Stop guessing your message. Test it like a product.

Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here.

Last week we talked about turning raw buying triggers into category entry points. But once you have them — how do you know which one will actually move buyers?

That’s the question I keep getting on podcasts.

“How do you test messaging fast, cheap, and without a full campaign?”

It’s a fair ask. Because message validation is the biggest black box in B2B. Teams either A/B test blindly or wait months for revenue data that says nothing about why buyers acted.

So here’s how I’ve been solving it with clients and inside Conversion Alchemy projects. A simple loop I call The 7-Day Message Sprint.

You can run it with one person, in one week, and with one slice of your audience.

The 7-Day Message Sprint

Day 1 — Pick the moment

Start with a real entry point. Something buyers actually say when the problem hits.

Day 2 — Write your variants

Draft 3–5 short versions of the message. Each one hits the belief from a different angle (logic, gain, loss, proof etc.). If you have messaging framework in place these “frames” should be part of it.

Day 3 — Test it “on paper”

Share with teammates or an AI ICP. Even better a synthetic research platform. Get rid of anything unclear or unbelievable.

Day 4 — Test in the wild

Run your top two in an email, ad, or landing page hero section. Keep things small and manageable with as few variables as possible.

Day 5 — Talk to real people

Jump on five short calls to ask what resonates best, what doesn’t, and what would make it clearer. Here is important to avoid asking leading questions and follow the conversation where it leads you.

Day 6 — Check your signals

Here you don’t need statistical significance, but rather directional feedback. “Is this the right direction to take to expand our messaging into a full page/email sequence, sales deck etc.?”

Opens → Attention: If the open rate jumps, the framing or emotion in your headline is landing. You’ve caught their eye, but that’s just step one.
Clicks or replies → Intent: A click means curiosity; a reply means genuine interest. Look for why they engaged, what words, phrases, or promises drew them in.
Replies or quotes → Belief shift: When people mirror your language in their replies, you’ve changed how they describe their own problem. Which means your message helped reframe their thinking.
Unsubscribes or drop-offs → Cost: Every message has a price. If opens go up but unsubscribes spike, your framing might be too narrow, too bold, or targeting the wrong segment. With our previous steps we de-risked this as much as possible.

Day 7 — Ship or scrap

Keep the messaging that helped people think differently about their problems or situation, without raising cost. Always log what worked and move on to the next entry point.

This loop turns messaging into a real-time learning tool.

In just a few weeks, you should know if your message earns attention or not.

DISCOVERY

I recently wrote another piece for the amazing team at Every, about a simple shift that makes AI a useful collaborator instead of a generic copy machine: context over commands.

The piece breaks down the three‑phase system I use with clients:

observe real customer and market inputs
distill them into positioning and messaging frameworks
crystallize into words with judgment.

You’ll see a side‑by‑side test that shows how adding real context turns bland output into specific, persuasive copy, plus a practical way to apply the same workflow to board decks, sales emails, or even novels. Read it here.

---

I joined Alec Cheung and Barb VanSomeren on The Marketing Share to chat about what I call the “messaging gap”, the space between what teams say and what customers actually hear. We went practical.

What you’ll learn:

How to spot and close the gap without a bloated research push
The three pillars that make messaging convert, clarity, emotion, differentiation
Where AI speeds the work, and where human judgment still carries the load

Listen here.