AMA: Loom Head of Product Marketing, Julia Szatar on Messaging

Start by defining the personas and the top-level narrative of the product. * Who is it for? * What is the problem statement? * What is the value prop? * What are the key benefits? You could start with the buyer and then modify it for the different end-users (or the other way around). There will be at least some overlap with nuanced differences, and some very different messages. In terms of choosing the marketing materials, this is also all about understanding your audience. How does they buyer make decisions, what materials do they consume, is there a standard procurement process for the buyer and materials they are used to seeing? E.g. white papers, landing pages, webinars? Same thing for the end-users. What are they reading? What press, newsletters, and blogs do they read? Are you targeting existing customers or trying to get new customers? Based on those answers you can explore the different materials and channels - 1 pagers, decks, emails, blog posts, videos (loom videos!), press releases, press outreach, webinars, events etc. The other factor is time and resourcing. For example, events are expensive and need more lead time.

We are still working on refining our process here, however, our usual process is to attend the commercial team all-hands to notify them of any new messaging guides and materials and then we record a more in-depth Loom video that walks through the messaging in more detail and with more nuance. We house these looms in a Sales Library in Notion. By recording it, reps and CSMs can review it more than once if needed in their own time. It also doubles as great onboarding material. We have a system to ensure everyone consumes the content.

This is mostly just practice, start writing, and keep writing. However, some specific things you could do include: * Actively consume other marketing content. For example subscribe to your favorite brand's emails, competitor emais. Read the content and think about why it is effective/not effective. * Before you start writing anything work with product to really understand why you are building a product or feature. Understand the audience and the problem you are trying to solve. * Get involved in user research. This is the most powerful shortcut to good messaging. Sometimes it feels like cheating, but your customers often use words in user interviews, that you can take and put into your messaging. * Build strong relationships with frontline teams: support, sales, CSMs. They speak with your users the most and often have the best insights. 

* a/b testing emails and landing pages * using an agency to survey audiences for large brand campaigns * direct user interviews * interviewing your frontline teams * competitive research Sometimes you don't have time to do all of the above and you have to go with your gut and then evolve it over time as you get to know your product, users, and market better.

This is the same as generally testing your messaging, but just segmenting your tests per audience or persona. * a/b testing emails and landing pages * using an agency to survey audiences for large brand campaings * direct user interviews * interviewing your frontline teams * competitive research Sometimes you don't have time to do all of the above and you have to go with your gut and then evolve it over time as you get to know your product, users, and market better.

We are actively thinking through this at Loom and it's not easy! It;s is about creating channels/spaces for the different audiences and making it easy for each audience to read what is relevant to them. So, for example, you could have different sections on your website for SMBs and Enterprise buyers - focusing on the different problems they have, or things they care about. You should try to have these audiences segmented in your database for email marketing. As far as your homepage goes, going with the most universal language up top, and then perhaps having a section below the fold that links to a more specific Enterprise page, where you can focus on messages that these buyers care about like security or admin features. 

* a/b testing emails and landing pages * using an agency to survey audiences for large brand campaings * direct user interviews * interviewing your frontline teams * competitive research Sometimes you don't have time to do all of the above and you have to go with your gut and then evolve it over time as you get to know your product, users, and market better. 

Since you will have a lot of different messages with potentially different audiences building some sort of matrix can help you make sure everything is cohesive. I personally love using tables for this kind of thing (a spreadsheet works, or building out tables in a doc, you can even make the page landscape to digest it more easily). You would start with what is the overall narrative for the platform? * Who is it for? * What is the problem statement? * What is the value prop? * What are the key benefits? Then below that break it out into the various products and ask the same questions: * Who is it for? * What is the problem statement? * What is the value prop? * What are the key benefits? You can find templates online, but I usually end up making a custom matrix because each launch is so different, especially if it's a platform.