AMA: Cortex Head of Product Marketing, Lauren Craigie on Messaging
April 16 @ 9:00AM PST
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Cortex Head of Product Marketing, Lauren Craigie on Messaging
Top Questions
Lauren Craigie
Cortex Head of Product Marketing • April 17
Serve your audience first, I’d say. If you’re both solving the same problem in the same way, your messaging will sound very similar, and that’s fine. What you’ll want to avoid is highlighting a differentiator in that feature that no one cares about. A good test for this is finding out whether tha......Read More
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Lauren Craigie
Cortex Head of Product Marketing • April 17
If you’d be embarrassed using those words when describing the product to a good friend, don’t use it. Then you’ll have two options: 1) Eliminate altogether, since those words are often just duplicative to the word following it. “Seamlessly integrates” becomes just “integrates” 2) Replace it wi......Read More
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Lauren Craigie
Cortex Head of Product Marketing • April 17
If you don’t have a process for this you’re going to be pulled into it anyways every 6 months or so. That’s how often either you or one of your competitors is shipping substantial new value. To get ahead of this, and avoid doing piecemeal updates to this page or that page, I would recommend sche......Read More
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What is your strategy for messaging a product that is very early in its lifecycle but is a differentiator for the company?
The promise of it is alluring but actual applications and the back end infrastructure is not ironed out yet.
Lauren Craigie
Cortex Head of Product Marketing • April 17
I think the answer here is the same as the answer for all messaging hierarchy—start with what you’re solving, and for whom. Nail the pain and outcomes, well before you get into the detail of “how.”
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Lauren Craigie
Cortex Head of Product Marketing • April 17
Love this question. But I don’t want to conflate messaging with positioning. Your positioning is who the product is for, what need it addresses, and how. Messaging is the words on a page you use to describe those things in public-facing mediums. So even if your product doesn’t have a category na......Read More
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Lauren Craigie
Cortex Head of Product Marketing • April 17
If the opinions on messaging feel REALLY divergent, it’s usually because 1) you’re not all answering the same question or 2) you’re actually disagreeing about copy not messaging. For the first, I wouldn’t ask a group of stakeholders, “what should our topline message be?” because that’s far too b......Read More
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Lauren Craigie
Cortex Head of Product Marketing • April 17
I don’t think I agree messaging should be differentiating but I do think it should make your company easily distinguishable. What I mean by that is that folks that focus too much on making their messaging sound unique against competitors often lose the plot for what their audience is trying to s......Read More
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Lauren Craigie
Cortex Head of Product Marketing • April 17
You may only know this by testing it with your target audience. Doing it in a vacuum in PMM or with product or sales will almost never work. Try message testing services like Wynter, send out surveys to existing users, or add a “marketing” section to your next Customer Advisory Board meeting.
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Lauren Craigie
Cortex Head of Product Marketing • April 17
Assuming we’re broadly talking about a technical user, and non-technical buyer here, I would focus first on learning how each makes their buying decisions. Then follow the same structure for both—why now, how we do it, why us—but abbreviate or expand each part according to that buying process. If......Read More
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Lauren Craigie
Cortex Head of Product Marketing • April 17
You tell them they’re wrong. 😂 This is just a good time to assert your expertise in PMM. But if you need to bring data to the problem, hire a copywriter, or contract one out for some editing—if the words and phrases are confusing to your target audience they’ll let you know. Or if we’re talking ......Read More
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