Creating good positioning tests 3 ways

Most founders don’t understand what makes a good test.

💡 A good test tries several bold new approaches to talking about what you do, speaks to several different audiences, or repackages your existing feature set into completely different products. Testing minor variants of language are not gonna cut it.

Let’s start with the first one: how do you find bold different ways to talk about a product?

Fortunately, we’ve known 3 classic ways to develop persuasive arguments for 2,500 years. Demosthenes taught 3 persuasive approaches: logos, pathos, and ethos, also known as logic, emotions, and authority.

These are otherwise known as the 3 rhetorical appeals.

Applying the 3 rhetorical appeals to your product

Applying logos, pathos, and ethos to your startup is easier than you’d think. Take a key feature of your product and rephrase that feature as a value to your users, shown through 3 different lenses:

1. Emotion
2. Logic
3. Social Proof

(Yes, the Greeks taught the 3rd point was authority, but in the modern-day social proof is more crucial than credentialism.)

You can do this for every feature of your product to really drill down into what matters.

Let’s show by example here. We’re testing some ads for our Growth Marketing Command Center right now, and here’s the first draft of the copy we produced:

🦁 Ad Headline:

1. Notion dashboard for all your growth marketing needs.
2. Plan, execute, report, and iterate on growth marketing ideas.
3. Growth marketing simplified.
4. Manage all your growth marketing experiments in one place.
Primary Text:

1. Growth Marketing Command Center is a Notion dashboard that will help you generate new marketing experiments.
2. GMCC is an all-in-one command center for growth marketers. You can now easily plan, execute, report, and iterate on growth marketing ideas. Grab your copy now!
3. Generating new marketing experiments is challenging and time-consuming. Get all your growth marketing needs to accomplish with the GMCC. It's now simple than ever to plan, execute, report, and iterate on growth marketing ideas.
4. Are you struggling to gain insights about your marketing & growth for your business? Now tackle any size Growth Marketing project with the GMCC and measure what works.

All 4 of these ads have more or less the same text. The performance from one will not be substantially different than the other. Running a test on these ads won’t teach us much about how to talk to our potential customers.

Let’s re-write this copy through the three different styles above

Social Proof Copy

Ad Headline:

1. This command center generated over $26MM. How much will it make you?
2. Can a Notion dashboard make your startup a success? It did for 13 others.
3. We can’t guarantee a 5,128,205% ROI on this command center. But we wouldn’t be surprised

Primary Text:

1. CrowdTamers’ founder has taken all of the principles he’s used to launch 13 different startups from $0 to $2MM+ in ARR, and distilled it into a single command center. Try the Growth Marketing Command Center to plan, organize, and report on all your growth marketing.
2. Imagine getting 20 years of experience launching startups, distilled into a single Notion dashboard—that’s what our Growth Marketing Command Center gets you. A single tool to help you

• Plan
• Organize
• Evaluate,
• Execute, and
• Report on dozens or hundreds of marketing experiments. Powered by Notion, our Growth Marketing Command Center contains all of the lessons and strategies that CrowdTamers has used to help more than a dozen startups launch from $0 to $2MM in ARR over the last decade.

Emotional Copy

Ad Headline:

1. Rocket your way out of marketing report confusion. Take charge of your marketing with the Growth marketing Command Center.
2. End the frustration—get the Growth Marketing Command Center and manage your marketing from A to Z in Notion.

Primary Text:

1. Running ads, webinars, lead magnets, events, conferences, blog posts…the list of everything you have to keep track of as a marketer is endless. Organize your work, coordinate between teams, plan your projects, report on results, and simplify marketing delivery with the Growth Marketing Command Center. Created by CrowdTamers’ founder, a startup marketer who has more than 20 years of experience in building and running teams from 0 to 50 people, this Notion command center distills that knowledge into a single tool that will help propel your marketing to success.
2. Fight the overwhelm of all of the marketing work your team needs to complete with the Growth Marketing Command Center. For just $49, get a complete Notion workspace for planning, organizing, and executing marketing campaigns, whether you’re a team of 1 or 100.
3. 👋 That’s you waving goodbye to bad marketing habits. Our Notion command center helps you generate new marketing experiments, prioritize your efforts, systematically create top-quality ads, measure what works, and gain long-term insights about marketing and growth for your business.

Logical Copy

Ad Headline:

1. Get 4 hours back a week with the Growth Marketing Command Center.
2. 0% of your marketing tasks should fall through the cracks. Keep on top of them with the Growth marketing Command Center.

Primary Text:

1. Organize your team’s work with the Growth Marketing Command Center & get back 15% of your time each week that’s lost to follow-ups, unplanned work, and misaligned goals. Just $49 gets you the ultimate Notion tool for marketing productivity.
2. The average team lead spends 8 hours either writing follow-up emails or chasing team members for deliverables on projects. We can’t claim that the Growth Marketing Command Center will eliminate all of those wasted hours—people are still people and we both know Jim will probably never hit that due date he agreed to—but it cuts them by at least 50%. How? Simple: we eliminated the need for tool switching. This is the summation of 12 months of iteration by our whole agency at CrowdTamers. This is a copy of what we use in our own company, and it helps you:
   1. Generate new marketing experiments
   2. Prioritize your efforts
   3. Systematically create top-quality ads
   4. Measure what works, and
   5. Gain long-term insights about marketing and growth for your business.
   Further, our Growth Marketing Command Center contains all of the lessons and strategies that CrowdTamers has used to help more than a dozen startups launch from $0 to $2MM in ARR over the last decade. Get insider knowledge on topics like
   • Build & test a million-dollar ARR acquisition funnel in 9 weeks
   • The 2,000-year-old trick that is crucial to improving your growth experiments
   • I spent $1MM in ads to learn what success looks like (so you don’t have to)
   • How to launch your thing today
   • Launching your idea, from start to finish
   • The Wolf and the Rat: Trading money for time in new startups

The difference in action

Without talking about any other feature than organization and performance in a marketing team, it only takes 20 or 40 minutes to come up with as different as these 3:

• We can’t guarantee a 5,128,205% ROI on this command center. But we wouldn’t be surprised
• End the frustration—get the Growth Marketing Command Center and manage your marketing from A to Z in Notion.
• Get 4 hours back a week with the Growth Marketing Command Center.

We could dive even deeper into what the Growth Marketing Command Center does for a marketer by exploring these 3 rhetorical devices for each feature, How would you write 3 variants of

• Only work on the campaigns that matter most for your goals

instead of

• Keep senior management in the loop on your marketing experiments with reports that focus on what they want to know

For a higher-ticket product, and one that’s more important to the overall success of a company, it’s worth diving that deep into phrasing the key features as values, because that’s how you learn what the market actually wants.