Find the headline or message that's clearest to your audience and makes them want to learn more. Participants meet the concept first, then react to each message you're considering.
The question it answers: which message makes them want more? Messaging testing is one of the four kinds of concept test. Use it when you know what you’re promising and need the words that carry it.
Run a messaging test before a launch, a campaign, a landing page or an email that a lot of people will see, when you have several ways of saying the same thing and a strong opinion about none of them.
It catches the clever headline that the team loves and the audience can’t explain back.
The concept comes first. Participants who haven’t met it see it and are checked for understanding; participants who have are asked to recall it, without it being pitched again.
Each message, shown word for word and in a different order for each participant: is it clear, and does it make them want to learn more?
A choice at the end: the clearest and most persuasive message, and the one that most makes them want to learn more.
A concept test report titled by what you ran (“Messaging test v1”), with the messages compared rather than whole concepts. Each section appears when the interviews give it something to show.
Decide which benefit you lead with, then test the words that carry it.
Put the message that won in front of real people with an A/B test in market, where behaviour settles what an interview can only suggest.
A value proposition test asks which benefit to promise and whether people believe it. A messaging test asks which way of saying it works: which headline or message is clearest, most persuasive, and makes people want to learn more. They often run in that order. Settle the benefit first, then test the words that carry it into a headline, an ad or an email.
A headline, a tagline, an ad line or an email subject, written as you'd ship it. Candor checks each option before you move on to the next step. A bare product or brand name, an internal note or gibberish blocks the test until you replace it, because it would waste the run. Softer issues, like a message that's too long, off-tone or just a list of features, get a note that doesn't block, often with a suggested rewrite of your own wording.
2 to 5 in one test. Two gives you a clean head-to-head. A few more let you span a range of tones or angles. Cut a long list to the strongest candidates first, because every participant hears every message and the comparison gets noisier as the list grows.
It means participants couldn't say what a message meant, or took away something the product doesn't do. A message nobody can play back can't persuade anyone, however good it sounds to the team that wrote it. The report flags these at the top, ahead of the comparison, so you rewrite them before deciding which message won.
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