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

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.’ While I’m not a huge fan of the name, it successfully defined a niche that 7-Up could be the leader in, and then focused on talking about why cola isn’t so great after all. Here's an example of how you would translate that to the B2B space: Let's say you can’t compete with the market leader in service offerings. But you can take the position of the top ‘self-service software’ — and then focus your marketing on why it’s unattractive to pay an arm and a leg for someone else to use the product for you.

* 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 they're instead forced to just use that copy verbatim or not at all. You should be able to distill down the core elements of the messaging into its key components, which can be phrased in different ways for different audiences and channels. * Thinking it has to be perfect right out of the gate and/or not revisiting messaging again after it’s shipped: Messaging is a constant evolution. You should continue to shape and mold it as you learn more and as the market changes. Air out those static, stale messaging docs every few months to see if there’s anything you can make better!

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'!) 

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.

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 winner. All your marketing actions are then designed to successfully achieve that position in that target audience’s mind, influencing them to consider and adopt your product. Positioning shapes the brand strategy, pricing, naming, product roadmap, partnerships strategy, marketing/advertising campaigns, and more. Which means that positioning is the lynchpin of marketing strategy. If you have weak positioning, even the best marketing execution in the world won’t be successful. So if positioning is the strategy, messaging is the execution. It’s how you articulate and communicate your positioning, bringing it to life in a way that resonates with the target audience. The focus is on the language — how you describe your unique position in the market, phrasing it in a way that: * Clearly articulates your unique differentiation * Uses language that the target audience easily understands and/or uses themselves * Makes the prospect think or feel positively towards the product/company

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 refine and validate messaging and positioning once you’ve drafted it — through focus groups, quantitative research, customer advisory boards, having people react to mock landing pages, doing A/B tests on the website, etc. Back in the day I wrote an article about some of my favorite ways to use customer research in product marketing; you can find it here! 

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.png?dl=0 If it’s for something slightly larger — a launch or a campaign, for example — I add on to the above with: * Overall - Target headlines - Key message per target persona, and/or guidance for how to adapt the messaging to serve different audiences * For each value prop: - Key benefits / value delivered - Key use cases - Success metrics — what are the key outcomes someone can expect to see? (e.g. higher customer lifetime value) And if it’s for an entire product line or company, I typically compile messaging frameworks for 3 different stages of the customer journey: * Awareness: Why should customers should evaluate your type of solution? This doesn’t mention your company or product at all, and is designed to inform really top-of-funnel activities or conversations. For example, the messaging framework for Klaviyo’s SMS product talks about why text message marketing is so valuable, and why companies should consider it, but never mentions Klaviyo. * Consideration: Why should your company earn a place in the consideration set? This pays off the awareness messaging above it, explaining how your company/product delivers on the value propositions established in the awareness-level messaging. In the Klaviyo example, the 3 awareness-level value props are ‘deliver a better customer experience,’ ‘double your ROI’ and ‘build direct relationships with your customers.' The consideration-level messaging uses those same value props, but talks about how Klaviyo delivers on them — knowing that those are the criteria that people will use to build their consideration set. It’s like you're giving the prospect permission to say "ok, this company checks those boxes, I’ll learn more." * Decision: Once you’re in the consideration set, this is where you set yourself apart from competitors and define the purchase decision criteria. This messaging should live at the intersection in the Venn Diagram of: what customers value, what your product/company does uniquely well, and what is competitively differentiated. This is usually the most extensive framework I build out, because it shapes the majority of what goes out into market: website language, sales assets, paid ads, etc.