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

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 learnin ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 specif ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 answ ...Read More

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 ...Read More