How can you test your messaging?

Don’t overcomplicate it. Just find the fastest way to talk to customers. You could set up a formal feedback session with surveys, incentives, and all the jazz - which still gives you biased feedback. Or... you can just hop on an already scheduled customer call TODAY and casually ask customers for their quick qualitative feedback.

Here is a sample message to your customer success folks:

Hey {CSM name] - I am just trying to get a quick and casual reaction from our customers on this new messaging I’m putting together for an upcoming launch. Do you have any calls with customers this week where you don’t anticipate using the full scheduled time? If so can I please hop on it with you and ask for their help once you take care of business? This will be a huge help!

Here is a sample script to ask to customers live on a call:

Hey {customer name} - I’m here to ask for your help. I am working on some marketing content for a new product launch coming up. I can let you in on the secret early if you promise to keep it yourself until launch, and share your quick reaction? This will only take a couple of minutes and will really help me out.

For quantitative feedback, there are great tools out there like Wynter.com to get reliable feedback from your target audience. 

Messaging can best tested in numerous ways. Customers are a great source of feedback for messaging. Leverage key accounts or your Product Advisory Board to gather input. You should also test your messaging with customer facing employees (sales, customer success). The analyst community (IDC, Forrester) provides a great resource to use for testing messaging. 

There are so many ways to test messaging, but here are some of my favorites:

1. Work with your Sales and Customer Success teams to reach out to your customers with an offer to give you feedback on your messaging via a phone or video call. This works better than you'd expect, but if they don't engage for some reason, offer an incentive (gift card, discount, etc.). This is even easier if you're Customer Marketing team has already pre-qualified customers who want to give feedback on messaging, product betas, etc.

2. Offer to join prospect calls with your Sales Team as a product expert. For example, if you're the PMM for your new AI product, and the salesperson is new to the subject matter, offer to run the demo. While on the call, test your new slide deck with the customer to offer context before the demo. This is by far my favorite way to test messaging, as so few PMMs do it, and your sales teams will love you if you can help close a deal. Plus, you'll developer greater empathy for how hard sales is.

3. Use a service such as Respondent, Wynter, or Usertesting to reach non-customers who are getting paid to give you feedback. This costs money, but not that much for what you're getting — and it's so easy.

4. A/B test different messaging on your website, in the product, etc. This is more difficult to do in small startups, as the busy engineering team will often roll their eyes because they're just trying to get the MVP out the door. So, in smaller companies, I recommend testing via channels you control such as email and social media. Testing via social media — something recommended by Dave Gerhardt — is probably what I'm using most frequently before I test somewhere riskier that I can't take back (e.g., email). Of course, as you get bigger you'll want to consider testing software such as Optimizely.

5. The good ol' survey. With an incentive, you can create a short survey in Google Forms or Typeform that will get you lots of results at scale — in minutes.

The depth of insight you can glean with a few good qualitative interviews can't be overstated! Reach out to your network to get connected with relevant personas in the space, ask them for a live chat to review what you've been working on, and offer a simple coffee or gift card in exchange for their time. Ask them to think out loud as they consume your messaging, and pay close attention to their non-verbal language; where are they leaning in, furrowing a brow, re-reading, or exlaiming as they process? All gold to show you what's resonating (and what isn't). 

Testing your message, aka advertising test, is done with quantitative marketing research.

Show a copy of the advertisement, be it a storyboard or the real ad, to a representative sample of the public supposed to be exposed to the message, and test 3 elements: Comprehension, Reaction, and Memorization.

Comprehension of the message meaning as you are supposed to transfer it. Reaction to the message coherent with the goal of the campaign (Trial? Repurchase? What else?) Memorization of the message, long enough to remember to buy the product the next time.

This is how to test a message. Comprehension, Reaction, and Memorization.

Also this on "How to judge an advertisement" is worth reading https://www.marketingstat.com/how-to-judge-ad-copy-strategy/