AMA: BILL Sr Director, Product Marketing, Kelly Kipkalov on Messaging

I've always found it best just to go straight to sales teams to get messaging feedback -- you need a depth of feedback that you can't get through tools like Salesforce. We have a couple of products in market right now where we're fine tuning the value prop. Given that we didn't do any user research or message testing ahead of time, we need to be hearing directly from the market on how we're positioning the product. So of course we're a/b testing different messages, but there's no substitute for a close operating rhythm with the sales team to keep the depth of feedback coming and to allow us to adjust on the fly as we learn.

I guess I'll have to pile on the Chat GPT bandwagon! But I will also say that we haven't used Chat GPT to create messages as much as we have used it to fine tune them, and to help with voice and tone. Some PMMs struggle with brevity and I've found Chat GPT helpful to take longer messages and skinny them down into something short, punchy and memorable. But you've got to start with the raw goods first and then let AI do the heavy lifting.

If you are focussed on messaging at the feature level, there's probably little you can do to differentiate if you are playing catch up with a specific piece of functionality. But messaging the feature in the overall context of how your product is different and better than a competitors is how you can differentiate. For me differentiation starts with product positioning (check out April Dunford's Obviously Awesome if you haven't already). Her five components of positioning: - Competitive Alternatives - Differentiated “Features” or “Capabilities” - Value for customers - Target Customer Segmentation - Market Category You'll end up paying less attention to tablestakes feature parity and more attention to what's truly differentiating about your product when you focus on positioning instead.

Ideally you're a/b testing in-market so you get a read on actual user behavior: headline testing on your website or paid landing pages, or subject line testing in email. Take really big swings in your messaging concepts and try to test ideas that are very different so the results will be clear. Incremental messaging changes aren't likely to be understood by customers and you'll probably get results that aren't stat sig in test vs control. If you don't have any in-market tools at your disposal, there's always quant research -- whether that's a more complex max diff or just a simple survey. Where I've seen this work best is where you've got very different messages that you are trying to prioritize (vs doing a messaging optimization.) If that's the case, doing survey based work will allow you to quickly test a range of messages, which would take much longer if you were to a/b test your way into it. The downside is that you won't have a read on the messages which will drive actual buying behavior in the same way you get when you a/b test. There's validity in both approaches so just be clear on what you're solving for to guide which way you go.

There's only one framework that I've ever needed in my career as a product marketer and it's sort of motherhood and apple pie: * Start with the customer insight written as if you were them (i.e. "I have xyz problem and really wish there was abc solution to help me.") * Write out your benefit statement that aligns to your customer insight. Keep it single minded, otherwise known as an SMP - Single Minded Proposition. And your benefit can be emotional, or it can be functional, depending on the space your product is playing in. * List out your RTBs - reasons to believe - that your product can deliver on the customer benefit. So for example if your product delivers on the benefit of efficiency, your RTBs become the things the product does or promises to do that can deliver on that benefit of efficiency (i.e. uses AI to save 50% of time doing x,y or z activity).

We iterate on copy - through in market testing - more frequently than we iterate on messaging. We treat our core messaging as more durable than copy and changing that too frequently probably means you haven't landed on the right messaging for your product. One caveat is the pace and type of innovation at your company, and whether or not it's changing the core value prop of your product or your product positioning. If the pace of innovation is high, you'll outgrow your messaging quickly. There's no set amount of time for refreshing your messaging, it's really going to depend on how quickly your business is growing and how fast you might outgrow existing messaging.

I think the worse thing you can do as a brand is to have your messaging get too far ahead of the product by promising something that you can't deliver, particularly if it's on a differentiating piece of functionality that could be game changing for the company. If you lean hard into messaging something that's not ready for prime time your customers will lose the trust in you that you've probably worked hard to establish. Trust and reputation is everything particularly in markets where competition is heated. Notice though that I said that messaging shouldn't get "too" far ahead of product. Sometimes saying nothing isn't an option and will allow competition to move further out of reach. This is where I would stay really close to product metrics on things like NPS, CSAT or Product Market Fit so you know when the product experience is moving in a direction that gives you comfort to put out externally facing messages. Perfection is the enemy of good, so you also don't need to wait for perfection as long as you understand where the friction in the experience is and how you, your sales teams and customer success teams can manage that with customers.

