You’re an entrepreneur or marketer building a climate tech company that helps other businesses or people mitigate or adapt to climate change. 

Among your many business goals: generate more leads, sales and brand awareness, so that your business can achieve more revenue and attract more investment.

Good news – the climate tech market is expected to continue growing. Future Market Insights projects growth at a compound annual growth rate of 24.6%, from about USD38 billion in 2025 to over USD220 billion by 2035. 

The not-so-good news? 

Funding has been slowing down. CB Insights’ State of Climate Tech 2024 reports that global climate tech funding declined for a second consecutive year in 2024, falling by 40% year-over-year.

As the market expands and financing slows, your company will face increased competition for customers, talent and investments. 

What can you do to set your business apart from the alternatives?

 

Why messaging matters in a competitive climate tech market

Yair Reem, a partner at Berlin-based Extantia Capital, notes in PwC’s State of Climate Tech 2024 report: 

“With some of the hype gone out of the market, more mediocre propositions are no longer attracting the interest they did previously. Truly exceptional companies, with clear and compelling value propositions that extend beyond simply being green, are still securing funding, but there is a lack of money generally.”

You heard that right: 

Companies that stand out with undeniable value beyond their tech’s environmental benefits are in a better position. 

That’s why, regardless of whether you’ve just started your company or it’s scaling up fast, you need to find the right messages.

Messages that clearly and memorably differentiate your tech and communicate your distinct value to attract potential customers and investors. 

In this article, you’ll find out more about the messaging traps climate tech companies get into and why finding the right messages for your climate tech matters.

 

What’s wrong with climate tech messaging now?

I’ve examined the messaging of hundreds of climate tech companies. Here are the 3 most common messaging traps I see:

1. The curse of knowledge

If you’re not careful, you may fall into the curse of knowledge trap. 

The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that makes it hard for you to imagine what it’s like not to have specialised knowledge about a topic because you are an expert in that topic.

So you wrongly assume others are just as knowledgeable as you are. 

Your climate tech is your “baby”. You know its engineering or technical details inside and out. 

No thanks to the curse of knowledge, you frontload the features and technical details in your communications, from the website to product descriptions. 

The result is jargon and complexity in your messaging that may not make immediate sense to the non-technical people among your target audience. 

 

 

MK McGowan, a fractional head of content for climate tech businesses, eloquently identified the messaging struggles faced by climate tech founders in her report, When Buyers Don’t Get It.

Among the founders she interviewed, 87% found it challenging to “translate complex technical concepts into compelling language for non-technical audiences”. 

Yep, these founders could have been blindsided by the curse of knowledge. 

The reality of what your audience wants? 

Studies have shown online readers prefer clear, straightforward language free of unnecessary jargon and complex terms. 

Yes, even experts like easy-to-read content. 

 

Skeleton Technologies’ messaging is too technical in my view. Granted, I’m not its target audience. But remember, even experts prefer plain language. Best thing to do to resolve this? Do message testing with your ideal customers.

2. Not leading with business value

You may have chosen to lead with the environmental benefits of your product or service. 

Or you may have defaulted to your mission statement relating to sustainability as your main message. 

I get that – it’s important to get such “green” messages out because you are doing impact work that addresses the climate crisis. And they help you connect with like-minded partners and people. 

However, these messages obscure your tech’s impact on your ideal customers’ businesses, like their operational efficiency, bottom line or regulatory compliance. 

If your messages aren’t specific about how your product or service can solve your ideal customers’ more urgent business problems or help them achieve their pressing business goals, they won’t resonate with them.

According to MK McGowan, 62% of the founders she interviewed began to lead their messaging with their tech’s business benefits after getting customer feedback. 

This goes to show that even climate-focused customers make buying decisions based on business value, which is more compelling than loftier ambitions such as “a more sustainable future”.

 

Like many climate tech companies, Alterno leads with a climate impact goal on its website homepage. Even if you were to scroll down the page, you can’t get a clear picture of its products or solutions quickly enough. This leaves its visitors wondering: What is the product or service? Is the product for me? How does it help me? What will exploring further to find the answers to these questions cost me?

3. Your messages are misaligned internally

When the messages communicated by your different teams are different, the dissonance creates confusion for your potential customers. 

You may find your company in this situation:

Marketing, product, sales and customer success come up with their own messages based on what they’ve heard and seen from their perspectives. 

These different messages are communicated via various assets and channels, targeting your ideal customers at different stages of the buying journey.

The mixed signals confuse your ideal customers, who wonder if your company is talking about the same product, feature or capability.

 

 

But I hear you when you say: Hey, it’s been working – we’re doing fine even with inconsistent messages. 

Think of it this way, though: Are you just getting by? How many leads are you not converting? 

How much revenue are you leaving on the table because you don’t have consistent and aligned messages that work cogently to build trust with your ideal customers?

What can you do to avoid the above messaging traps, unify your messages and align your teams? 

Find the right messages for your climate tech.

 

What is climate tech messaging?

