AMA: Mezmo Director of Product Marketing, Alissa Lydon on Messaging

I've read a couple of great books on building messaging. The two I enjoyed the most were: The Aha Moment by Andy Cunningham. She has worked with some of the most iconic brands in tech (including Apple during Steve Jobs' heyday). She provides a great framework for understanding what she calls "your positioning DNA." And she not only presents her concepts in a very straightforward way, but she also supplements them with lots of great stories from her experiences. Storynomics by Robert McKee and Th ...Read More

Messaging is notoriously difficult to train teams on because it is all-encompassing and ever-changing. To help make messaging more accessible, I find maintaining a few different assets helpful. Firstly, you will want a primary messaging doc that is multiple pages long and includes every detail related to:  The defined problem in the market How your product solves it Personas Use cases Business impacts Feature maps  Etc.  But while that is useful for someone in marketing who needs that level of d ...Read More

There are a few key components of messaging that are crucial, no matter what framework you are using: Define the problem statement. What is happening in the market that necessitates your solution, and what are the business impacts? In an ideal world, what does the solution look like? This shouldn't mention your product at all, but instead should be more of a point of view. This is helpful when determining what your thought leadership should focus on. What is your solution? This includes short bi ...Read More

Messaging is made up of two equally important components - Brand and Product. Brand messaging encompasses the product, vision, market, customers, culture, and more. It can be much more aspirational and future-facing. This is normally owned by corporate marketing, or maybe you have a specific brand team that cultivates this message. Product messaging (as you can probably guess) is solely focused on the product. More specifically, it speaks to the problems your product is solving, who you are solv ...Read More

When positioning your product against competitors, messaging should really focus on the key differentiators (i.e., what do you do better than competitor X?). To accomplish this, I start with the core use cases that our product supports and then map our features accordingly. From there, you can do a compare and contrast with your competitor's capabilities, and find that white space you can turn into compelling messaging. And don't forget to connect those differences back to your core value props ...Read More

This is always difficult to find time for (really anything post-launch is hard to prioritize, we are all guilty of getting to launch and moving on to the next shiny object!). But one thing I find helpful is to align messaging updates with roadmap updates. Updating the roadmap is a pretty standard cadence for Product and Product Marketing, and I found that it is a natural forcing function to reevaluate higher-level messaging. Plus, you get more bang for your buck! When the sales and marketing tea ...Read More