AMA: You.com Director, Product Marketing, Ben Geller on Messaging

Generally, one of the mistakes I’ve seen people make is A/B testing subtle changes in messaging and using these test results to drive decision-making. For example, before Nike was known to the world, I doubt “Just do it” would have performed well in an A/B test or focus group. But the reason “Just do it” is so well-known and successful is the consistency with which it’s been used and the strong brand underpinning the messaging. Rather than spending time sweating these small changes in direction, ...Read More

This is a problem we often face at You.com, where we sprint to bring new features to market and iterate over time, rather than waiting until the final vision for the feature is realized. The way I like to approach this problem is by designing messaging and related collateral for the desired end-state—where we are going—and then working backward to strip away features for the initial release. This approach helps maintain continuity in messaging as the feature set evolves, bringing clarity to user ...Read More

Generally, when messaging for a technical audience, I have two rules of thumb: Simple is best. If something is too complex to make sense to a layperson, it means you're not explaining it clearly enough. Generally, I've seen messaging for technical products fall into the trap of using too much jargon. Don't follow that temptation! Use plain English as much as possible, keeping in mind that the audience does not have nearly as much context as your internal employees. As an old copywriter friend us ...Read More

I love the JTBD (Jobs to be Done) framework for improving messaging. The JTBD framework helps define the high-level tasks your users are trying to accomplish using your product and how they evaluate success. When you deeply understand what users are "hiring" your product to accomplish, you can shift your messaging from focusing on features to emphasizing the value to the user.The classic quote on this style of thinking is from HBS Professor Theodore Levitt: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-in ...Read More

One simple messaging process I've recently started using (and loving), is developing a Glossary of all the various product offerings and features.The glossary is organized into a few simple columns: product name, 1-line value prop (internal), description of how it works (internal). This is incredibly useful for visualizing the portfolio of offerings that your company has in the market. It becomes easier to identify opportunities to improve naming & messaging when your team can clearly see ho ...Read More

I’ve been through multiple situations where we’ve discovered a breakthrough message that dramatically changes the economics of user acquisition and the trajectory of revenue growth. The testing/measurement part is straightforward—run creative featuring different messaging on an advertising platform like Meta, and see which performs best in efficiently driving conversions. Generally, for these creative tests, I prefer to test a number of different static ads with various executions for each of th ...Read More