How Buyer-Centric Is Your Messaging?
A ten-question self-assessment on who your messaging actually serves. Output: a buyer-centricity score plus the rewrite pattern for your weakest surface.
Who it’s for: Heads of marketing and product marketers auditing whether their surfaces speak to buyers — or to themselves.
What does your homepage hero headline mostly talk about?
Read it honestly, not charitably.
Four messaging postures, ranked by how your surfaces currently read. The winner is how your site actually talks — not how your brand book says it should.
If Mirror and Spec-Sheet are close, you’re probably in the middle of a rewrite and it hasn’t reached every surface. If Self-Portrait and Cocktail are close, you’re overdue for a content audit — the damage is cumulative.
The distribution matters more than the label. A site that’s 45% Mirror / 40% Spec-Sheet is salvageable with a focused pass. A site that’s 30% / 30% / 30% across three archetypes needs an owner before it needs a rewrite.
Three moves you can make this week.
- Pull three recent buyer call transcripts and highlight the words that repeat. Those are your raw materials. If the words on your homepage don’t appear in the transcripts, the homepage is wrong — not the buyer.
- Run a focused rewrite pass on the top three surfaces. Homepage hero, sub-head, and one pricing tier block. Use the Messaging Hierarchy Builder to hold the trade-offs on one page.
- Install a reviewer role for every new surface. One person whose job is to ask, “whose language is this?” before anything ships. Without that role, you will drift back to Cocktail inside of two quarters.
Why these questions, in this order.
Ten questions across four surface types — homepage, sales, pricing, content — because messaging problems are almost always uneven. A homepage can be Mirror-tight while the pricing page is Spec-Sheet and the blog is Self-Portrait. Averaging would hide the pattern.
We cut questions about “brand personality” and “tone of voice” on purpose. Those are downstream outputs. Whose problem the copy is about is the upstream input; if you fix that, tone tends to self-correct.
Run the full Message Consistency.
Catches drift between your site, your reps, and your content.
- Your Positioning PersonalityChallenger, category creator, fast follower, or commodity?
- How Strategically Mature Is Your Team?Twelve questions → level 1 (chaotic) to level 5 (operationalized).
- What's Your Strategic Blind Spot?Messaging, competitors, customers, or internal alignment — which is neglected?