How do you measure the success of your messaging?

This really depends on your where you are as an organization, and what your overall goals are, but here are a few thoughts and ideas:

• If you are trying to move up-market as an org, you can try to measure brand perception with different segments over time. While brand perception is not entirely isolated to messaging, messaging plays a huge role in how your brand is perceived and this can be a great indicator of how customers are responding to the story you are telling about your org. Most orgs have a brand tracker that runs at a regular cadence, it can be as simple as adding an additional question to your brand tracker.
• If the goal is to educate sales and inspire confidence - Measure sales confidence before and after you train the team on new messaging (we work with sales enablement to run a survey quarterly to measure this) - this can help you show/prove impact internally
• You can potentially look at performance of campaigns over time (pre-messaging rollout and post-messaging rollout) and see if the new messaging is able to increase the performance of any paid or demand gen campaigns.
• Analyst briefings - if you have access to any analysts in the space, you can also test your messaging with them and use thier feedback to determine success.

Messaging impact so many functions across an organization, in my opinion, its hard to attribute a single KPI to messaging. If done well, messaging drives growth and revenue and makes a significant impact to your brand overall.

Measuring the success of messaging overall generally ties back to product launch goals — whether that’s a sales or revenue number, or more user/signup focused. That being said, if you’re working on positioning and messaging outside of a launch then I’d look at metrics like length of sales cycle, demo to close rate, % of deals closed-won vs, closed lost (and against specific competitors if that’s important to your product line/business), and raw volume of sales and MRR/ARR. You can switch some of those metrics to be more freemium focused if you are working on user acquisition instead of direct sales but the same overall concept applies. Lastly, there are a bunch of tools on the market that allow you to measure and see how enablement materials you are creating are being used. I’d start by establishing some baseline metrics on previous enablement materials — how many views, demos were resources a part of — and how is your new messaging (and the respective assets it’s a part of) doing compared to that baseline? If the internal metrics and external metrics are not headed in the right direction it could signal a problem with your messaging.

Lots of ways to do this, but there are 'tactical' and 'strategic' ways to measure success. Tactically, setting up metrics-based feedback loops in the go-to-market is key. We used Outreach in our SDR efforts that offers a great, low-risk way to quickly test messaging, we measured content performance in the field via analytics on our Box fileshare, and, obviously, demand gen performance reviews are important.  

Win/loss reviews are also great. I like to get about 20-25 reps to provide feedback every quarter. And win/loss feedback is the quickest path to getting meaningful feedback on messaging (and go-to-market strategy).

Shout-out to the PulseQA folks as well. You can get feedback from 100 IT, security, or CTOs on your messaging, positioning, etc. Takes a couple weeks. If you do that, be sure to have a few open-ended questions. That's where all the gold nuggets come from. I did one on Zero Trust a couple months ago and asked 'what is the biggest concern you have on security in the public cloud'. Feedback was amazing!!

And, then there are 'strategic' ways to measure success. Performance in a Gartner MQ or Forrester Wave is certainly important as that's an annual report card on messaging at a high-level.

• Conversion rates across the funnel - Did the messaging drive the desired actions at each customer touchpoint from initial engagement to sign up/trial/purchase
• Landing pages, emails, posts, and ad performance - How did individual assets and channels perform relative to benchmarks? 
• Sales asset usage and engagement - Which assets, talking points, and messaging were used, and how did prospects and customers engage? Highspot will show you which sales assets are being used the most and which are driving the most customer engagement, while Gong.io provides sophisticated insights into sales calls to determine what’s working and what’s not.
• Finally don’t forget to capture qualitative feedback on your messaging from customers, prospects, and internal stakeholders. While presumably, you’ve done this pre-launch, another round of feedback post-launch will provide further insights you can quickly apply to post-launch campaigns for a fast follow.

It's pretty difficult to get a straightforward read on the effectiveness of your messaging and positioning but there are a few things you can do to ensure your messaging is more likely to succeed. 1) During the process of creating the messaging, work with your market research team to test aspects of the messaging with prospects and customers. This can be both quantitative test of words or descriptors you use as well as qualitative tests where you actually test aspects of a pitch with customer. 2) Get input early and often from your sales, customer success, and support teams. 3) Use A/B testing to evalute how the messaging resonates on your website, search, social copy.  