We have a Go To Market Strategy document and template that we use as a forcing function to gain alignment across Product, Marketing and Revenue teams. One part of that strategy doc is the positioning and messaging but it also includes the customer problem, the technical solution and why we chose that solution, competitive benchmarking and the channel marketing strategy among other topics. It's a holistic view of the product being launched and how we'll bring it to market. We typically start on the strategy doc while the product is still being built, and after we've done things like user testing, to help inform messaging and positioning. We socialize the strategy prior to beta launch and use the beta period to work with marketing channel partners to execute the strategy.

I always think it's important to be able to attribute impact or outcomes to anything we do as a product marketer. But I think it's probably more useful to test your way into winning messages vs launching an effort to assess the impact of messaging vs other elements of marketing like pricing, packaging or even the product itself. One goal of a product marketer is to continuously improve the effectiveness of your messages, and you do that by a/b testing in landing pages, websites, emails, etc. The best message is the one that drives behavior, and you can really only accurately measure that in real life scenarios where a customer has to take action.

So you're basically category building -- that's both exciting and intimidating! Exciting because you are doing something ground breaking and you get to shape the narrative vs fit into an existing one. Intimidating because the burden of educating the market will fall on your shoulders, and that takes time, money, patience and a lot of feedback from the market to know if your message is resonating. Be humble and be prepared for lots of pivots as you test and learn. I wouldn't recommend dumbing down your positioning by aligning to something existing; it sounds like you have a unique opportunity on your hands. I've recommended April Dunford's a few times in this AMA, and if you haven't read Obviously Awesome, run out and get it. It's a quick read and a great tool. I've used it to help me with product positioning for a more mature product and category, but I think it's probably even more helpful for the use case you're in.

Whether the audience is technical or non technical, you just need to speak their language and use their vocabulary. Using overly simple language for a technical audience won't help build credibility with that audience; using technical language with a layperson audience will just lose them in the process. As an example, I have been working on some language that's developer facing. With my PM team we've had some debates about some of our word choices. Language that is intuitive for them, isn't intuitive for me...but I'm not the audience. This is one of those rare cases where I'm opting for more technical vernacular because I think the audience will be looking for it and it will resonate with them. At the end of the day, get to know your personas well and tune your messaging to speak their language, not yours.

Customer quotes are incredibly validating for prospects considering your product. One practice I've seen though is for marketers to build customer stories or quotes that a particular customer uses and loves a product, but they stop short of explaining why. To your point about story telling, these types of basic quotes don't actually help strengthen the overall story you're trying to tell. All good messaging is grounded in your customer insight and product benefit. So any customer quotes or case studies should ladder up to the customer benefit. If your product helps customers save money, then your quotes and case studies should showcase exactly how your customers use your product to save money, and then quantify if you can, how much was saved. Use your stats as the reasons to believe (RTBs) that your product delivers on the benefit. Then you have one cohesive story.

I don't use a lot of variety in the way I approach strategic messaging - you have to be able to tell a good, cohesive story regardless of how you acquire customers. But with PLG, it becomes a lot more important to make sure that you're following the customer journey and have really tight alignment - at each stage of the funnel - between your messaging and the customer need at that stage. The higher up in the funnel, the more aspirational and broad you can be, but as customers move down the funnel, you have to get a lot more specific about what your product can do and how it will do it. And even more important than messaging, in PLG you need to make sure you have the right content aligned to stage in the funnel (video, tutorials, demos, etc). Messaging and content, aligned to stage of the buyer journey.

Anything by Trout and Ries (ancient, I realize), or April Dunford. April's 'Obviously Awesome' book is an quick and fascinating read, and while it focusses on positioning, good messaging falls out of great positioning. So start there and everything else follows!