AMA: SurveyMonkey Senior Director, Head of Product & Lifecycle Marketing, Morgan (Molnar) Lehmann on Messaging

Frankly? Don't. :-| Messaging doesn't exist in a vacuum, and at the very least you'll want to do some light research to gut check against existing messaging (if launching a new feature that would alter how you currently talk about your product) and to understand how messaging stacks up against competitors. If I am really time-strapped, I'll visit competitor websites to see how they talk about a comparable product/feature. Both to see if there is anything consistent across competitors (industry l ...Read More

PMMs have it tough. So much of what we do is influencing other metrics vs owning them outright. Especially when it comes to messaging. Here are some of the metrics we look at & methods we use to measure the impact of product marketing: Direct measurement: AB testing (mentioned in the question) is great, and places where we can do this to test messaging are our website headlines, paid search ads, in-product notifications, etc. Sales confidence: I think I've written about this on Sharebird bef ...Read More

Yes, the approach to creating messaging can vary for channels (website/email/paid social, etc) and altitude (product launch vs brand campaign) but only slightly. You still want all of the ingredients of good messaging: your ICP or target segments, internal/external narrative, positioning, benefits, and reasons to believe (RYBs) like features or claims. The biggest difference is that product messaging is a consistent resource that needs to be maintained. Campaign and website messaging depends on ...Read More

My biggest advice is to do a bit of research to make sure you even need differentiated messaging in other markets before going through all of the trouble. Things you should look into before creating differentiated messaging: How different is your offering market-to-market (e.g. do you have different features? How are they localized? Different data centers?) Does your ICP in those markets care about different things? (Or is the primary concern different than the primary concern of your domestic m ...Read More

Compelling messaging sits at the intersection of deep market, product, and customer understanding. If I were sitting down at a blank page & needed to craft compelling messaging, here are the steps I'd take: 1. Go deep on product knowledge Understand how the product works Clarify what it does + why it was built Talk to PMs, engineers, CS, sales Identify what truly differentiates it from competitors 2. Go deep on competitive knowledge What is different about what you offer? How do competitors ...Read More