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

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 people who are early adopters of your product to understand their experience. This is why it's also so important to get out into the market and learn about what's happening outside of your own narrow perspective. Brand reputation is hard to build and easy to lose and it must be protected and nourished. Every touch point a person has with your product, team, marketing, etc. is a brand experience and it behooves teams to understand that in the real world there isn't a separation between the product experience and marketing experience. At the end of the day, you are trying to create a loop that goes from getting a person or team to using your product> evangelizing your product and growing your reach - this IS the secret sauce about brand and is something that can't be bought. Read more about why brand is so important and join DGMG for more of Dave's musings.

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 gap between someone identifying the problem they may not even yet be aware that they have into the solution that your product/feature provides in a seamless way. Messaging and brand become the key differentiators when people are selecting a tool because at the end of the day most products can't win on features or price alone - it's about how you make the person feel and how you have articulated why your solution is the no-brainer option.

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 internal stakeholders and doing external research to learn as much as we could before we made any changes. That being said - once we'd collected enough feedback and insights we had to act - one of the bigger challenges I see for a mature product to reconfigure their messaging is to play it too safe. Sometimes these types of projects can start big and then scoped back so much that it doesn't feel like there was a truly tangible change made. I think what helped us was having a broad team of leaders internally who could provide different perspectives throughout the process - this wasn't just a marketing change, it was a company-wide transition and we needed to think about it from all angles - product, sales, support, design etc. I think the other big thing to keep in mind is the context of the world when these changes are being made. When Trello first launched it was a completely different time, and though many of the challenges our users faced remain the same- there is a completely different technical and work landscape they are facing. These types of changes can't be made in a vacuum and it's important to keep that in mind. My colleague Leah who led this project did an awesome feature in Writer.com about all of this if you'd like to dive deeper! 

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 overall messaging house for your brand/product to be able to come back to over time and use as a launching point for specific features/GTMs. This is something that will make your job so much easier and not feel like you are starting from scratch each time you try to set up the messaging for a launch.

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 features. When you are small and scrappy it's possible for one person or a few people to do this without a proper document but as your team grows and as more and more people work in a distributed way a messaging house becomes a necessity - in fact, it's something I recommend prioritizing early because once it's too late it becomes a big cleanup job, with a messaging house you can set your team up for success long-term by providing the guardrails and guidelines early and often. When it comes to new features and releases it can be really helpful to create essentially mini-messaging houses that help the group rally around how you will be bringing said feature to market. It not only builds alignment but it again becomes a document that you can look back on and point people towards in the future.

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. This is why I think it's really important to have a good chain of command for content creation > editing > publishing. If content touches too many hands it can end up in a state where it feels like a human didn't actually write it.

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 audience likes and doesn't like - this comes back to knowing your user segments inside and out and constantly updating them. This means knowing where they spend time and making sure you've got a pulse in those communities. I like to also stay informed with what competitors are doing, we use tools like Crayon to understand what changes are happening in the market - this can be a good way to make sure that our content isn't coming off too similar to our competitors and being drowned out.