AMA: Atlassian Marketing Director (Trello), Jessica Webb Kennedy on Messaging

One of my favorite ways to test messaging is to ask people outside of my team/company/and even industry to review content I create. You can do this on a grander scale with things like usertesting.com but you can also hack it together on different platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter. Sometimes I will even reach out to a friend or family member and ask them to review a piece of content if I'm feeling like it's getting a little too "inside baseball".  In terms of staying in the loop on what my audi ...Read More

A great way to think about framing your messaging is by starting out with a short paragraph outlining who you are talking to and why they should care or need your solution/product. At Atlassian, we often start with these questions: Is this how you want your product or service to be represented? Are you appealing to the right audience? This is a good framework for laying out this information and keeping it top of mind as you formulate your messaging. I'll make another pitch for creating an overal ...Read More

One of the biggest mistakes I see when it comes to messaging in product marketing is trying to write to everybody at once. This comes back to the importance of who you are actually trying to reach with your content, if your language is too broad it won't land with anybody, better to be specific and make an impact with the audience you care about. This can also happen a lot when you write by committee - a surefire way to end up with sentences with many good words but don't mean much together. Thi ...Read More

This is always a challenge but in a lot of ways, I think it comes back to understanding that your brand isn't just what YOU say it's what the community says about you. Dave Gerhardt CBO at Drift has a ton of content around this, one thing he says that I wholeheartedly agree with is "What people say about your brand matters a lot more than what you say about yourself. Make sure they have something good to say." Meaning it's smart to invest in your community early and often and to listen to the pe ...Read More

Research, research, research! This is something we embarked on a few years ago for Trello - we had been acquired by Atlassian and over time we needed to cement our place as a mission-critical tool for businesses. We had made our name in the space of being a loveable freemium product that many users got a ton of value out of without paying and it was our job to reposition and repackage our offerings to add enough value to our paid tiers to make them really desirable. We spent a lot of time with i ...Read More

I think when it comes to features <> benefits in messaging you really can't have one without the other. Features are the what, benefits are the why - people need to be painted a picture of how you are going to help them solve their problems. A checklist alone doesn't make someone more productive, but a checklist that enables them to get their ideas out of their brains and ready to be collaborated on across their team tells a very different story. As a PMM it's our job to help bridge the ga ...Read More

I think it's essential to have some sort of lasting and broader messaging house for everybody internally to rely on. It's the only way to scale and maintain messaging across an organization. Internally for us, this looks like Confluence documentation https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/templates/message-house that is updated regularly. It's a one-stop-shop though for the marketing team to be able to send to any team internally to reference how we message and market our product and feat ...Read More