Do you create persona based messaging and or vertical based messaging for your product? What is the best format for your messaging document? And how do you get buy in and then distribute your messaging document across the organization?
Yes!
Persona-based messaging
Before I joined Coda, the team already had a set of personas derived from shared observations about who uses different kinds of technology within a team, and how they use itーand with what expectations of the technology. Since then, my amazing colleague Elaine has expanded our set of personas to guide things like shared product & story ideation in support of our enterprise offering. You can see the fruits of that labor at coda.io/enterprise, which I’m hopeful you’ll find feels very “Coda” in look, feel & tone, but directly speaks to the topics that are top of mind for an Enterprise buyer.
Prior to my time at Coda, I was privileged to collaborate with colleagues across partnerships and research to guide personas and principles for our products and outreach strategies on the Instagram Creator & Media marketing team. While Instagram is viewed primarily as a consumer app, there are three distinct audiences (personas) on the platform:
- Consumers who “tune in” to the app,
- Creators who “produce” the content consumers view, and
- Businesses who engage with those audiences in a number of waysーfrom ads, sponsorships and their own organic engagement.
- This is a fairly common 3-sided participation marketplace for any content platform.
A single person using Instagram might identify as any combination of the three audiences, but they tend to bias primarily towards one of them. Which is why within each audience, there are a number of additional dimensions and personas. The more you scale your reach, the more opportunity you have to build out increasingly precise personas. And the more help you’ll want to recruit from your talented colleagues in learning about them, documenting them, empowering them with product, and reaching them with messages!
Format
In terms of format, I've seen many successful approaches at different organizations, and candidly don’t have one that I’d recommend above the others. It depends on the type of market you’re playing in, the capabilities of your team, the stage of your businesses, and the goals you have in developing personas.
Distribution & Buy-in
Getting buy-in and distribution can also vary wildly, but there are a few best practices that have helped me wherever I’ve done this work:
Socialize your intention to build a persona program early and often! Especially in a start-up environment where you have to make tradeoffs with your time every day, help your colleagues and leaders in other departments understand why this work is important, how you plan to use it, and how it helps them and their teams. This should at least make sure you have the buy-in to carve out time for this work, but you might even get some volunteers to share the work!
Set and share a research agenda. Make sure your personas aren’t built on instincts, but on insights. Conduct surveys and interviews. Collect as many dimensions of identity as possible (geographic, firmagraphic, demographic, etc.) but be sure to store your info in a way that it is secure and anonymized before sharing your synthesis.
You might have to demonstrate the first “win.” It’s great if you have a killer write-up or presentation. But other teams are likely mid-flight in their own work, and probably won’t halt their world on its axis to shift course based on your personas. Instead, leverage them for a quick winーa small outreach campaign, a lightweight virtual event, a weeklong social media series, etc.ーand report out on the win as loudly as possible. People will want some of that secret sauce when they hear how delicious it is!
Done right, product marketing should be the company's messaging API . How effective you are in disseminating it and helping everyone sing from the sames songsheet is a direct reflection of how targeted and focused your messaging documents are.
One of my favorite messaging artifacts is Geoffrey Moore's positioning framework. It's so popular in fact that it's even on GitHub because it's essentially source code for positioning.
It reads as follows:
For (target customers)
Who must (solve a specific problem)
Our product is a new (new product category)
That provides (key breakthrough benefit vs. current way of doing things – which solves dilemma)
Unlike (competitor in new category)
We have (whole product most relevant for you)
Whether it's been at Google, WeWork or even my current role at Matterport, this is the framework that has paid dividends. It's a strategic exercise. It forces stakeholders to boil down their inputs into a sentence that they have to agree on. But once you have that, you're off to the races as you can then feed that positioning statement into other messaging documents and derivatives like a one slide positioning messaging framework.
To the first part of your question, I don't see why you couldn't have a version of that positioning statement for a particular persona or vertical. At WeWork we built out a few of these positioning artifacts in the midst of experiencing hypergrowth, but the one we did for enterprise buyers for example had an immediate impact into the updating of our homepage messaging at a critical time for the company.
For achieving buy in, see my answer to one of the questions above.
Yes, persona messaging is a must always. I question I answered earlier has the framework I typically use for personas and an overall messaging structure.
Vertical messaging can be required if your company targets specific industries - finance, pharma, etc.
If your working with a horizontal product then my experience is that vertical messaging should be applied in campaigns and content targeting those specific verticals leveraging relevant customer examples in those industries as customer evidence.
Getting buy-in on messaging is probably the most critical and most challenging part of messaging. This is absolutely vital to the success of any messaging effort.
If no one is bought in on your messaging then it won't be succesfful. The top priority is to get buy-in from the CEO but then other critical stakeholders are founders, head of sales, head of product, etc. Look for people who have infuence in the organization - this includes executives but also top reps or long-tenured/respected employees. You will need them to build momentum behind your messaging.
Take their feedback and look for ways to incorporate it into the messaging. If it doesn't work then explain why ahead of the roll out. Never get defensive or emotional...it's part of the process!
I believe 2 parts of this have already been answered, but for the persona-/vertical-based question, yes! If you're taking to a user vs an executive, those messages likely will be very different. And likely same if you're talking to a bank vs a retailer. However, the challenge for product marketing is how to scale to support different messages (and sustain the resulting assets that come from them). Don't try and tackle everything at once. Who are the most critical personas you need to win? Is verticalization necessary out of the gate (for some features/products, it very well may be!)? Develop your core materials that your field most needs, and then prioritize what might be the next critical areas to build out for your business. Partners can also help you break into new verticals or personas, and that can help buy you time as you scale your team
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