AMA: Handshake Senior Director of Corporate Marketing, Kristen Ribero on Messaging

This will depend on what your product/service/platform does and who the target audience is. For instance, in one of my previous roles, we had one product for one audience. Of course the platform was extensible, had different feature sets, but the value was easy to articulate to one audience. On the other hand, in my current role at Handshake, we have a three-sided talent marketplace with very different products and audiences. We tackle this by having one company value prop and then tailor specif ...Read More

There are a number of messaging framework templates available these days. I shared an article that I like to reference (link is below again); I also suggest you check out posts from Andy Raskin (https://andyraskin.com/) who I've worked with previously or check out this recording of Tiffany Spencer doing a talk at Heavybit. It's a handful of years old, but still relevant: https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/getting-to-a-messaging-framework-and-value-prop/.  More than having the right template, ...Read More

Insights are extremely important and should always be an input into your messaging architecture or recommendation. Market and customer insights are one of the best ways to make a case for your recommendation, in fact.  So you don't get stuck in an analysis paralysis state, I'd do a quick audit to understand the current state of data and insights as it pertains to your product/market/etc. Find out: What research is complete and available? This could be something like a survey to your database tha ...Read More

For my company, it's currently shared between product, product marketing and design, but that's mostly a factor of being a startup and in the process of building out each of those functions. I think about it in two ways: Is the in-app copy descriptive of the product itself? Things like feature names, onboarding wizard copy, CTAs make sense to cut across the three teams I mentioned, with product and design having a heavy say in those decisions. Is the in-app copy meant to drive conversion activit ...Read More

The first step here is to share the WHY behind a messaging project. If you can get every group to align on that and the outcome, getting ‘approval’ is much easier. I start with a kickoff meeting and have often shared this article (linked below), particularly in startups where you may be dealing with multiple stakeholders who have not been through this type of project before. All those orgs listed - Product, Sales and CS - are key inputs of forming your unique value prop, but ultimately it’s up t ...Read More

I’m a big believer in experimentation in any marketing activity. And messaging should be included in that. I see a lot of enterprise product marketers get caught up in taking on a huge messaging and positioning project/revamp that typically cuts across multiple teams and stakeholders, which can feel difficult to pull across the line. These projects take time, but this is where experimentation comes in... it’s easy to test messaging in your digital channels and that's a great place to start. I su ...Read More