AMA: SurveyMonkey Former Director of Product Marketing, Sarah Din on Messaging

This really depends on your where you are as an organization, and what your overall goals are, but here are a few thoughts and ideas: If you are trying to move up-market as an org, you can try to measure brand perception with different segments over time. While brand perception is not entirely isolated to messaging, messaging plays a huge role in how your brand is perceived and this can be a great indicator of how customers are responding to the story you are telling about your org. Most orgs ha ...Read More

When: I like to think of testing in 2 stages. The first one is when you are just getting started and want to understand what are the big pain points you are solving for and what do customers care about. That is the first round of market research you will do to build your actual messaging. The second round comes once you have built a basic messaging framework, but now you need to wordsmith. For example, Do they like the word "Measure" or do they prefer the word "Understand". At the end of the day ...Read More

We are in the process of creating an internal messaging hub, where all of our messaging will live. This hub will be on our Confluence site (which is what we use as our internal Wiki for the org). Our goal is to host all of our messaging docs on that hub, and give everyone access to it as a "Single Source of Truth" (SSOT). For the rollout, we also did a focus group with leads from different functions to get feedback on what formats work best for them.Some teams, such as marketing or product teams ...Read More

If I had to pick one thing, it is your core value proposition. Everyone should understand what your solution/benefit statement is. We use this format "We help you, so you can..". Secondly, everyone should know what makes your product unique - why are you different/better than your competitors. Next, you want to make sure that people really know your elevator pitch - this does not have to be the long, detailed pitch but the quick elevator pitch you would want them to use if they were, lets say at ...Read More

The first thing here is to make sure the research you are doing is done with the end goal in mind. Meaning, think of how you are going to deliver this messaging, what is your final framework and format. If you are using a traditional value proposition framework for example, it might look something like this at a very high level You audience Their biggest challenge Your solution/offering How you solve their problem (solution/benefit statements) Your core differentiators So when you do your resear ...Read More

You want your ICP to give you a good sense for all of the above. Its hard to give you specifics, because this will vary by org.  We defined our ICP per product (we have 8 products in our B2B portfolio), pulled sales data for the past 365 days, and did an in-depth analysis on that to define a few things such as: Top segments we win in (and trends over time) for each product (SMB, Mid-market, Enterprise) Top industries or verticals where we have been closing the most deals, with the highest AOV (p ...Read More

If you have differing opinions across your org, you definitely need to bring some data to the table. Testing is a critical part of developing successful messaging, and testing or market research does not have to cost an arm and a leg. Even if you don’t have a huge budget, you can still do some amount of testing to gather insights that help highlight what resonates with your market. You also want to do a mix of these to get a holistic view of what works and what doesn’t across various channels. H ...Read More

Great question! You can easily spend a lot of time on building the perfect messaging framework, but it can be useless if other teams, especially sales, do not understand it or believe in it - so here are a few things to keep in mind as you work through messaging: Involve them at the start of the process. The first step in any new messaging project should be doing research and gathering input. Do a focus group with your sales team and gather their feedback - they are on the front lines every day ...Read More

The format that has worked for us to-date is segmenting users by functional roles / buyer personas and use cases. For example - Let’s say your product caters to both HR and IT - you want distinct messages for HR and for IT - because the challenges HR faces are likely very different than what IT cares about. But to take this a step further, even within HR itself, you might have a product that solves for either recruiting, or onboarding or employee engagement (or all) - Isolate the top use cases a ...Read More

This really depends on the size of your org. For a fairly small start-up, this might be an easier process since you likely have very few marketing channels you focus on. But as you get to larger sized orgs, this will be more difficult and has to happen over time.  You want to make sure that you involve all the marketing leads across various channels in your messaging development and rollout. Not only will this help in getting you buy-in from them, but it will ensure that they incorporate this me ...Read More

If your leadership team understands the value of messaging, and how that can impact the success of an org, they will likely want to be involved without you having to ask! So the first step is to make sure that the leadership team truly understands what good messaging can do for an organization. We made sure to bring our leadership along the journey as we revamped our messaging across all of our products and buyer personas, had regular check-ins and kept them updated on our process and progress. ...Read More