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

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, t ...Read More

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 Alternat ...Read More

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 yo ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 int ...Read More

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 t ...Read More

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 dow ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 funne ...Read More

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 competitio ...Read More