AMA: Momentive Director of Product Marketing, Mike Greenberg on Competitive Messaging

I'm a big fan of A/B testing, but it can take a lot of time, and you need to be careful not to change things up-funnel if you want a clean result, which can be paralyzing. The best approach is to get an initial signal on your messaging through other means (like a Message Testing solution), then move on to in-market A/B testing if the study indicates multiple possible winning messages (as a validation exercise). You're also likely to get better segmentation data this way, possibly resulting in unique messages for some of your target audiences. As a general rule, I think it's good to present a consistent message across channels that target generally the same audience. Your prospects are likely to encounter you in several places during their awareness and consideration journey, and one touchpoint should reinforce the rest. There may be cases where you need to alter your voice to communicate authentically (for example, typcal Facebook or LinkedIn ad copy would feel out of place on Reddit or Twitter), but this shouldn't completely alter your core value statement(s) or brand guidelines.

This is probably one of the toughest problems we face as marketers. A lot of times, teams will look at a combination of leading quantitative indicators (clicks, conversions, time spent, etc.) and qualitative signals (from buyer interviews, listening to sales calls, etc.), to take a best guess at what’s working and what’s not. There are lots of problems with this. It’s tough to isolate messaging as the primary driver of these results, and assign quantifiable measures that will clearly indicate improvement if you make changes. Qual feedback takes a lot of time to gather, especially if you want to validate your messaging across a number of buyer personas. A/B testing can help, but you and your GTM team need to be pretty careful not to change anything else (including upper-funnel stuff like ad copy and targeting) that might impact results, which can be paralyzing. Worst of all, while you’re doing all of this, you’re already in-market: the train has left the station and you’re losing opportunity if you’re not sure your message is connecting. Instead, my recommendation is to validate your messaging before you go to market. (I won’t do too much self-promotion here, but it just so happens we make a Message Testing solution at Momentive, and it’s one of the products we leverage the most internally.) With a message testing solution, you can get a number of messages in front of your target audience — we tend to target a broad array of business buyers — and get real data on which messages resonate across a attributes like overall appeal, uniqueness, and, importantly, desire to learn more (as well as segmentation across buyers if you like). This is the kind of thing that, a few years ago, you’d probably need to engage a research agency to run, but modern survey-based tools like ours have purpose-built methodologies built-in, and you can get a clear signal on your key messages in just a day or two. We ran one of these recently to test new headline messaging for our Momentive homepage and it paid off in spades. It validated a messaging direction with our target buyers that was different than what internal leadership was advocating for — so we had some data to bring to the table justifying our positioning (see another of my AMA responses on gaining XF alignment on positioning). If we hadn’t tested, there was a strong risk of going to market with a losing message on one of our most important properties. Instead, we were able to go live on Day 1 with a message that we already know will resonate. In fact, two of our test messages performed strongly, so we were able to run an in-market A/B test to find a winner without really risking any traffic to a poor performer. tl;dr: I recommend using a survey-based solution to test your messaging before you go to market. You’ll get quantifiable information about what works and what doesn’t, aid internal buy-in, and gain a lot of launch day confidence. You will influence other performance KPIs driven by the GTM team, but PMM’s biggest responsibility is ensuring you have messaging that resonates with target buyers.

I won’t sugar coat it: localization is hard. While I’d love to give you some magic advice that will ensure your messaging resonates globally, the reality is that geographic segmentation and market insights are as important as any other work you may be doing to personalize your messaging and GTM strategy if you want to be successful. We’re actually working on refreshing our global GTM strategy now at Momentive. That being said, it’s unlikely you’ll need to stand your messaging completely on its head to resonate with target buyers across geos. You do need to be in tune with local buyer preferences and the competition. There are a couple pieces of research that might help your messaging development. First, conduct some buyer research across the geos you play in or are considering playing in (a usage and attitude or similar study, or if prohibitive, get super close to your sales channels) so that you can understand any significant differences in purchase drivers or buying behavior and reflect that in your localized messaging. For example, you might find that having a local data center is a big purchase driver in certain geos — if you have one, you’d want to amplify that in any messaging targeting that part of the world. Also, conduct geo-specific competitive analyses for your top-tier target geos. I’ve found a number of smaller, local competitors this way who are unknown here in the US but nonetheless successful at capturing significant market share by deeply tailoring their messaging — and in some cases injecting a little F.U.D. when it comes to the international/multinational competition. It usually goes something like, “we’re local, therefore we understand you better.” You need to be able to combat that by demonstrating your understanding of local buyers with value statements and proof points that combat those ideas, in addition to your typical competitive approach. One of the projects I’ve undertaken to this end is gathering customer case studies and social proof from top-tier markets so that we’ve got local insights and customers backing us up. Lastly, the world is a big place. Make sure you understand where your biggest opportunities are, and choose carefully which geographies to prioritize in your GTM motion, as resources aren’t limitless. If you don’t have a tiered and prioritized list of target geos that’s adopted throughout the organization (including when it comes to product support), champion this project so that all teams are aligned on where in the world you want to gain marketshare. Hope that’s helpful!

