AMA: Wistia Director of Product Marketing, Elise Beck on Messaging

There are a few ways you can validate your messaging: * I like to start by doing a customer listening tour. Spend some time getting to know your target customer and pay close attention to the way that they are describing their process and pain points. When you unveil your final messaging, it's important that you're speaking to your audience in the words that they use to ensure that your message resonates. * I also like to look at market trends and SEO insights to help inform the direction. I'll often spend time on third party review sites like G2 to understand how they're defining categories and features. It's also helpful to comb reviews of your own product and your competitors to again understand how the market is tending to describe certain features and functionality. It's always helpful to root yourself in what your audience already knows, how they're talking about things, and how they're already searching for things in their own words. * When it comes to true messaging, like the actual six words that are going to appear in big bold leaders at the top of your website, you can conduct user tests to understand how this message resonates. This takes time and resources, so I'd only recommend this for really big projects, like a total repositioning of your product vs. a small feature launch. Have your team mock up your top 2-3 messaging variations and see how the audience responds through guided interviews. Alternatively, you can incorporate message testing into surveys or run A/B test on paid ads to see what converts. 

The most important part of messaging is actually your positioning. I like to think of it as a sculpture where positioning is the armature -- the most foundational skeleton or bones of the thing. Without the armature, your sculpture could easily lose shape and fall apart. Without positioning, your messaging could easily lose shape and fall apart. Your positioning should be really explicit about: 1. The name of your product or feature 2. The category that your product or feature fits into 3. The target audience 4. The key benefit(s) 5. The key differentiator(s) 6. The reason to believe ...I typically write this out in a table format, and draft up a short response for each of those 6 prompts. From there, challenge yourself to rewrite it as a simple positioning statement. Does it work? Typically I'll spend a lot of time here with my team, really kicking the tires to ensure that the positioning is clear and defensible. This is the foundation of your messaging. From here, you can begin to draft up some messaging pillars. Think of these as key themes that relate to your positioning. It's really important that altogether, this is shared with your broader marketing team and GTM partners so that any additional marketing collateral, help documentation, sales enablement, etc. all holds up and aligns with the over arching positioning and messaging you've set forth. The reality is that your messaging can change flavors depending on where it shows up. The headline of an ad will be different from the body of an email which will be different from a blog post. Providing your team with the foundations of positioning and some broad messaging pillars will ensure that altogether, the message comes across in the right way no matter what. 

Believe it or not, I think that marketing is the biggest critic of messaging. :) That's why I am so adamant about positioning and messaging being considered hollistically. Often times, in positioning review meetings, we'll jump ahead to a place where we are splitting hairs on something as if it were the headline of a campaign. It's important to remember that positioning should be really strong, defensible, and not left open for interpretation. As such, positioning should really not be used verbatim on your website. Messaging comes later, and is where creativity and brand are infused into the process to transform the positioning into something that could be a headline of a campaign. It's really important to remind folks to think of these as two separate steps in the process, and carve out that extra (separate) time to get funky and turn on the creativity to ideate about potential campaign headlines, taglines, and ad copy. 

I do think it's important to ladder your product positioning into the broader product portfolio and/or company message. I've talked about the 6 components of your positioning (Product Name, Category Name, Target Audience, Key Benefits, Key Differentiators, and Reasons to Believe)... when reflecting on your Reason to Believe, I feel like there is often something in there that will tie back to your broader product portfolio and/or company message. Let's take HubSpot as an example. HubSpot's mission is to help millions of companies "grow better". As a company and as a product, HubSpot deeply values the customer experience and believes in putting long-term relationships ahead of short-term gains. There a lot of ways to dig into and interpret "grow better", but we'd challenge ourselves to really think about how this ethos and core part of our company and our brand ties back to the individual product. In the case of our sales product, Sales Hub, we ended up zeroing in on this idea that if you can focus on your customers, instead of your systems, you'll be able to grow better. That was our brand tie in and reason to believe, and ultimately this ended up being applicable to HubSpot's portfolio as a whole. 

At HubSpot, I started creating what I called "Product Marketing Guides". This was a ~15 page document that was polished and nicely designed so as to feel like a reliable source of truth. The Product Marketing Guide included a detailed overview of the product positioning, pricing, benefits, features, and competitive comparisons. It also included a complete glossary of terms (think feature names and descriptions). This ended up being a really valuable resource because it could easily be shared with content creators and give them all of the ingredients they needed to be successful. It was helpful in creating pitch decks, and ensuring our agency partners understood our positioning. Perhaps the coolest use case was when we went to launch a brand campaign with a new creative agency, we were able to pass along this complete bible of our positioning and messaging and all of the details for them to work off of. The final ad campaign (which featured Kathryn Hanh as a pirate CEO) was on point and really aligned with the messaging we had set forth. The Product Marketing Guide is something I've continued to encourage and bring with me as a best practice. 

In another response, I talked about the "Product Marketing Guide" -- this is intended to be an evergreen(ish) document that includes everything from foundational product positioning, to pricing, to competitive information, and a glossary of terms among other details that can be easily shared with your broader marketing team and other cross-functional partners. I encourage my team to revisit this with every launch to ensure it's complete and comprehensive. This might mean adding a few new terms to our Glossary or other light updates. Of course, some updates might slip through the cracks. All in, we'll end up doing a really detailed review of this document roughly twice a year to ensure it's up to date. On the cover page, we'll include a note of "Last Updated on XX Date" -- this helps to ensure we're keeping it fresh and signals to our cross-functional partners that this is indeed something that gets regularly reviewed and updated. 

This is a great question! While I don't have 3 perfect insights up my sleeve, I'd love to share my take. Marketing to developers has been tricky for me, usually because the developer sits just outside of our core product offering. In my case, I've spent lots of time understanding various marketing and sales personas. Not so much developers. With whatever you're marketing, it's important to spend a good amount of time deeply embedded in the world of your customer, understanding their pain points and challenges so that you can craft that perfect message that is going to resonate and relate to where they're at. If you're not as close to the developer persona as you'd like to be, spend some time getting there. Scheduling 1:1 conversations to go deep on your product offering with your internal engineering team will give you enough context to start to form your own ideas for what might resonate. From there, I recommend talking to existing customers and/or prospects. You'll start to get a really great understanding of how they work, what they love about certain parts of their process, and where they could afford to do better (aka how your solution can help!) If you're at a company where the developer isn't your primary persona, but is an important one to market to -- I would try to get to a place where you can have a dedicated PMM supporting the developer persona and the positioning of your developer products. In my opinion, it is a pretty unique persona and it's tough to be able to go deep enough to truly understand the developer if you're balancing other less-technical personas as well.