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

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 how everything flows together. The glossary also becomes a great internal resource when developing assets for a specific product-line, and ensuring consistency. For more details on how to develop the 1-line value prop, I love the JTBD framework, which I discuss here.

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, it’s better to focus on collecting data to inform where your core positioning should focus and whether your offering is resonating with users. One lightweight way to do this is to have a small sample of users walk through the site. Ensure the audience is tailored to your objective; for example, if your goal is new acquisition, make sure your non-users that represent your ICP (Ideal Customer Persona) are part of the target audience. Have users describe in their own words what they believe the product offers based on the site and how compelling, trustworthy, and memorable the offering is. You can even have them redline messaging and images to get their take on what would be most effective. If you'd like, you can have them go through the old versus new messaging and compare feedback. This kind of feedback can be really helpful to inform whether things are resonating as intended/if there are any issues in comprehension, and potentially finding more compelling language. But, these findings should always be seen as input rather than a directive. Trust that the internal team understands the direction the product is headed and have conviction in taking some risks. Going back to the Nike example, great creative should not be crowdsourced!

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 the messaging variants, rather than a more 'scientific' test of constraining the creative and just testing copy. Why? Sometimes you need the creative to amplify your message and drive it home. That being said, the hard part is developing messaging that works. To do this well, you need a consistent process for gathering user feedback around your product and mining for insights on how users, in their own words, describe the product’s value. One way we do this at You.com is by cultivating a community of power users we call our Inner Circle and running weekly surveys and 1:1 interviews to get feedback about their needs, our offering, and the competitive landscape. Learning from this audience, who deeply understands the product, has been invaluable in finding our breakthrough messaging.

Generally, when messaging for a technical audience, I have two rules of thumb: 1. 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 used to say—the best copy should be simple, and easily understood if shouted from the bleachers during the sixth inning of a ball game. Simplicity is the ultimate sign of sophistication. 2. Leverage internal experts. This may sound obvious, but take the opportunity to run your messaging by the developers who built the actual product! Just last week, I was developing messaging at You.com for our API offerings and had a wonderful breakthrough after a jam session with a couple of our engineers who deeply understood the product (and fit into the buyer persona). I asked them to review the copy and describe each feature in plain English. This quick feedback led to a number of breakthroughs and was well worth the time. It was also a wonderful opportunity for the engineering team to have ownership of how their product goes to market, and build closer ties with the marketing team.

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 users and internal teams.

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-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” To stretch this example further, consider the high-level tasks drill buyers are looking to accomplish with the hole (e.g., hanging a picture, building furniture, fixing a roof, etc.) and the various ways they measure success (e.g., achieving the task cheaply, easily, and with precision). As a drill manufacturer developing messaging, rather than marketing the technical components (e.g., "It's made from x material"), it's more effective to use language that addresses the user's JTBD and success metrics (i.e., the drill is purpose-built as the easiest, most precise way to accomplish household tasks, at a competitive price). The beauty of JTBD is that it not only guides your messaging but can also inform the product roadmap. For example, going back to the drill, what features can we add to make it more precise? Maybe a leveler or a laser guide to show where you're drilling? For more about JTBD and how to conduct JTBD interviews, I highly recommend "The Jobs To Be Done Playbook" by Jim Kalbach.