As a new product marketer I am struggling with messaging. What is the best way to develop this skill?

With early career product marketers, I find that messaging struggles are often tied to one or more of the following things:  Not knowing where to start Issues editing / punching up the language  Developing messaging in a vacuum  Not the messaging itself, but getting stakeholder buy-in on it The most important thing you can do to grow your skill is get some at-bats. But here are some actionable tips for improving your work if any of the challenges above feel like growth opportunities for you. "I ...Read More

Messaging will really differ based on the target audience you are messaging for, so developing empathy for your target customer is key. When I joined OpenTable, I spent a lot of time with account execs and account managers, I shadowed local customer meetings, I subscribed to every industry trade, went to industry events and I even did a "stage shift" at a restaurant nearby. It's so important to understand what your audience's key pain points are, how they speak, what they actually care about (ev ...Read More

I find it's easiest to start with a messaging framework because that helps you organize your thoughts around the target, benefit promise and key reasons to believe. From there it's an iterative process to create, get feedback, and refine your messaging. It's also best to keep the customer in mind so that you write more about the benefits with features as the key support points. It's far too easy to write using the product features as the message and this is often the mistake of B2B companies. Pe ...Read More

You are definitely not alone! I think a lot of new and experienced PMMs struggle with messaging and I absolutely did and still think I have plenty of room to improve. Since I’m unfortunately running out of time in this AMA, I wanted to at least suggest this similar question and thread that has a ton of great responses from highly-respected PMMs sharing the resources that help them create strong messaging: https://sharebird.com/what-are-good-messaging-framework-resources-that-you-use. There are a ...Read More

I used to suck at Messaging, and I don't claim to be a guru at it either even today. But let me elaborate: At one point in my career, I would attempt to write a product one-pager (circa 2013-14) and my boss would redline the entire thing and hand it back to me.  I improved a bit. I learned to write about features as benefits, not about features themselves.  But I was still not stellar.  My work only increased by a step function when I took a step back and changed my approach. I empathized intima ...Read More