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Jenna Crane

AMA: Klaviyo Senior Director of Product Marketing, Jenna Crane on Messaging

July 15, 2021 @ 10:00AM PT

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  1. What are your creative ideas, tips, or resources that can help to improve storytelling skills?

    I'd love to get better at using storytelling in my product launches. I know of the basics e.g. knowing your audience, focusing on the benefit and value over features etc. but I'm looking any creative ideas, examples, or resources that could help me really sharpen things up and hone my skills. I'd love to hear peoples recommendations and experiences of how they developed their skills in this area.

    Jenna Crane
    Jenna Crane

    Triple Whale 🐳 VP of Marketing | Formerly Klaviyo, Drift, Dropbox, Upwork • 5y

    The best of the best on this topic is Andy Raskin: https://raskin.medium.com. Highly recommend reading a bunch of his stuff, especially his now-famous Zuora sales deck deconstruction .

    Other books you can consider: ‘Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs’ and ‘Creativity, Inc.' (and I second the recommendation of 'Made to Stick'!) 

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  2. What messaging framework do you use?

    Would love frameworks to share.

    Jenna Crane
    Jenna Crane

    Triple Whale 🐳 VP of Marketing | Formerly Klaviyo, Drift, Dropbox, Upwork • 5y

    I find that it depends on the scale of what I’m messaging. If it’s for a small project (a landing page, a video, etc.) I like to go with: Key message 3 supporting value propositions, with taglines and descriptions Supporting points for each of those value props — whether those are unique differentiators, supporting features, and/or reasons to believe/proof points I like to use the following table structure: https://www.dropbox.com/s/x1catf2yn6zh451/Screen%20Shot%202021-07-14%20at%209.59.54%20PM. ...Read More

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  3. Fundamental question: How is positioning different from messaging? I have attended so many PMM talks and the lines seem to blur between the two. Would love to understand how they are different/the nuances. Thanks!

    Jenna Crane
    Jenna Crane

    Triple Whale 🐳 VP of Marketing | Formerly Klaviyo, Drift, Dropbox, Upwork • 5y

    I’m so glad you asked this, because it’s actually one of my favorite topics to get on the soapbox about! :) I think April Dunford defined positioning best when she wrote, “positioning describes the specific market you intend to win and why you are uniquely qualified to win it.” I'll add my two cents which is that strong positioning means identifying and deeply understanding the most strategic target audience(s) you want to acquire, and picking out a place in their mind where you are the clear wi ...Read More

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  4. How would you recommend Product Marketing Managers improve their messaging skills?

    Jenna Crane
    Jenna Crane

    Triple Whale 🐳 VP of Marketing | Formerly Klaviyo, Drift, Dropbox, Upwork • 5y

    Practice, practice, practice! Get as many reps in as you can, and have a marketer you admire give you very candid feedback. Bonus points if you can do a working session with someone who’s skilled in messaging — build a messaging framework together, live, so you can get a front-row seat to watch how they think and how they approach it in a real-life situation.

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  5. What are some common Messaging mistakes you see Product Marketers make?

    Jenna Crane
    Jenna Crane

    Triple Whale 🐳 VP of Marketing | Formerly Klaviyo, Drift, Dropbox, Upwork • 5y

    Not value-oriented: They focus on features and functionality, not value and benefits They’re not customer-centric: They aren’t putting themselves in the target audience’s shoes, to make sure the language is what customers would use and the benefits are things customers would care about Writing copy instead of messaging: You can write some great-sounding sentences that are more copy than messaging; that is, it's hard for other people to distill down the essence of what you're trying to say and th ...Read More

    998 Views
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  6. How do you approach messaging and positioning when your product isn't the market leader?

    Jenna Crane
    Jenna Crane

    Triple Whale 🐳 VP of Marketing | Formerly Klaviyo, Drift, Dropbox, Upwork • 5y

    You change the conversation. Positioning is all about defining a target audience and a place in their minds where you are the market leader. There’s some great inspiration in the ‘Positioning of a Follower’ chapter of ‘Positioning’ by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Worth reading, but to paraphrase one example, 7-Up didn’t try to compete with Coca-Cola and Pepsi in the category of‘soda.’ They competed with the sub-category of ‘cola’ within the ‘soda’ category, positioning themselves as the ‘Un-Cola.’ Wh ...Read More

    1,489 Views
    3 requests

  7. How do you incorporate voice of the customer into positioning and messaging?

    Curious to know how customer research works best in your experience and how to drive to actionable outputs like positioning and messaging.

    Jenna Crane
    Jenna Crane

    Triple Whale 🐳 VP of Marketing | Formerly Klaviyo, Drift, Dropbox, Upwork • 5y

    It’s so important! I like to do some exploratory research before I draft anything — both quantitative and qualitative if I can — to hear in an unbiased way what our target audience values, looks for, struggles with, etc. That will put some (necessary and helpful) constraints around our messaging and positioning, because whatever we end up with has to be within the bounds of what our target audience cares about and will find valuable. Then there are a lot of great ways to use customer research to ...Read More

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