How do you balance succinct simple messaging with a complex technology product and or set of products.

As counterintuitive as this may sound, simple messaging isn’t always the way to go. It really comes down to your target buyer(s) and the set of messages that resonate with them, which may need to be simple for a line of business buyer like Marketing or HR or more complex/technical for an IT/Developer buyer. But it always comes back to understanding your target audience and their pain points, and ensuring you're tailoring your messaging for them. Also, depending on the channel/medium where your m ...Read More

I love this question! This is one of my favorite parts of product marketing - getting to translate deeply technical concepts into what actually matters. As much as possible, I encourage you to dig into the technology. Spend time with your product and engineering teams to really understand what is being built and why. And don't be afraid to ask lots of questions! That's how we learn. And continuously asking why something matters or how it's different is a great push on those teams to get crisp on ...Read More

I think the key to writing messaging for complex technology products boils down to understanding, in layman's terms, what pain point your product is solving and translating how the feature delivers the key benefit. This definitely requires peeling the onion in terms of the underlying pain point you're solving. For example, we have a predictive analytics feature that leverages various inputs to produce a score that helps users understand the likelihood an account will turn into an opportunity. Ha ...Read More

After working through Positioning, I will build Messaging from the bottom-up. The bottom-up approach automatically encourages you to elevate your messaging from technical details and features. More specifically, I build in this order: Features -> Benefits -> Value -> Message. Some definitions that might be helpful: Features: This is what your product or service does. Even though I talk about these as features, be sure to expand your thinking to include all capabilities related to the of ...Read More