How do you and at what stages do you test your messaging?

I am constantly testing messaging. Any customer meeting, event or executive briefing I attend, I'm testing messaging in some way, even if it's not messaging that I'm actively working on. The most critical part of this process is to ensure you're leaving space for feedback and reactions or explicitly asking for it. One mistake I used to make when I first started as a PMM was to go into presentation mode and just barrel through a deck/pitch instead of adding pauses and deliberate questions through ...Read More

When: I like to think of testing in 2 stages. The first one is when you are just getting started and want to understand what are the big pain points you are solving for and what do customers care about. That is the first round of market research you will do to build your actual messaging. The second round comes once you have built a basic messaging framework, but now you need to wordsmith. For example, Do they like the word "Measure" or do they prefer the word "Understand". At the end of the day ...Read More

I think you need to experiment and test your messages throughout the go-to-market planning phase, marketing research and development of your value proposition. We use multiple channels to test our messaging, Emails, In-App Messaging, Push Notifications, Text Messaging, Social Media, Performance Ads, Web, Customer Focus Groups and Sales Teams. As mentioned in the other response, experimentation is a critical factor in the success of your story. Because the pace of change is accelerating, user nee ...Read More

We test our messaging various ways: Talk directly to your customers and prospects, interview them, survey them  Test messaging with analysts who cover your space Talk to partners, consultants and subject matter experts  Get feedback from sales Present it to executives and get their feedback Join sales calls with prospects and listen to them deliver the message or deliver the message yourself Make it a part of your executives talk track and get their feedback (our CEO tests our messaging for us b ...Read More

One of the best ways to actually test your message is to speak with analysts. They speak with other vendors in your space, and take inquiries from customers all the time! Another great external resource is your customer base. Select 2-3 customers that you think would offer some strong advice and ask them how they feel about your messaging. Is it unique? Would it capture the attention of their peers? Is it even relevant to the challenges their peers are dealing with each day? Is it any different ...Read More

I find it helpful to test along the way and continue testing once it's released broadly. Unsurprisingly, we work closely with customer-facing teams, advisors, and internal teams as a starting point and work with them to roadtest. I'd love to say there's always a deliberate process, but sometimes you don't have the time to do so. For instance, last year with the pandemic, we had to very quickly expand into a new vertical and operating in an unknown environment. So we relied more on customer valid ...Read More

One of my favorite ways to test messaging is to ask people outside of my team/company/and even industry to review content I create. You can do this on a grander scale with things like usertesting.com but you can also hack it together on different platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter. Sometimes I will even reach out to a friend or family member and ask them to review a piece of content if I'm feeling like it's getting a little too "inside baseball".  In terms of staying in the loop on what my audi ...Read More