Emma Stratton, who wrote the definitive book on messaging for B2B tech, Make It Punchy, defines messaging as “what you say to help your buyer grasp why your product matters”.

“It translates your positioning into key messages that describe how your product or company delivers that unique value,” she writes.

Messaging is a purposeful discovery of what to say to help your ideal customers understand why they should care about your climate tech.

The messaging process involves:

• identifying who your ideal customers are 
• discovering what they struggle with and what motivates them
• knowing how your tech solves their problems better than others
• mapping your tech’s best qualities to their pains and desires
• pinning down your tech’s value proposition and key benefits 
• writing the key messages to convey your tech’s value 

Put it another way: 

Messaging isn’t about looking at your competitors and copying what they say. Even if you wish you could have said that. 

(Though it helps to see what your competition is saying and isn’t saying, as part of your competitor analysis, so you know whether your value proposition is distinct and memorable.)

Neither is messaging about broadening or watering down your messages so you can talk and sell to everyone.

Nor is it about sounding more intelligent with complexity and big buzzwords. That’s being fake-smart, which isn’t clever at all.

It’s also not about talking up only the features and having your ideal customers struggle to see the business value your product or service brings.

Instead, messaging is an intentional process of finding the relevant messages from your customer’s perspective. So that you can resonate specifically with the ideal customers you want to attract and build their trust.

At the most fundamental level, your messaging process should uncover the answers to these top-level questions:

• What is your product/service and what does it do? (Your product/service and category)
• Who is it for? (Your ideal customers)
• Why should they care? (Your unique value proposition and benefits to them)

 

 

Climate.ai’s website offers an excellent example of effective messaging. It answers the 3 questions right out of the gate in the hero section.

What is the product and what does it do?
Spatial resolution technology that provides hyper-local, AI-powered climate insights

Who is it for?
Food and agriculture industry (This is clear from both the copy and the visual in the hero section)

Why should they care?
They can stay ahead of climate volatility, maximise productivity and ensure supply reliability.

And what happens after you’ve found your messages? Document them in a messaging strategy document. This is a living document – as your product or service evolves and the market changes over time, clarify, refine and adjust your messages periodically.

 

Why does climate tech messaging matter?

Climate tech messaging matters a lot. 

When you’ve determined your messages, you know what to say to your ideal customers. You can then communicate these messages in your website, emails, social media and other channels.

But you’ll get much more than knowing what to say about your product or service.

I’ll break it down for you.

Relevance

During your messaging process, you don’t only define what to say. You also define who you say it to. This means, as part of the process you nail down who your ideal customers are and the struggles they have, so that your messages can be tailored to resonate with them.  

This way, you show them the relevance and value of your product or service in solving their specific business problems. You help them see “what’s in it for them” – i.e. your business value beyond your climate impact.

The result of this resonance? You’ll attract right-fit leads, repel poor-fit ones and shorten your sales cycle.

Clarity 

Messaging provides the golden opportunity to strip away unnecessary insider jargon, technical complexity, abstract language and generic green buzzwords.

What you get from your messaging exercise is clear, concrete and plain language from your customers’ perspective. It ensures that you speak to your ideal customers directly and they can understand what you say.

Efficiency

Messaging produces the key messages that your different teams – whether marketing, product, sales, customer success or other teams – can consistently communicate across various channels and assets, from your website, landing pages, email and social media to your ebooks, white papers, blog articles and other content types. 

They also help eliminate your internal inefficiencies regarding copy and content. You can:

• stop struggling with producing content efficiently because everyone now has the same idea about what problem you solve
• end the internal debates on what to say about your product because your teams can now agree
• create content that doesn’t get lost and forgotten after it’s published because your ideal customers can resonate with it

Trust

You may think: Won’t we sound like a broken record if we say the same things over and over again? 

The thing is, most buyers are not yet ready to buy. The 95:5 Rule says 95% of B2B buyers are not in-market at any one time.

This means that for most of your ideal customers visiting your website or encountering your messages elsewhere, they are still far from initiating contact or buying from you. 

It also means they are consuming information about you. They want to find out what you can do for them. They are sussing out whether they can believe in you. 

As you expose them to your clear and consistent messages again and again, your ideal customers will find them intentional and familiar, not repetitive. 

This familiarity helps you build your ideal customers’ trust in you. It also builds memory links that will activate when they are ready to reach out, so that your product, service or brand will be among the first ones they will remember.   

 

Final thoughts

Climate tech companies face unique messaging challenges. 

The curse of knowledge, failure to emphasise business benefits and misaligned internal communication can be significant barriers to conveying the value of your product or service. 

These messaging traps directly affect your company’s ability to attract customers and talent and to secure funding in an increasingly competitive market.

A purposeful messaging process will help you find the relevant messages and clearly articulate the business value of your product or service, beyond its environmental impact. These value-first messages are the foundation of your sales and marketing. 

In my next article, I’ll walk you through the messaging process and show you how to document your strategy in a messaging guide, so that you can use it to align your product or service with your ideal customers’ needs and wants, and to align your teams on clear, consistent messages.

 

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