AMA: Fivetran Director of Product Marketing, Zarmina Niazie on Messaging Strategy

Our messaging strategy is built on a framework that looks at this in 2 ways. First, we run a large scale research project once a year that gathers feedback via interviews and surveys from our target ICP, existing customers, sales team members, key technology partners, and analysts. We use that to understand how the market is evolving, how we fit into it today, and how we can play a bigger role in the future. For example, we were able to anticipate our ICP’s growing focus on AI because our yearly ...Read More

One thing we’ve seen a lot in my current role is competitors mimicking our messaging. They’ll start using the same taglines or similar marketing language that we came up with first. Sometimes that’s a good thing because if we’re building a new market category, we want other players in the space as long as we’re leading it. But it can get frustrating when everyone’s suddenly saying they’re "reliable and secure" and now the customer can’t tell the difference between us all. Our deep research into ...Read More

Incorporating customer pain points and challenges is honestly where good messaging literally starts. You can’t build meaningful product messaging without getting really clear on the problems the product is solving. The easiest way to do that is to just ask! There’s nothing more valuable than hearing it directly from the customer in exactly their own words. Some PMMs shy away from those conversations, but I think it’s critical. It's why former sellers tend to make good PMMs, they really understan ...Read More

We use a few different tactics to test and validate messaging before a full-scale launch. We start early by working with product design partners and early testers to hear how they describe the product in their own words. That gives us a good read on how the product is landing and how people naturally position it. We also work closely with sellers and the product team to understand what’s resonating so far and what gaps we need to fill. As the product moves through different release stages, we ru ...Read More

Consistency in messaging across channels is something we’re still actively working to improve. Right now, we provide detailed messaging resources to our internal marketing teams and the agencies we work with, which helps set a strong foundation. But the challenge is keeping a clear feedback loop to see how that messaging actually shows up and gets adapted across different channels. To close that gap, we’ve started testing a pod structure for key channels like SEO or email, where a channel expert ...Read More