testing language comes in…

The right words can make all the difference between capturing your audience's attention and losing them in the noise.

You need to take all the learnings we’ve got so far and put them to the test so you can prove which messaging ultimately drives results. Embedding an ongoing, iterative process of testing will allow you to continuously test new ideas and new insights over time. Using quick cost-effective experiments you will optimise your messaging, backed by quantitative data, and give you confidence when you are investing in marketing activity.

So, how can you test your start up’s messaging?

• Meta ads (Instagram and Facebook)
• User testing calls/interviews
• Email testing

We dig deeper into each of these tactics in our most recent blog here.

‍

Key takeaways

‍

👉 Really get to know what you’re competitors are doing

👉 Talk to your customers, after all, they know themselves best

​​👉 Test, test, test

‍