19 Oct, 2026
Messaging Strategy: How to Decide What Your B2B Brand Wants to Be Known For
A competitor could put their logo on most B2B SaaS content, and nobody would notice the difference. That’s the logo test, and it’s the fastest way to find out whether your brand is saying anything that belongs to it.
Plenty of companies fail it. A headline like “we supercharge your finance revenue system” could describe any of the 500 companies in your category, and no amount of content stacked on top will make it yours. A messaging strategy has to come before you start producing content.
Ryan and I talked through the whole process on episode 117 of SaaS Marketing Weekly, How to nail your messaging so you know what content to create.
What is the difference between messaging and content?
Messaging is the layer you sort out before you even look at your content. It starts on your website. It isn’t copy you change every day, so it has to be solid before anything gets built on it.
Messaging and positioning come first. If you skip them, you’ll create content for the sake of it, with nothing meaningful behind it.
Content is the fluid layer where you have room to play: the blogs, the videos, the social posts going out across your platforms. It can only resonate with your ICP and drive results if there’s messaging underneath it that means something.
The logo test for brand messaging
Could another business, or a competitor specifically, take their logo and put it on your content? If the answer is yes, your messaging isn’t niche enough to your business, and you don’t have a voice strong enough to make an impact in your industry. For a quick second check, try the 5-second messaging test.
Going niche is the obvious first fix. Pick an industry or a job title and commit to it, or build everything around one problem you solve better than anyone else.
Write a “what we want to be known for” statement
A “what we want to be known for” statement is one line that captures the thing you want your market to associate with your business above everything else you do. It lives internally rather than on the website, and it sits above your content so that anybody writing anything has a test to apply before they start.
The statement earns its place by being specific enough that a competitor couldn’t claim it. That usually means it carries a belief about your market rather than a description of your product category, drawn from what the people inside your business think.
An example from Cognism
At Cognism, the statement I helped the marketing team write was this:
“Marketing insights for forward-looking executives, grounded in the belief that AI amplifies great GTM when powered by accurate and verified data.”
Cognism marketing team
It’s long, and no competitor could put their logo on it, or on the content we built around it, because internal and external thought leaders were behind every piece of it.
An example from Slack
Slack’s public line is “be less busy”, aimed squarely at teams using email to talk to each other internally. Their internal statement isn’t public, so nobody outside sees the working, and the line alone shows what the positioning is doing.
The Rocket SaaS example
At Rocket SaaS, Ryan positions the agency roughly halfway between a marketing agency and a recruitment agency, and he pitches it that way on sales calls.
Most founders who come to us aren’t arriving with a service in mind, which is where that positioning comes from. They don’t know whether they need LinkedIn ads or Google Ads; they know they need marketing resource. So the first sell is a team of experts ready to start tomorrow, and the second sell is which of those services to run first.
Competitors tend to lead with a list of services instead of the problem their customers have. That’s where we set ourselves apart.
How to build a messaging strategy with your leadership team
Marketing teams usually attempt this alone, and the people who can answer the questions normally aren’t in the room.
Who to involve
The founder started the business for a reason, so they already know what they want it to be known for, which makes them the first person to talk to. Ryan’s view is that this stays a founder’s job whatever the size of the company. Even Jeff Bezos would be across what Amazon wants to be known for, because steering the vision is the job.
At enterprise or mid-market level, you’ll struggle to get that time from your founder, so go to the CMO or CRO instead. A 15-minute interview is enough to understand what they think the business should stand for.
Where AI fits
If you aren’t sure where to start, there are two ways in.
I prefer to run a few rough thoughts through AI first, then narrow them down and work from there. The other way is Ryan’s: start with pen and paper, then take what you’ve written into AI to flesh it out.
“If I start with AI, then my brain gets lazy.”
Ryan James, Founder, Rocket SaaS
The three-point meeting agenda
- The origin story. Why did you start the business? Usually it’s a competitor doing something badly, customer service nobody was happy with, a better service at a lower price, or an industry the big players had left behind.
- Your ICP. A statement only works if your ideal customer recognises themselves in it, and the narrower your ICP, the easier the exercise gets.
- A point of view for each audience. If you’ve got more than one audience, each one needs its own point of view.
