Ten years ago, average website usability was poor. Few companies were doing user testing and the only place you could read about it was in nerdy blogs. Now, everyone's doing it and average website usability has much improved.
Today, few companies are doing message testing or know what message testing is. So, 10 years from now, everyone will be doing it.
Message testing checks how your messaging resonates with your target customer. It's a form of qualitative research.
With message testing you can check how your web page, outbound emails or sales pitches (whatever the medium) land on people that represent your ideal customer profile (ICP). What do they find clear or unclear, what's boring or interesting, what resonates or turns them off.
So, in other words, if you're asking yourself "what is message testing," you're basically asking yourself "does my target audience get me?"
In B2B message testing, you're looking for professional criteria, such as your prospects':
All these will tell you not only what specific users think of your messaging. They will also allow you to make improvements and projections based on qualitative data.
For consumer products, your targeting attributes should be focused on the individuals. Attributes like level of education, income, gender, interests, age, etc. will allow you to test your messaging based on your target consumers.
If you want to learn the problems your customers have, conduct jobs-to-be-done research. To discover usability issues, run user testing. And if you want to learn how to improve your product, do another user research.
To land more customers, now that you know what is message testing, run it to improve your marketing.
The most important part of your value proposition is the offer itself, but work hard to find the best way to convey the message.It's impossible to know in advance what will work the best - hence testing.
Trying to improve your go-to-market messaging without message testing looks something like this: