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How to systematically test your copy before it goes live

Message testing has always meant one of two things: expensive user research you couldn’t afford, or shipping and hoping you got it right.

You’d write the homepage. Get internal feedback. Maybe show a few friendly customers. Then launch and see what happened.

If it worked, great. If it didn’t, you’d rewrite under pressure while conversions bled out.

The bottleneck was access and speed. By the time you recruited testers, scheduled sessions, and analyzed feedback, you’d already shipped. Testing happened too late to matter.

Enter AI and synthetic research

​Synthetic research, or using AI/LLMs to create AI personas that mirror your ICP, is collapsing that timeline.

You can simulate your customers now.

Build a persona from research, feed it your message, and get feedback in an hour. Iterate fast. Test multiple versions. And catch problems before anything goes live.

While it’s not 100% accurate (yet), you can get very good directional feedback cheaper, faster and more repeatably than with traditional research.

But efficiency only helps if you know how to take advantage of it.

I’ve spent years testing messaging with clients. Sometimes we’d catch a gap in how much people knew about our solution space and in the language we used. Sometimes a we hadn’t considered a specific belif we needed to address before asking them to takew action. Other times we were prioritizing a job to be done over one that mattered more.

But the way we’ve identified those gaps was repeatable: people move through the same psychological checkpoints when they internalize a message.

So I mapped them, wrote the questions, and tested the sequence on fifty-plus projects. Now synthetic research makes this accessible to every team. You don’t need a research budget or a three-week timeline. You just need the right questions in the right order.

That’s the gap I wanted to fill with…

The Message Testing Pyramid

The pyramid is a structured framework to test messaging psychology across ten stages, or the checkpoints people naturally move through when they “absorb” what they read during a buying process.

Keep in mind, you’re not testing your ICP, nor product-market fit. You’re simply testing the message itself: whether it’s clear, relevant, believable, and whether it creates momentum.

Each stage comes with specific, non-leading questions you can ask a synthetic persona (or real customers) to surface gaps you wouldn’t catch on your own.

The 10 stages:

1. Awareness Alignment: Does this match their current understanding, or assume context they don’t have?

2. Sophistication Match: Does this fit their experience level with the category?

3. Emotional Connection: Does this speak to what matters emotionally?

4. Job-to-be-Done Resonance: Does this align with the progress they’re trying to make?

5. Belief Barriers: What doubts show up? What assurances are missing?

6. Decision Sequence Fit: Is information ordered the way they naturally decide?

7. Identity Alignment: Does this fit how they see themselves professionally?

8. Differentiation Clarity: Does this feel distinct, or like every other option?

9. Cognitive Ease & Clarity: Can they understand and repeat it easily?

10. Momentum & Next-Step Intent: Does this create desire to take the next step?

How to use it

Start with the copy you’re about to ship. Headline, pricing intro, email subject—doesn’t matter. Just dive in with a goal for what you plan on learning from your test.

Go to stage 1. Ask any of the questions. The framework includes 5–6 per stage designed to reveal friction without leading to the answer.

Run it through a synthetic persona built from your customer research. Or test with real customers if you have quick access. Record the responses, and watch for red flags around confusion, hesitation, misunderstanding etc.

Refine the message, move to stage 2. Keep going until you hit stage 10.

It’s important you follow the stages, too. People process messages in sequence. First your message needs to be clear and have some kind of emotional impact for them to keep reading. It also needs to be relevant to them, and then they can start digging into the value you offer. Only if they find enough value in your priomise they will take action.

By the end, you’ll have data and a clearer idea of why your copy works, and where it might not once you set it live.

Three ways to deploy it

Before launch: Test your homepage hero, your pricing page intro, your campaign copy. Catch gaps when changes are still cheap to make.

During iteration: You’ve shipped, but something doesn’t work. Use the pyramid to diagnose which stage needs work.

For rapid validation: You need to test five headline variations. Run each through stages 1 to 10 to see which one clears the critical checkpoints.

Next step

I've just filmed a 20+ min video walkthrough of exactly how I go about validating messaging using synthetic research. Check it out here.

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And you want the complete framework, all ten stages with the full question sets for each, reply and I’ll send it over.

RESONANCE

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Have a great weekend!

Cheers,

Chris

Chris Silvestri Founder & conversion alchemist

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