AMA: Okta Former Senior Director of Product Marketing, Customer Identity, Jiong Liu on Messaging

There is a process to messaging and I think many folks are overly focused on the last step which is the final translation to words. I actually think this piece is the simplest of all the steps so I don't spend a lot of time looking at documented work when I interview product marketers. What's really important to me is understanding how a candidate thinks about and navigates the process itself. How does someone internalize the needs of the customer and market dynamics. In many ways, this is more ...Read More

I am constantly testing messaging. Any customer meeting, event or executive briefing I attend, I'm testing messaging in some way, even if it's not messaging that I'm actively working on. The most critical part of this process is to ensure you're leaving space for feedback and reactions or explicitly asking for it. One mistake I used to make when I first started as a PMM was to go into presentation mode and just barrel through a deck/pitch instead of adding pauses and deliberate questions through ...Read More

The 3 most critical components of messaging IMO are target audience, hard-hitting & differentiated value props and customer/field validation. Target audience - I can't understate the importance of understanding your target audience. This includes getting deep into who is your economic buyer, your champion and key stakeholders across the organization. For the product area I oversee (Customer Identity), we actually see 2 major buying centers (IT/Security and Digital/product development) and a ...Read More

Sales is definitely the biggest critic of messaging. Getting them involved early and often and treating them as a true partner in the process is fundamental. There are 3 things that I always do when it comes to messaging: Partner with the best sellers of your product area. They are experts in reaching your target audience and executing your pitch. If you know they are happy with the message and actively using it, then you've gone a long way in ensuring the message resonates with the right audien ...Read More

Competition is critical and should always be a factor in your positioning and messaging for B2B. At Okta, it is a core part of our brand identity and position to be best-of-breed, vendor-neutral. This is how we plan to win the market and is also a core competitive message. When we look at all of our messages by importance to the customer, on average, this is likely the #2 or 3 most critical. However, we elevate it to #1 and reinforce this everywhere because we want our marketing and field teams ...Read More

One method for doing this is to understand buying patterns, natural bundling that may be occurring and determining what initiatives/projects your customers are undertaking when they purchase your products. For example, customers that are purchasing Okta's Customer Identity products are generally looking to solve 3 main initiatives: building better customer experiences faster, modernizing their infrastructure or securing their customers. Once we understand what they are trying to accomplish, we c ...Read More