AMA: BlueVine Sr. Director Product Marketing, Anna Wiggins on Messaging

There are a lot of messaging frameworks out there. If you are on the hunt for templates, check out April Dunford's website (Obviously Awesome is a must-read of Product Marketers) or the Product Marketing Alliance. In general, a messaging doc should be the single source of truth and act as the building block for any external-facing language used in your marketing. Also, it's likely that you won't always be there to walk folks through the document, so it should be as clear and self-explanatory as ...Read More

I usually use qualitative insights in two ways: 1) uncover the “so-what” behind good messaging 2) test target response to messaging.Qualitative studies are a great quick way to understand customer or prospect behavior, needs, and pain points, which help you identify meaningful insights that will make customers pay attention to your message. However, since qualitative studies are not statistically significant, they should be reinforced with quant data or insights from your CS and sales teams. Qua ...Read More

Positioning is an internal exercise during which you define the unique value proposition for your product, how the product is differentiated from the competition, and where it sits relative to the competition/alternatives in consumer’s minds. Positioning is a building block for messaging. Messaging is customer-facing articulation of the product’s value proposition. Messaging is the building blocks of all customer-facing language whether it’s on your site, your pitch decks, or your ads. In genera ...Read More

I would say this depends on your roadmap and when the platform functionality is scheduled to launch. If you incorporate platform messaging too early, you can actually do more harm than good because your prospects will sign up for your product expecting a platform and instead will get a few basic features. If platform capabilities are launching soon, you may want to start incorporating this aspect into your messaging to gauge reactions. Alternatively, you may also want to hold this messaging back ...Read More

This will depend on the maturity of the product. If your product and target audience don’t change very much, you can look at doing annual refreshes. However, if you are working on a growing product with evolving audiences or you’ve recently pivoted, you may need to tweak your messaging more frequently - even on a quarterly basis. You should set expectations with your stakeholders on your message refresh frequency as part of your annual product marketing plans.  And of course, major changes in pr ...Read More

I find UserTesting to be a great tool for getting a quick directional read for how your messaging will perform with your target. I typically test for comprehension and emotional response or in other words did the target understand the product benefit and how they feel about it. Note that UserTesting will give you about 15 responses, so paid media may be a better bet if you are interested in testing messaging at scale. Also, if you have a customer advisory council or an early beta tester group, t ...Read More