AMA: Zendesk Director of Product Marketing - Workforce Engagement Solutions, Liz Gonzalez on Messaging

If your product doesn't have the innovation on it's side to highlight I'd recommend turning to customer win feedback to learn why your product was selected and lean into those differentiators. It could be intangible differentiation like costs, ease of doing business with your company, excellent service. Or you could offer some of these non-competitive features like a native solution, more flexible/integrated solution, a better user experience, expertise, etc -- there's always a reason why people choose your product so don't be afraid to say what it is even if it's not a shiny new, super cool feature.

Messaging is never set it and forget it. We typically work with the rest of the marketing organization to ensure we're crafting what we call the 'red thread' between top level brand and campaign messaging down to bottom of funnel product messaging. Brand campaigns can often last a year or more in order to see effectiveness so our mid to bottom level messaging is what we're updating more frequently as the market shifts and product changes. Typically we're updating 2 big refreshes of our Product Messaging Source Document that is used across different teams and smaller quarterly refreshes for new features, changes in market, or even to incorporate fresh new proof points with new customer stories.

Our stakeholders typically involve the big 3 which include Sales, Product and Marketing. Each product PMM works with their counterpart Product Manager to learn about the latest product developments, what's coming ahead and how it's differentiated from the competitor landscape. Our sales folks are involved for stress testing what this looks and feels like in real-world conversations, as well as getting insight into what is resonating with prospects -- we're looking for the 'ah-ha' moment when it clicks for them. And last but not least, we're plugging into our overall market narrative and vision of our brand at the highest level from the marketing team to ensure consistency and keeping that drumbeat going in a crowded market landscape.

This is something you'll see often in a certain space with high competition, often times products can do more or less the same things with a few differentiating elements. You'll have to ensure you cover the basics of "what is the job-to-be done" so people can understand your product can achieve what they're looking but find ways to incorporate your special sauce too. Some of it will be your brand tone helping that brand identity come through and some of it will be what makes you different and lean into the outcomes you provide for customers. For example we use this message: "Take the guesswork your of quality assurance" -- because we heard from our customers they felt like a lot of the time they we're guessing/assuming so we wanted to let them understand our product helps eliminate that ambiguity for them.

Lean into the customer pain. Don't just use that to craft a nice 'benefits' list...use it to evoke a sense of "oh they understand what I'm going through or what I want to achieve" with your messaging. Quick example for illustrative purposes: Pain: "My quality of service is going down, and I'm not understanding what's going on" Plain Benefit: Gain visibility into important quality metrics Benefit with emotion: Coach agents with data that pinpoint exactly where training efforts are needed As a leader, you want your team to succeed, gaining visibility is great but it's truly what you do with that data that matters. If we can help Managers use the data to be a better leader and coach for better outcomes that is a win-win and makes the leader and agent feel more successful in their jobs.

A comprehensive messaging document that encompasses elements like target audience, narrative, business challenges, benefits and value props, features as well as common uses cases can help hone the message for different target personas and allows you to build for the right audience. With this messaging foundation by audience you can then craft relevant content where in the funnel it's appropriate. A way to balance more technical content is to build the bottom of funnel without overburdening extra layers of information. Let audiences dive for more when they need to or want to -- one idea could be to build a one-pager or product landing page with deep links to more technical videos or a help center article so they can learn more about a feature if they so choose.

Yes, we have used AI available to help us in crafting messaging - we're bringing AI powered CX to the market so naturally it makes sense of us to learn to use it to help our day-to-day jobs internally as well. I recommend testing it out if you haven't already, it's not a replacement for developing your insights and differentiation...and of course you need to human review. But, we do see that AI helps our writing to be more concise, and when you've hit a creative block it's a great way to get a fresh idea or spin on messaging. Often in marketing we can get caught up in jargon and end up all saying the same thing sometimes so having AI can help eliminate some of that.