Testing Your Message Before You Build a Full Identity

Better questions create better lives.

I would add that better questions also create better brands. A lot of owners start by asking, “What should our logo look like?” A better first question is, “What sentence would make the right customer stop and say, that is exactly my problem?” You can answer that one for almost nothing, and the answer decides how much everything else is worth.

The order matters, because the expensive parts of a brand, the identity, the site, the signage, the printed materials, all repeat a message. If the message is wrong, you are paying to repeat it in a nicer font. So test the message first.

Start with people, not ads

The cheapest test is a conversation. Talk to real customers, past ones if you have them, and people who fit your ideal customer if you do not. Ask what was going on when they decided to look for help, what they worried about, what they nearly did instead, and what words they used. Write those words down exactly.

Then test your candidate messages on them. Two or three versions, said out loud, in plain language. Watch which one gets a nod, which one gets a question, which one gets polite silence. Silence is data. The Knowing Your Competitors lesson and the Marketing Avatar Worksheet and Pain Points and Solutions Worksheet on the Resources page help you shape the versions worth testing.

A caution I want to be honest about: a handful of conversations does not prove anything statistically. It tells you where to look. Treat it as direction, not verdict.

Then put a small amount of money behind it

Once one or two messages survive the conversations, test them where customers actually are. Run two headlines against each other in a small ad campaign, a simple landing page, or a social post with a clear way to respond. Change one thing at a time, so you know what moved the result.

Here is the key economic step. The cost per click matters less than the cost per lead, and whether you are tracking conversions. Your cost per customer rises faster than your cost per lead only if your close rate drops, so watch both. Measure the message the same way.

Set a ceiling first. Here is a labelled hypothetical. Say a typical job leaves $600 in gross profit and you close one in four leads. Each lead is then worth, on average, $150 of gross profit ($600 divided by 4). If a message costs $150 or more per lead, the average sale leaves you nothing after advertising, and overhead is still unpaid. Anything under it leaves room for overhead and profit. Decide your own limit, well under that, before you look at the results, so you are not tempted to rationalize afterward. Later in Track 3, How to Track Results covers the tracking, and Budgeting From Gross Profit, Not Revenue shows where the ceiling comes from.

Decide, then build

When a message wins, cheaper leads, better-fit leads, or people repeating your words back to you, that is your foundation. Now the logo, the color and the website have a job: to make that message easy to see and easy to trust. You will brief a designer better, spend less on revisions, and be less likely to redo it all next year.

When none of your messages work, that is also a result, and a cheap one. It may mean the message is wrong, or the offer behind it, or the audience. Go back to Translating Your Positioning Into an Actual Offer and check that what you are saying is worth saying.

Your next step

Write two versions of your core message in one plain sentence each. This week, say both to five people who fit your ideal customer, and write down their reactions and their exact words. Pick the version that gets the strongest response for your first small ad test, and set your cost-per-lead limit before you look at any results.

What it costs

About a week for the conversations and one to two weeks for a small paid test, with only a few hours of your own time in total. Conversations are free. A small ad test can run from nothing, using organic posts, to a few hundred dollars, depending on your area and how quickly you want an answer.

What words do your customers use for their problem that you never use for your solution? And what result would make you drop your favorite message?