AMA: Upwork Former Head of Product Marketing, Anjali Cameron on Go-to-Market Messaging

We use a feature messaging brief (or initiative messaging for big projects) to communicate everything from the big picture to the fine details to internal stakeholders. The brief typically contains these sections: Feature description (usually includes screenshots), Target audience, Release and go-to-market plan, Key messaging (2-3 sentence blurb for customers that clearly explains the benefit and if any action is required), Ongoing marketing efforts beyond the GTM, and FAQs.Through some missteps ...Read More

Similar to the question above on uncovering buyer trends, I’d suggest starting broad and then going narrow to develop market driven messaging. Start with a few key insights about your target market and their pain points. I leverage personas for this. If you don’t have them, the work should start there to really understand your customer’s needs and concerns.From there, I would build some options and do high-level testing with focus groups or customer panels. I’ve also done this via quantitative s ...Read More

I’d focus mainly on all the things you can do to stand out: Make your visual layout, pricing and customer experience unique to further differentiate your offering from competitors. The messaging is the wrapper for all of this but these pieces can really help you speak to your unique value prop. Talk to your customers that have used your competitors and find out where you are truly differentiated and then hammer that home in the messaging. Give customers a reason to try you versus the competition ...Read More

This continues to be an evolving process but we leverage a few things: Lead time - sharing the info early so the sales team can disseminate it via the right channels with enough notice (for example, some teams meet just once a week so if you miss that cycle, they may not see it until after launch) Central POC - we have at least one person on sales who has the responsibility of reviewing key messaging and ensuring that updates relevant to sales are flagged via an internal dashboard Visibility - i ...Read More

Be clear on your target and start there. If you’re a marketplace, force primary and secondary segments. And if you’ve got multiple business lines and segments with unique pain points, align on a clear hierarchy and where in your funnel you can speak to different audiences. I’d say the fewer segments the better. It leads to less confusion internally and externally.As you do research on your segmentation, in addition to unique needs and pain points, look for commonalities. That will help ensure th ...Read More

Agreed that often in the race to get a product to market, teams will put their best messaging idea forth, run it out for a quick test and then launch. I think there are a few ways to check that you’re on the right path or if pausing is required. Internal comprehension - at least in the case of Upwork we’re lucky that we collaborate with many freelancers internally. So when they see the messaging and find it confusing or have a lot of questions about a launch that are clearly not obvious through ...Read More

I’m a big believer in experimentation before your messaging hits customers. Typically in the product development and go-to-market planning cycles you have at least two, if not more, opportunities to test different messaging. The first is to sneak it into usability research. If a UI designer is going to run a study on how customers comprehend a product flow, the messaging naturally comes up. When possible, attend the first interview or get detailed notes to see how the customer or prospect is tal ...Read More

For broader buyer trends, I’ve found focus groups with prospects to be effective. It’s a way to get in the heads of prospective buyers and see what’s on their mind. You can get their reaction to several high-level messaging angles and through moderated conversation, you can uncover larger trends versus just buzz.Once you have the key message in place, I’d suggest qualitative research with buyers. I organize these as 1:1 interviews where you share a screen and ask a buyer (prospect or current) to ...Read More

Great question and not an easy one. There’s a difference between saying, “let’s shift messaging to go upmarket but retain and continue to build for our core SMB base” versus “let’s shift messaging and resources to go all in on upmarket, even if that means neglecting SMB.”If it’s the former, it’s much easier to do because you can shift all your prospect messaging upmarket but continue to engage and speak to your SMB base as you have been. And you’ll still have a product ladder or offerings that m ...Read More