AMA: Upwork Head of Product Marketing, Liza Sperling on Messaging

Conversion rates across the funnel - Did the messaging drive the desired actions at each customer touchpoint from initial engagement to sign up/trial/purchase Landing pages, emails, posts, and ad performance - How did individual assets and channels perform relative to benchmarks?  Sales asset usage and engagement - Which assets, talking points, and messaging were used, and how did prospects and customers engage? Highspot will show you which sales assets are being used the most and which are driv ...Read More

In general, I don't think you can determine that a platform approach makes sense or begin developing platform positioning and messaging until you know more about your product(s) than just capabilities. First I’d develop positioning and messaging for your product(s), including clearly defining your customer, the problem you are solving in the market, and how your offering compares to alternatives. This exercise will result in many of the inputs required to determine if a platform (or another appr ...Read More

There are a lot of frameworks and approaches to positioning and messaging, but I’ve found that a simple document including the following elements is most effective: Tell the story: Starting with a narrative acts as a forcing function to ensure you’ve thought through the positioning and can tie it all together in straightforward, customer-facing language. Amazon’s internal press release is a good framework to get started. What is it? A single sentence that describes the offering. No fluff. Keep i ...Read More

Getting feedback from stakeholders is valuable to capture insights and feedback from customer-facing teams and to foster healthy internal partnerships. That said, positioning and messaging by consensus is one of the biggest mistakes a product marketer can make. To avoid this, set clear expectations by defining roles and responsibilities upfront. I suggest using a simple DACI framework and asking everyone to agree with their respective roles when you kick off the exercise. DACI stands for Driver, ...Read More

It's a good idea to start with overall product positioning and messaging ("P&M") as a foundation for general or evergreen marketing channels and campaigns. Channel owners can then leverage the guidance to craft channel-specific messaging tailored for each channel and audience that ladders up to the product P&M.  For feature launches, however, I treat new features (or bundles of features), as separate, thematic launches and develop separate P&Ms to lean into the most relevant customer ...Read More

I love this question because balancing what feels like competing goals is one of the most challenging aspects of being a product marketer. The reality is that these aren't competing but complementary goals, and it's our job to do both -- deeply understand our customers' needs AND develop clear, compelling messaging. While we don't have the luxury of choosing between 80% "right" messaging or 100% "right" messaging, the good news is that 100% right is an unrealistic goal, and there are many increm ...Read More

With a team of two product marketers, I'd opt for collaboration. Why? Well, product marketing teams are small, but collaboration is how we make 1+1 = 3. Differentiating your roles by function on a small team doesn't make sense, especially for foundational, strategic exercises like positioning and messaging. Even if one PMM takes the lead on drafting the positioning and messaging, I suggest the other PMM follows fast with feedback, and both partner closely to finalize and align on the output. One ...Read More

We generally start with the launch goals and then define more granular metrics leading up to the launch goals to measure the effectiveness of our messaging. Here are some initial ideas to consider:  Conversion rates across the funnel - Did the messaging drive the desired actions at each customer touchpoint from initial engagement to sign up/trial/purchase?  Signups, purchases, and/or adoption (depending on launch goals) Landing pages, emails, posts, and ad performance - How did individual assets ...Read More