AMA: Podium VP, Product Marketing, Hally Pinaud on Messaging

With early career product marketers, I find that messaging struggles are often tied to one or more of the following things: * Not knowing where to start * Issues editing / punching up the language * Developing messaging in a vacuum * Not the messaging itself, but getting stakeholder buy-in on it The most important thing you can do to grow your skill is get some at-bats. But here are some actionable tips for improving your work if any of the challenges above feel like growth opportunities for you. "I don't know where to start!" Find a good messaging template / framework. There are loads of them out there if you Google. Ask peers and mentors for their preferred template. Get a filled out example to see what they do. Messaging is sort of like jazz; you can freestyle on how you deliver once you're very good at working from the sheet music. "There's no 'so-what?' here." Some PMMs are really value-oriented, punchy copywriters naturally. Many aren't. There is zero shame in that. But here's a tip: end with your headlines. Seriously. Don't start with wordsmithing. I usually get all my support, proof, reasons to believe, and why now validation out in a doc. Way more than I need. Then I pass it to a colleague to edit or talk through what is superfluous. Your goal should be to edit. Finally, when the message justification is tight, you feel more confident putting a great headline, elevator pitch, or value prop header to exactly what you mean to say. "I did it all by myself!" A lot of early career PMMs make the mistake of messaging from their gut. Yes, I'm sure you've met a lot of customers—but carefully consider the context around those conversations. Have you spoken to them with the intent to create messaging? Or has it been in sales conversations, customer case studies, etc? Until you do, treat your opinion like a hypothesis and get out there to test it. And, as much as possible, balance qualitative with quantitative (surveys, third-party data, etc.) to validate. "No one uses my messaging." Sometimes this is simply a matter of socializing your work. But the more insideous problem is when stakeholders disregard messaging because it doesn't validate their own opinions and observations. Disagreement is healthy, but points to my point above—you shouldn't try to win in a war of opinions. Do the work to learn and document all of it. Share not only the messaging but the process (for example, data or key quotes.) Bring your revenue stakeholders in to help you research. Heck, have them help you edit and brainstorm the punchy headlines. All of these things help make your messaging better and also bring your stakeholders along to use it.

If you get to know who you're talking to, it's a lot easier to know what to say. That's a core tenet of messaging and being a good conversationalist in general. Your first step with a question like this is to establish buyer personas. Who's involved in the buying committee? Are they the key decision maker or an influencer? What do they need to know? If you don't know, start by doing win/loss in partnership with your revenue teams. Try to get a handle on who was involved in recent purchase decisions, what their process looked like behind the scenes, what motivated their decision, and where they had questions. You may confirm you have highly-technical buyers driving the bus. Or, you may find that the key decision maker and budget holder is typically a business owner who brings in an IT partner to evaluate the technical feasibility of your product. Do the dilligence to find out and you'll learn when and where the technical emphasis is most critical.

Never stop iterating. But first, let's establish that there are degrees of iteration. To use a home improvement analogy, there's down-to-the-studs rebuild and then there's freshening up the paint. The latter should happen all the time. Basically anytime you have a notable release. The former requires organizational alignment as much as actual messaging work and shouldn't be taken on lightly. If you're in tech product marketing, you should look at change to the product as an opportunity to improve your "reasons to believe" that support your core value propositions. Do those tweaks as often as the features are updated. But those are just the product-related signals. You should also be keeping tabs on your customer and market to understand if there are context changes. For example, here at Podium we sell to local businesses and it would be a real miss not to acknowledge current supply chain issues in our messaging. To keep up on the market, I recommend quarterly pulse checks that feel achievable for your business. Those might include a number of win/loss interviews, surveys, or interviews with key segments of your customer and prospect base.

I call this the "seagull phenomenon." It's kind of incredible how many folks can swoop in to make a mess on a messaging project. As a product marketer, your challenge is to find ways to make key stakeholders heard, but also curate their input on your path to messaging that works. Four hard-won tips here: * Start with who needs to be involved. I'm a fan of establishing a RASCI or RAPID framework before embarking on a messaging project. Drive alignment on roles and appropriate involvement. * Get an executive sponsor. It's a huge help to have a single leader who can tell you when the work is done to their satisfaction and help you manage stakeholder feedback along the way. * Socialize progress, not just final output. On big lifts, give updates on findings and how the messaging is evolving. I find this is great to do in 1-1's so you get full engagement from key individuals. If possible, present this as a story so stakeholders can give feedback and push on what's not working. Communicate timelines and next steps. * Find outlets for those who want to problem solve. Some folks just want to give feedback, others want to be part of the solution. Creating space in your process like messaging workshops, brainstorms, etc. will help you get the most from the problem solvers in a communal context of editing and consensus building.

Others have said this but it bears repeating: if you product is truly undifferentiated, then marketing is your path forward. Feature/function is a losing battle in this scenario. Figure out your brand marketing and how to give the buyer a little something extra that makes your product the top-of-mind choice. Frankly, I think consumer brands have this on lock. What's one brand of orange juice compared to another? In a blind taste-test, not much. But I'll buy Florida Natural because somehow the way it's branded and packaged feels "fresher." (Maybe it's the Floridian in me, but fresh OJ is the only way to go.) I recommend classic books on branding to get you thinking. * Kellog on Branding - bascially the MBA urtext on branding. * Start with Why - Simon Sinek * Basically any Seth Godin book if you haven't read them