AMA: AlertMedia Vice President Product Marketing, Harsha Kalapala on Messaging

Every company needs the following building blocks of marketing: Upper funnel - Content engine (Attract eyeballs), Brand (Build a reputation) Mid funnel - Demand gen engine (Turn eyeballs to drive demand) Lower funnel - Product marketing (Help turn qualified prospects into customers) Beyond the funnel - Customer marketing and advocacy (get the customers to become voracious users and raving fans — an extension of your marketing) There will be a lot of connective tissue, partnerships, and dependencies between the above functions. But every function should define clean KPIs - lead indicators and lag indicators of success. Product marketing can be charged with different objectives depending on the company. My team at AlertMedia for example focuses on Lower funnel and beyond. Even within my team, our product marketing managers own the success of their respective product and work closely with the customer marketing manager to make sure she has the messaging she needs to drive product adoption with customers. The work of our customer marketing function feeds into customer advocacy - which then provides customer stories and referrals back into the top. Marketing produces the best outcomes when the various functions above are humming together. One’s output becomes the other’s input and so on. I don't believe a general marketing function exists (or should exist) once a company matures past a product-market fit stage. Everything mentioned above is carried on to varying degrees as a team sport at a company until you hire someone to own it. Product marketing, for example, is typically driven by the CEO, product leaders, and/or marketing execs until a proper PMM function is established.

Most early to growth-stage tech companies have 1-2 products. For those companies, product marketing and brand have a significant overlap. Their product identity makes up most of their brand identity. For larger orgs we see more distinction between brand and product messaging where there are multiple products, services, and solutions in place. Though my experience has mostly been in startups and growth companies, the approach I have seen work for my peers at larger companies is to start with a core brand architecture. There will be multiple stakeholders to convince and KPIs impacted with how you go to market. The best approach is the one that steers away from opinions and brings consensus on the frameworks you will use to execute. There will always be some art and some science with messaging. Agree on the science before you get into the art to avoid endless loops of group editing. My favorite go-to framework is the Story Brand framework by Donald Miller - It does a great job connecting the brand-level narrative to product-level story. This framework takes some creativity to apply to your own business model, but it is very effective. It is the same framework Pixar uses to model their best movie hits. A few other frameworks to consider: * Pick a simple message house framework like the ones mentioned here. * PMA’s storytelling framework * April Dunford shared simple and effective frameworks in her book Obviously awesome In all cases, it's super important to cast the customer (not the product) as the hero of the story.

Don’t overcomplicate it. Just find the fastest way to talk to customers. You could set up a formal feedback session with surveys, incentives, and all the jazz - which still gives you biased feedback. Or... you can just hop on an already scheduled customer call TODAY and casually ask customers for their quick qualitative feedback. Here is a sample message to your customer success folks: Hey {CSM name] - I am just trying to get a quick and casual reaction from our customers on this new messaging I’m putting together for an upcoming launch. Do you have any calls with customers this week where you don’t anticipate using the full scheduled time? If so can I please hop on it with you and ask for their help once you take care of business? This will be a huge help! Here is a sample script to ask to customers live on a call: Hey {customer name} - I’m here to ask for your help. I am working on some marketing content for a new product launch coming up. I can let you in on the secret early if you promise to keep it yourself until launch, and share your quick reaction? This will only take a couple of minutes and will really help me out. For quantitative feedback, there are great tools out there like Wynter.com to get reliable feedback from your target audience. 

Trying to get buy-in over a theoretical outcome is always an uphill battle. I would focus on making meaningful progress by yourself on category design. Ask for forgiveness, not permission. Test things out and gain some traction. And then worry about getting buy-in to do more of what works. It will also be important to educate your team on why category creation (or redefinition) is the right strategy for your company at this time. Get them to read the book “Play Bigger” by Christopher Lochhead. Follow Christoper Lochhead on LinkedIn for bite-sized insights on the topic. Show them examples of companies in a similar situation winning with category design techniques. Combining this education with early proof that this is the right move for your company can really help your team see the light.