There's always a cost! * You can interview existing customers to validate whether proposed messaging resonates, but it's difficult to get validation at scale this way (certainly nothing quantifiable), and super time-consuming. * You can A/B test proposed messaging in-market — on your homepage, for example — but there's opportunity cost for every visitor who encounters messaging that isn't a winner. Worse if you're testing with paid placements. Survey-based message testing solutions are pretty affordable, and you'll know before you go to market which messages are winners and losers (or worse, if you really need to go back to the drawing board). Consider that the increased confidence up-front, and prospect of a more successful launch, might justify a small expenditure before you're putting money into content production and ad spend that might fall flat.

I'd describe positioning as how we want to be perceived in the market, and messaging as the customer-facing language that proves it. But in practice, I've rarely (if ever) had this specific conversation at Momentive outside of PMM: it tends to be pretty marketing-centric. What I've learned from internal stakeholders is that what's most important to them is to be able to look at a messaging document and know what's internal framework vs. something they can use in external-facing materials, so we tend to mark things clearly in those terms when putting a new messaging resource together.

Great question (and there are a few others around messaging development process that I’ll use this response to cover). We have a few processes and frameworks in place that really help with XF alignment. First of all, if you don’t have one, I recommend developing a messaging framework or template that the entire PMM team will adopt consistently, and that you’ve socialized with partners in advance. That way, your cross-functional team knows what to expect from PMM whenever they receive a new messaging brief. Over the past year, I collaborated with my fellow PMM leads to create a fresh messaging framework template at SurveyMonkey, and we brought our frequent internal customers into that process to provide feedback (primarily folks in Marketing/Communications and Sales Enablement roles). As a result, we’ve now got a template that partners agree — in advance! — will contain all the key information they need to be successful, and this cuts down greatly on any XF friction that might occur when it’s time to deliver a new messaging doc. Additionally, it’s important to show your work so that you’re bringing partners along for the ride as they read what you’ve got to say. The opening third (or so) of our template is dedicated to summarizing (with data!) the market opportunity, buyer pain points, the competitive environment, etc. We also show the building blocks of our positioning — the target audience, problem statement, competitive differentiators, value statement, and benefits — as separate elements before weaving them into customer-facing copy. If we’ve done any message testing (more on that in a different AMA response), we’ll include the results of that, too. There’s little room for “we don’t believe you”-type statements, because we’re drawing a pretty clear map of how we arrived at our positioning. Lastly, we’ll usually do a first pass with our creative team of writers to ensure our tone and voice are on point, and customer-facing messages are compelling, before briefing in the GTM team. Ultimately, your writers (if you’re not writing all copy yourself) are on the hook for translating your messaging doc into an array of wonderful collateral. The extra bit of preview and polish has everyone ready to run with your messaging and start creating as soon as you hit “go”.

As far as your approach to messaging, there’s probably more in common than there are differences in engaging B2C and B2B buyers (there are more differences in GTM strategy than messaging). I’ve spent a lot of my career in the gray area in-between these buyers, as PMM for consumer productivity apps at Apple which also targeted SMB and EDU buyers, and in my current role working with SurveyMonkey, which scales from a free offering all the way up to enterprise solutions. Some observations… The B2B journey is a bit different because it can involve a lot of convincing others (those with the purchasing power) to spend the company’s money and resources on your solution, and it’s good to be aware that the internal champion for your product may or may not hold that power, or even be in the same department as the decision-maker. You need to put messages in the hands of the champions that will appeal to buyers, so that they can advocate on your behalf. Understanding that journey, and who the decision-makers are, can help you customize your messaging and GTM strategy to appeal to all parties. As one example, when developing messaging for our SurveyMonkey Enterprise product, we produce a lot of messaging for IT buyers around topics like mitigating data security risks and ease of setup and administration, because we know IT is going to be heavily involved in the purchasing decision, even if they’re rarely the end user for the product. By contrast, for our self-serve, freemium SurveyMonkey product (which is typically still B2B), our messaging focuses on end user pain points and use cases for surveys — IT isn’t typically in the loop for these purchases, so we don’t need to prioritize those messaging themes. It’s super important to understand the decision-making and purchasing process of your B2B buyers to inform the personas you’ll need to influence. You might also consider your buyer’s goal when constructing your Reasons To Believe and any aspirational statements. The B2B buyer might be more motivated by driving organizational success (by which they’ll gain personal accolades), whereas the consumer may be more personally-motivated. What’s important is that as you’re personalizing your messaging for different buyers and buying journeys, if appealing to both of these segments, you don’t compromise your brand voice or tone, which should be consistent (it reflects who you are as a company). Business buyers are consumers too, so I subscribe to the school that advises approachable, friendly language regardless of audience. You still need to poke the pain point, describe technical solutions in nontechnical terms, stand out from the competition, and provoke an emotional response that triggers a buying decision — regardless of whether it’s a business buyer or consumer on the other end of the conversation.

