AMA: Calendly Head of Product Marketing, Jeff Hardison on Messaging

There are so many ways to test messaging, but here are some of my favorites:1. Work with your Sales and Customer Success teams to reach out to your customers with an offer to give you feedback on your messaging via a phone or video call. This works better than you'd expect, but if they don't engage for some reason, offer an incentive (gift card, discount, etc.). This is even easier if you're Customer Marketing team has already pre-qualified customers who want to give feedback on messaging, produ ...Read More

The best ways I've found to ensure your messaging lives for more than a few weeks:1) Collaborating with your company leaders to not just review, but also develop the messaging2) Testing the messaging with real customers (and sharing their responses with your coworkers)2) Training — and sometimes testing — your coworkers on the messaging so they know how to use it3) Spreading the messaging everywhere — website, video, emails, etc. — you can and measuring the effectiveness (and sharing that measur ...Read More

Repeat, repeat, repeat. As our CMO Jessica says, once you start getting tired of sharing the messaging, then you're just getting started. Of course you need to email, share on Slack, host on Asana, and so on. But that's just the beginning. Speak publicly about the messaging. Present on the messaging in not just one-to-many meetings but also small meetings with demand gen, content, different sales teams, etc. Get their feedback in small, "safe" situations. Record Looms of you presenting the messa ...Read More

One thing I've seen work is positioning "positioning" as business strategy or a business plan versus marketing "words" we want people to think about and use. Positioning is the company's strategy — based on research and expertise — for who we're going after (e.g., sales teams) with what category of product (scheduling automation) to solve what problems or address what jobs to be done (qualify, route, and schedule meetings via the marketing website) to achieve a business outcomes (shorten the sal ...Read More

One of the biggest mistakes I see marketers make when talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning (ML) is they just throw the terms around. Like their employer can just sprinkle some AI salt on something to give it extra marketing zest. Think like a journalist for a small-town news site, instead, and try to explain why AI/ML is important and how it works for the use case at hand. Interviewing a software developer working on the AI/ML aspect of your product is one of my favorit ...Read More

For me, there are few types of "Why's." There's the lowercase "why." And the uppercase "Why." Lowercase "why" gets at communicating why a prospect should choose your offering over the competition. For that, I recommend the popular value pillars/differentiation method I mention in another question about corporate positioning/messaging.The uppercase "Why" gets at why should this company exist in the world? How are you making a dent in the universe? How are you improving the world for the better? W ...Read More

First off, I recommend reading my friend Adam DuVander's book Developer Marketing Does Not Exist. He is the master of teaching people about how to work with developers. In the past, when I've done developer marketing, these were some of my most successful initiatives (but please read Adam's book as he's much more comprehensive):1. Create a solid developer portal that not only provides access to your developer tools and technical documentation, but also includes examples of what other developers ...Read More

I recommend collaborating with your executive team to first create "umbrella" positioning/messaging that covers your entire product line. Then, the product-line product marketers + product managers can create their own positioning/messaging for each new feature/product that aligns with the umbrella messaging. For the umbrella corporate messaging at Calendly, we use the popular Value Pillars / Differentiators method, but we tweak how the inventor might have envisioned it to sound natural in our c ...Read More

One of my first jobs in tech marketing was promoting Amazon's software development kits (SDK) to developers. What I learned from everyone at Amazon is the power of using "plain English" when talking about anything. If you look at Amazon's site, you'll notice they use very simple language to talk about everything from shoes (on the retail site) to highly complicated software tools (in Amazon Web Services). The idea, I think, is that everyone can benefit from the writer working really hard to unde ...Read More

If you frequently find yourself in a "messaging by committee" situation, I'd recommend working directly with your boss (e.g, the CMO) and the CEO to create a DACI document (Driver, Approver, Contributor, Informed). Let's take company messaging.You might be the Driver. Your boss might be the first Approver, but the final Approver is the CEO. Contributor could be the other C-level executives. Informed could be the other people who typically weigh in, as well as other who need to use your messaging ...Read More

We've all seen this and cringed, right?Over-reliance on benefits: "Our scheduling automation platform help you shorten your sales cycle! Want a demo for something that you don't understand at all but somehow magically shortens your sales cycle?"Over-reliance on features: "Our scheduling automation software allows your customers to book meetings with you on your website. Want to pay a bunch of money for something that sounds like something you could hack together yourself?" Instead, I like to tel ...Read More

One thing I've seen work is positioning "positioning" as business strategy or a business plan versus marketing "words" we want people to think about and use.Positioning is the company's strategy — based on research and expertise — for who we're going after (e.g., sales teams) with what category of product (scheduling automation) to solve what problems or address what jobs to be done (qualify, route, and schedule meetings via the marketing website) to achieve a business outcomes (shorten the sale ...Read More

Good product marketing helps build the brand. Good brand marketing helps drive usage of the products. To me, they're like cousins in marketing. Perhaps more so than any other marketing disciplines. Take Apple, a master of marrying their brand marketing and product marketing. Here's an old ad for the iPod. There's the logo, and an engaging illustration of someone dancing, sure. Some people's idea of brand advertising might stop there. But Apple doesn't. Then they add: 10,000 songs in your pocket. ...Read More

If the product's audience includes a handful of large Enterprise customers, I'd ask for approval from Sales and Customer Success to reach out to the customers and run the messaging by them on a video or phone call. "Hey, Big Customer. We value your opinion, and would love just 15 minutes to run by you some words we're using to explain this new product. We thought you could give us your honest opinion — we won't be offended! — on what's working and what's not working with our messaging." One of o ...Read More