You begin with the customer - either buyer, user, or both, depending on the objective of your messaging. We should definitely consult with internal experts in product, sales, customer success, and other customer-facing teams. However, it is important to take their input as one source of information. Messaging is actually the middle step of product storytelling. The order of formulating a story starts with: Positioning - How do we want our product to be perceived in the market? What unique value do we deliver relative to alternatives? What is our story? Messaging - How do we communicate the value? How does our product help the user solve their problem? What buyer objections must our story overcome? Copy - What words do we use to deliver the message? How do we describe the solution on multiple communication channels? In summary, always start with the customer in mind, and start with the why. Check out this great piece on how people don’t buy products - they buy a better version of themselves.

Short answer - yes. It depends on what you mean by “writing”. The skillset of a best-selling novel writer vs. an effective product marketer is different. Written copy is by far the most powerful way to engage our audience and drive results. In my experience, you can’t get really good at product messaging without being creative with words. And you can’t be really good at that without reading a lot. So my advice - read a lot and practice writing for the intended medium.

Some of the best performing product launch emails I have seen have the following elements: * Cuts to the chase - Skip the prologue and get to the point within the first couple of lines. And then add in the necessary context. * Human - Write like you talk. Avoid jargon and be believable. * Provoking - Human emotion is the most powerful driver of action. If you can tap into the emotional pains and benefits for your audience, you hit gold. * Helpful - Offer something of value in the email. An insight, or a promise. * Clear CTA - Offer one action item and make it low lift Note that I didn’t say “short”. I do think we should remove unnecessary words, but the goal of the email is to be understood and to prompt action. Engaging messages always win over short messages.

Winning your category and taking control of it can be a super powerful strategy. However, I think too many go straight to creating a new category. We should first strongly consider how we can redesign a category that exists and win by renewing how people think about the category. Category creation isn’t for everyone. It is really hard to do. While it can be powerful, it can also be really difficult to pull off, take a long time, get expensive, and become a major distraction for your team if it’s not the right approach. I have seen a lot more success with redefining a category that has old-school incumbents and the way of doing things. Such a strategy needs a lot of channels to come together. PR, analyst relations, social influencers, and a content marketing strategy combined with strong messaging can create momentum for change in the consumer’s mind. Of course, a strong and differentiated product offering is a key ingredient as well. Another important consideration is to create sub-categories within known categories. Recently at TrustRadius, our team disrupted the category of buyer intent data by creating and pushing a sub-category called “downstream intent”. We realized that the biggest competition wasn’t direct competitors, but customer confusion among different types of intent data providers. Downstream intent is now starting to be a familiar term associated with b2b review sites offering intent data that is more down-funnel. This strategy has been in motion for a year and a half. Category design takes time.

Getting messaging right is hard. We tend to get biased on our own messaging and copy after staring at versions of it for hours and days. It is important to get objective pulse checks from people closely resembling your target audience. If the message tends to focus heavily on features and the product’s benefits vs. the customer outcomes, that’s a sign of missing the mark. I always say the story should not be about what the product can do for you, but about what you can do with the product. The latter is about empowerment - which is what your customer likely wants to see and hear.

Getting all teams to hum along is the hardest part. A successful product launch is not just a product marketer’s job. It’s a team activity. Product marketing plays the quarterback, with support from Customer Success, Sales, Product, Support, and the rest of marketing. Getting everyone on the same page and sending a cohesive experience to your audience is a tough challenge. Influencing other teams and leading without authority is an important career skill for product marketers to develop.

I would first define ownership of each product marketer - whether that is by product, solution, vertical, etc. depending on your business and market. I would then work on positioning guardrails together to collaborate on how you will and will not tell the story of your products. At the end, the most important thing is that your product narrative is consistent across all channels and your audience should see it as coming from one cohesive voice. Collaboration is important, but just as important is ownership. There are several approaches to get messaging and positioning right. The product marketer who owns it makes the call on which path is the right one to take.