The short answer is that you'll need to develop messaging with both audiences in mind, and apply the correct messaging (or combination of messages) based on the target audience and funnel stage for each part of your GTM strategy. Our SurveyMonkey product spans self-serve and enterprise (sales assisted) businesses, with a lot of existing end users we can target for upsell and cross-sell, departmental buyers and administrators who may not be users of our product but key to the buying process, and an untappted market of potential new customers. So there are a lot of potential permutations of our core messaging depending on who might be listening. It's helpful to have customer journeys mapped out to support your GTM strategy, and help your XF team identify who is coming into the buying journey, and when. To answer your quesiton more specifically, in a broad, general audience resource like a press release or top-level organic webpage, I'd recommend a high-level "greatest hits" of how your product benefits both users and buyers. When we do this, it usually looks like some version of, "End users will love how much easier our product makes it to do [departmental pain point], while IT administrators will appreciate improved [IT buyer concern]." Provide journey paths for readers to self-segment into more targeted and detailed Consideration resources. As a general statement, end users will outnumber decision-makers in terms of who you can reach, so you can be more efficient getting their attention. If you can convince the user that your product will make their lives better, they can get your sales team or Consideration resources in front of the right decision-maker(s) internally. That mid-funnel discussion is often where some of the more buyer-targeted messaging comes in. But there are no hard rules and you may find a different approach that works for you, or campaigns that directly target buyers for larger accounts. As your GTM strategy comes together, it may be helpful, wherever you're listing your campaign tactics (we typically maintain a launch activity tracker in Google Sheets), to clearly list what funnel stage and target audience(s) each bit of collateral supports. That'll help you and your marketing communications team align on the right messaging, at the right level, for the right audiences with every piece. 

Short answer: we use our own (Momentive) message testing solution since this is the market we're in and we have a market-leading product. Not to toot our own horn too much, but here's what I like about our offering that I would look for in any solution you're considering: * The respondent panel is built into the product, so you can target virtually any global audience you like without having to purchase and integrate a panel separately * You don't need to be a research scientist to use it: research and analysis methodologies are built in and driven by AI, so the solution will tell you in a clear way what's important and significant in the results so you know which message(s) resonate * The product works to filter out unreliable responses (for example, a respondent who speeds through the survey or always chooses the first option) to ensure good data * It's fast, delivering responses in a matter of hours Overall, a Saas-based solution is worlds better (and cheaper) than the time and cost of outsourcing this to an agency. Attributes I'd look for are the built-in panel, ease of use, results that will clearly tell you what to do next, and speed to ROI.

My best advice here is not to skimp on establishing credibility: lead with something compelling that tells your pitch audience why they should listen to what you’re about to say, and why they should believe you above other companies they may be hearing from. All other things being equal, brand reputation and domain expertise go a long way. A great way to do this is with some signature research. You’ve probably seen a lot of organizations making this a big part of their GTM strategy: “State of [Department]” reports, or “Top 10 Challenges Facing [Persona] in 2023”. These can give you some compelling stats to lead with in pitches, validate your buyer challenges, and provide long-form content that can become part of your demand generation strategy. Again, not to be too self-promotional of SurveyMonkey products, but this isn’t a heavy lift: you can target anyone you want to hear from and get reliable market data at scale in literally a matter of hours these days. Bringing proprietary insights to the party is really easy to do, and the audience will lean into your pitches. If you don’t have a lot of great data or think you’ve got something truly cutting edge that the market doesn’t yet understand, get creative. I think a lot about the introduction of the original iPad in 2010. The first thing Steve Jobs does after walking onstage is quote a Wall Street Journal article: “The last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it.” What he’s really saying is, “There’s a ton of market demand for what I’m about to show you.” But before getting to that, he spends the next 5 minutes repositioning Apple as “the largest mobile devices company in the world.” He is asking the audience to change the way it thinks about Apple, so that they’ll believe he has the authority to make claims that are coming about the mobile device market, and why you want a third device between your laptop and your smartphone. It’s an absolute masterclass in setting up the conversation. But most of us don’t possess the power to bend minds like that — much easier to show up with some great market and customer insights to support your pitch ;)