Ryan’s origin story is a good example of point one. He kept seeing B2B SaaS companies with a sales team of 20 and one lonely marketer, and no agency that could drop in a team of in-house-standard experts straight away. That’s still what Rocket SaaS is known for today. For point two, our guide on how to identify your ideal customer profile covers the groundwork.
Use a brand messaging framework with a point of view for each audience
Most businesses have more than one ICP, and stretching a single statement across all of them waters it down. The brand messaging framework that fixes this keeps one “what we want to be known for” statement at the top, with a point of view underneath it for each audience, and everything you make ladders back up to the statement.
The two points of view at Rocket SaaS
- Founders with nobody in marketing are our first ICP. The point of view for them is that Rocket SaaS beats hiring your first marketer, because you don’t yet know how to hire or manage one, and we’re ready to go on day one.
- Marketing leaders who already have a team and not enough resource are the second. For them, we’re an extension of what they’ve got, filling the skills gaps they’re missing in-house, usually LinkedIn ads or website CRO.
Same business, same services, two very different arguments, and each one gets its own landing pages, ads, funnel content, case studies and sales pitch.
If you only have one audience
“People in construction” is a sector rather than a target audience, so look harder at who you’re selling to before deciding you only have one group.
If you do only have one, still write a point of view for it. The value is in knowing exactly who you’re talking to and what to make for them.
How to roll your messaging out into content
If you’ve been producing content already, audit it. Go through the website, the blogs and anything else you’ve tried, and work out what can be refreshed to fit the new statement. A podcast that did all right, for example, can be relaunched with a sharper angle and keep its subscribers.
If you’ve never done content, now is the moment. Get the founder and senior marketers posting on LinkedIn, write a few blogs built on the new statement and its points of view, then repurpose those into video.
Build the content calendar with AI
AI is good at frameworks, which is what a content calendar is. Ask for 12 main topics with 4 subtopics under each, built around your statement and the point of view for each ICP, and feed it writing that already points the right way.
That gives you 48 topics, close to one a week for the year. Even so, we recommend planning one quarter at a time. Trends and interests change, and you don’t want to plan so far ahead that the content is irrelevant by the time you get there. The framework is the easy part; content creation is where the work goes.
Does your messaging strategy work across the whole funnel?
A good statement is broad enough to cover the entire funnel. Your product usually appears somewhere in the wording, because that’s what the founder wants people to know about, but that doesn’t mean every piece has to be about the product. Top-of-funnel content can carry much wider thought leadership as long as it stays in the same ballpark, with the call to action moving people on to a case study or a webinar, and down to the bottom from there.
You don’t realise how important a “what we want to be known for” statement is until you have one. I’ve worked at businesses that didn’t have one, and once we did, we looked back at what we’d published before and wondered who on earth it was for.
Messaging is the most important thing in any startup, because if people land on your website and can’t tell what you do, you don’t have a business you can scale.
Rocket SaaS runs one statement of what the business wants to be known for, with a separate point of view underneath it for each audience. Founders with no marketing team hear why an agency beats a first hire, and marketing leaders hear about filling skills gaps.
Same business and same services, with a different argument for each audience.
A brand messaging strategy is the set of decisions about what your business says about itself, who it says it to, and what you want to be known for above everything else you do.
Do it in order. Positioning first, then the statement of what you want to be known for, then a point of view for each audience you sell to.
Brand messaging is what your business says about itself on its fixed channels, mainly the website. It rarely changes, and it sets the terms for everything else.
Content is the layer that moves. Blogs, videos and posts get created every week, and they should all trace back to the messaging.
A messaging framework is one statement of what you want to be known for, with a point of view for each ICP underneath it, and every piece of content laddering back up to the statement.
It gives you a test to apply to anything you’re about to make. If a piece doesn’t connect to the statement, it probably shouldn’t exist.
Run a meeting with three points on the agenda. Start with the origin story and why the business was founded, move to your ICP and whether they’d recognise themselves in what you’re writing, then build a point of view for each audience.
Get the founder in the room. They had a view on what the business should be known for before anybody else did.
If people land on your website and can’t tell what you do, it’s hard to scale the business. Vague messaging also fails the logo test, which means a competitor could run your words without anyone spotting the difference.
Strong messaging makes the buying decision easier for the people who were already a fit.
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