AMA: HubSpot Former VP of Product and Solutions Marketing, Vidya Drego on Messaging

It's pretty difficult to get a straightforward read on the effectiveness of your messaging and positioning but there are a few things you can do to ensure your messaging is more likely to succeed. 1) During the process of creating the messaging, work with your market research team to test aspects of the messaging with prospects and customers. This can be both quantitative test of words or descriptors you use as well as qualitative tests where you actually test aspects of a pitch with customer. 2 ...Read More

Positioning and messaging both help you explain the value you deliver. I've always thought of positioning as something that lives internally within a company to help the organization contextualize their product or service within their category. It's the strategy by which you choose to communicate your value. The messaging is the words they use to explain this to the outside world. The two are very related and in some companies with a mature offering, they may be mostly the same. For companies th ...Read More

That's a tough call. What we've found recently is that as we've adapted our messaging for an enterprise audience, it's resonated less with small businesses. Some companies choose to vary their messaging by audience size (e.g. Shopify) others have one-size-fits-all messaging regardless of size. I think another option is somewhere in between where there are different reasons to believe, proofs and sometimes even value propositions depending on the size of the prospect or customer (but with other a ...Read More

I truly believe messaging should be a living, breathing thing that gets updated periodically. How often though can be challenging. It's often not feasible to update it at every product launch or, if decision making takes a long time, it can be tedious to update frequently. This is where I think aligning on year or multi-year positioning that reflects the future state of the product roadmap can be helpful. Then, you can think of messaging as evolving in several steps until you realize that ultima ...Read More