AMA: Cortex Head of Product Marketing, Lauren Craigie on Messaging

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 name, the pain it solves and who it solves that pain for should already be something well-understood. The language you choose should be well aligned with both. Comparison can help if your product was built to fill a gap in existing tools—but it can also box you in based on the comparison tools capabilities. If you’re like a CRM for engineering team, but also do “other stuff”—that analogy in your messaging could do you more harm than good.

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.”

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 solve, and the words they use to describe their pain and ideal solution. It’s very rare you and your competitors do the exact same thing in the same way for the same ICP. Tune your messaging to your specific audience. And make it consistent everywhere. The weight you place on personas, value drivers, process, and outcomes should feel similar everywhere your message exists—which is what makes it distinguishable in a sea of others.

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 scheduling a messaging review committee every 6 months. You can start with gut feels—does what we said 6 months ago still resonate? Is it still true? Is it still unique? And let stakeholders like founders and marketing and sales counterparts respond. Then add in quantitative data like website, search, and ad data, as well as use case and call recording data to see if what the market is asking for—and the words they use to ask for it, is addressed by your messaging.

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.

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 broad. I would get much more granular: What value do we provide to which audience, when, and how do we do it? What data supports that those are the things our audience actually cares about? What’s our answer to that question today, vs what we want it to be in 5 years? If you can map these details out there shouldn’t be any disagreement about messaging 2) If you feel aligned on value for the audience, and how the product helps, you might actually be having a copywriting problem. Someone doesn’t like that particular word or phrase. Make sure to clarify if you’re directionally aligned, and just need to find a different way of phrasing.

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 with more “how” detail. “Seamlessly integrates” becomes “initiates an HTTP request” in certain situations.

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 your technical audience is deciding based on whether they like the UI—you better spend a lot of time explaining the workflow. If your non-technical audience is buying based on ROI—you better spend a lot more time on “why now.” But everyone—technical and non-technical—wants to know how you solve a problem. It used to be enough to just anchor on the “why” for non-technical audiences but with a much fiercer competitive landscape for nearly all markets, people are no longer just buying the topline value message. Everything they demoed this week claims the same benefit, afterall. Everyone needs some understanding of how you specifically help, and where you fit with their existing stack—what you do, and don’t do. So don’t skip that, even for “non-technical” audiences.

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 that thing could be a reason why your ICP does or doesn’t buy. I remember I was once competing with another link analysis tool, and really wanted to highlight that we were using unsupervised machine learning models while our competitors were using supervised 😂. My boss brought me back to reality that that was a little too much information for our average buyer—and it wouldn’t influence their decision. Now, if I really wanted to drive the market here, I should tie this differentiator to the job that my audience needs to accomplish, or a benefit they’d experience—but only if the job or benefit is already understood by them.

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 about digital copy, and you’re working with a web analytics company or product—find out if dwell time or click-through or conversion rates are higher or lower in areas where you use that message. Or even better, use a service like Wynter to get direct feedback from your target audience. Let them be the ones to point out that your choice of words is confusing or opaque. If they don’t raise the flag, your stakeholders might win this one! Or check your call recording software for customer reactions when certain messages are used in slides or in conversation.