From localization to messaging strategy

Diane Wiredu describes herself as a “messaging strategist, conversion copywriter, and recovering translator.”

Before LionWords, she spent over a decade working in localisation and global communications — adapting content across languages and markets for B2B technology brands. She is multilingual.

The turn from translation to messaging strategy came from what she observed during that work. Her published bio frames it this way: she discovered that the messaging problem lived upstream — before anyone tried to translate it. The source copy was the thing that needed fixing.

LionWords is the result. A one-person practice serving B2B SaaS and tech companies.

I help B2B SaaS and tech companies basically with their messaging. I help them better explain what the hell their products do, why anyone should care, why they should buy them.

That framing is deliberate. Her LinkedIn tagline reads “Anti-buzzword Strategist.”

The bluntness runs through everything: the bio, the content, the way she describes the work. She’s not positioning as a “strategic partner” or “brand architect.” She’s saying your homepage doesn’t explain what you do, and that’s the problem she fixes.

Research first, writing last

The LionWords approach puts research at the centre of every engagement.

Diane’s published framework is explicit: “Great messaging is 90% research, 10% writing. We get to know your market, product and brand inside-out. Understanding your mission and importantly — your customer.”

The practice is intentionally small. Her About page notes that the work is boutique and every client works directly with her: no middle layer, no team handoff.

Diane’s view, repeated often enough that it functions as a principle, is that great messaging is mostly research and only a little bit of writing. The teams who try to skip the research never write the right copy.

Building without ads — the LinkedIn chapter

Diane has around 14,000 LinkedIn followers. By the standards of big LinkedIn creators, that’s a small audience. Diane is clear-eyed about this.

It all depends, right? For some people, the big content creators are like 100,000 followers. And then for some, when you’re a micro follower, it’s like 5,000. I think what’s more important is — are you sharing things that are valuable? Do you actually have genuine engagement with your stuff? Are you helping people and are you creating valuable relationships and connections and community?

For a one-person consultancy, 14,000 followers is more than enough — if those followers are the right people and the content produces conversations that convert into work.

Diane has been investing in LinkedIn for a long time. She describes it as “a bit of a long game and a slow growth” — and she didn’t follow a particular strategy to get there. No growth tactics, no engagement pods, no frequency hacks. What she did was share a point of view that was hers, consistently, in her own voice.

I’ve actually made real connections, real friends, real opportunities, discovered podcasts and masterminds and events through LinkedIn. And that stuff I actually find more valuable.

The impact, as she describes it, happens off-platform — in conversations, in DMs, in relationships that started with a post and turned into something else. LinkedIn functions as a lead generator for her business, but the relationships it produces are the more important output.

What happens when you skip the playbook

When asked what she’d recommend to someone starting from scratch, Diane skipped the obvious answer.

I think the obvious answer is to create valuable content that helps people. But that’s not what I’m going to say, because I think if you’re really starting from scratch, I think what you need to do is just test. I think you need to have a point of view, you need to have an opinion. And I think you need to write and share things in a way that are unique and relevant to you.

She’s direct about what she sees on the platform. Diane confirms there are too many people on LinkedIn that are just trying to publish to basically get the numbers, or they’re trying to game things or follow tactics.

As she puts it: “It becomes very apparent very soon, and you end up with this kind of vacuous following where no one’s really engaging with you.”

Her counter-position: find your people, find a posting cadence and content style that suits you, and commit to slow, valuable growth over fast, hollow growth.

I’m more of the school of thought of slow, valuable growth is more important than huge growth.

What other operators can take from this

The takeaway for service businesses is that LinkedIn success doesn’t look like LinkedIn success for a consumer product. The number that matters is whether the content produces conversations that convert into work — not the follower count.

Diane’s content works because she has a defined point of view about messaging that her audience recognises as hers. The frames she uses, the directness, the allergy to buzzwords — these are consistent across everything she publishes. They’re what her clients are hiring when they hire her.

Operators who build their own version of that consistency get their own version of the same compounding effect over time.

The deeper point is about time horizon.

Diane describes a slow game, one she’s been playing for years before either the practice or the audience produced obvious payoff. A founder who treats LinkedIn as a long-term investment in their own authority, rather than a short-term lead gen tactic, is building an asset that compounds in the same way.If you want to speak to GTM leaders like Diane directly, join the GTM Society now for FREE — where the practitioners rewriting how SaaS markets itself share what they are working on right now.