AMA: Coda Former Product & Company Marketing Lead, Andrew Stinger on Messaging

Above all, meet your company where it is. If you’re a small team just getting started, you’re likely going to have nail a brand identity and core message, and then be flexible as you evolve from there. If you’re part of a 500 person marketing team, you’re going to navigate some different challenges related to step-wise refinement of your messaging.A few tried & true rules here: Define & Know your Core Nouns  Assign them value props and core messages of 25, 50, and 100 words Establish cle ...Read More

Yes! Persona-based messagingBefore I joined Coda, the team already had a set of personas derived from shared observations about who uses different kinds of technology within a team, and how they use itーand with what expectations of the technology. Since then, my amazing colleague Elaine has expanded our set of personas to guide things like shared product & story ideation in support of our enterprise offering. You can see the fruits of that labor at coda.io/enterprise, which I’m hopeful you’l ...Read More

If things are going right, these should almost feel one-in-the-same: The product direction reinforces the story and brand promise, and the brand messages easily and thoroughly communicate the value of the product.But, this isn’t always the case, as timelines, teams and strategic visions shift. And that’s okay! Especially at nimble, early companies! If one or the other falls out of alignment, just be sure you make the time cross-functionally to identify and discuss why, re-articulate whichever st ...Read More

In 2020, there has been major interest in workplace productivity software. Competition begets innovation, so it’s great that users have more choices than ever. Our role is to help potential users understand what Coda can offer in a sea of possibilities.Some of our guiding principles for competitive messaging are:Benefits & Value > Solution > Features > JargonThis means we always strive to show the value & benefits of our solution, instead of getting bogged down in the kind of in ...Read More

Two-part question? Two-part answer :) Messaging Processes & Consensus The type of messaging we do varies depending on whether we’re looking at our entire product, a feature or set of features, or a campaign or sales motion.In most cases, we’re likely to draft up a mini-brief to make sure we have strategic alignment. You can find an example mini-brief template in my PMM Hub template .For net new products, or those that shift the paradigm of our product, we likely need to allocate time to nami ...Read More

A few options we’ve employed recently:Data-based indicators A/B testing marketing email subject lines, and evaluating click-to-open rates Running multiple variants of ad copy and evaluating CTR & conversion rate Making three variants of a landing page (usually a published Coda doc), then (1.) supporting with paid ad spend to evaluate against ads metrics, as well as (2.) measuring SEO scores in AHRefs Running experiments on our site with language and/or design updates Qualitative indicators S ...Read More

Yes!At Coda, I’m very lucky to have a wildly talented Brand Team that supports our company, and privileged to have worked on 100+ customer-facing feature launches in 2020. (Seriously. Over 100. Because Coda runs on Coda, our product team ships incredibly. You can count all the launches here if you don't believe me!)Your overall product messaging should serve as an umbrella covering all of your individual feature messaging. Top-line product messaging is going to play a role in generating evergree ...Read More

No. But I do think their value changes over the lifecycle of a product and company, and the narrative should be re-evaluated at regular intervals. It’s one thing to have a hypothesis and convicted story that gets you to an MVP, but once you have real users giving real feedback in a real marketplace, you likely need to make sure you’re not clinging to an originating narrative at the expense of opportunities in your new context.  In “Crossing the Chasm” terms, once you’ve secured your beachhead, i ...Read More

You can find my thoughts on that in response to this question: https://sharebird.com/whats-the-best-way-to-ensure-that-messaging-evolves-at-the-pace-of-the-company-while-still-maintaining-some-consistency-should-i-give-up-any-hope-of-running-a-campaign-that-lives-more-than-a-few-weeks?answer=aWNAKGMxgy tl;dr - It depends on the "level" of the message, lifecycle stage of your company, and team priorities. Messages need some time to breath and resonate, but it's never a bad idea to thoughtfully co ...Read More