Once you've created the messaging, you can use your channel metrics to track how well it's resonating but give it time. Any change of messaging takes a while to take hold with the audience (be it sales or customers) so don't be in a rush to make an update just because you see metrics dip initially.

This is probably one of the toughest problems we face as marketers. A lot of times, teams will look at a combination of leading quantitative indicators (clicks, conversions, time spent, etc.) and qualitative signals (from buyer interviews, listening to sales calls, etc.), to take a best guess at what’s working and what’s not.

There are lots of problems with this. It’s tough to isolate messaging as the primary driver of these results, and assign quantifiable measures that will clearly indicate improvement if you make changes. Qual feedback takes a lot of time to gather, especially if you want to validate your messaging across a number of buyer personas. A/B testing can help, but you and your GTM team need to be pretty careful not to change anything else (including upper-funnel stuff like ad copy and targeting) that might impact results, which can be paralyzing. Worst of all, while you’re doing all of this, you’re already in-market: the train has left the station and you’re losing opportunity if you’re not sure your message is connecting.

Instead, my recommendation is to validate your messaging before you go to market. (I won’t do too much self-promotion here, but it just so happens we make a Message Testing solution at Momentive, and it’s one of the products we leverage the most internally.) With a message testing solution, you can get a number of messages in front of your target audience — we tend to target a broad array of business buyers — and get real data on which messages resonate across a attributes like overall appeal, uniqueness, and, importantly, desire to learn more (as well as segmentation across buyers if you like). This is the kind of thing that, a few years ago, you’d probably need to engage a research agency to run, but modern survey-based tools like ours have purpose-built methodologies built-in, and you can get a clear signal on your key messages in just a day or two.

We ran one of these recently to test new headline messaging for our Momentive homepage and it paid off in spades. It validated a messaging direction with our target buyers that was different than what internal leadership was advocating for — so we had some data to bring to the table justifying our positioning (see another of my AMA responses on gaining XF alignment on positioning). If we hadn’t tested, there was a strong risk of going to market with a losing message on one of our most important properties. Instead, we were able to go live on Day 1 with a message that we already know will resonate. In fact, two of our test messages performed strongly, so we were able to run an in-market A/B test to find a winner without really risking any traffic to a poor performer.

tl;dr: I recommend using a survey-based solution to test your messaging before you go to market. You’ll get quantifiable information about what works and what doesn’t, aid internal buy-in, and gain a lot of launch day confidence. You will influence other performance KPIs driven by the GTM team, but PMM’s biggest responsibility is ensuring you have messaging that resonates with target buyers.

There's no perfect way to do this. People hate when I say this but when it comes to messaging, I'm much more into qualitative feedback vs. quantitative. If you similarly hate me, feel free to move on. If not, here are a few qualitative measures I use:

• Can your sales team remember it and pitch it on calls? If you use call recording software with your team, take a listen. If your sales team is pitching it, it's working. If not, it's not.

• Do a webinar or event and ask for feedback after. Incentivize response with free swag. Session scores call tell you a lot about how your messaging landed.

• Is more work "falling out of it"? What I mean by this is whether other people are building on top of it. ARe they thinking about it could be used for their segment and iterating on it. The best messaging becomes an organic force at your company.

Anchor on the metrics that matter. You can track efficacy of messaging throughout the funnel - and at each stage, the KPI might be different. Decide/discuss with your team what objectives you're trying to accomplish and base your measurement plan off that.

For example: if your main business goal is to drive revenue:

• Top of the funnel: work with your data team/marketing ops to ensure you're tracking important metrics

  • Example metrics:

    • CTRs of ads

    • Site visitors

    • Demo requests

    • Sign ups

• Middle of the funnel - talk to your sales team! Listen to Gong, or other services that gives you insight on sales conversations

  • Example metrics:

    • Qualitative feedback

    • Conversions => closed won deals

There are multiple methods to gauge the effectiveness of messaging and positioning at different stages.

Pre-launch:

• Quantitative surveys: Test messaging variations with your target audience to identify what resonates.

• Tools like Wynter: Evaluate messaging effectiveness in real-time within your target segment.

• Product beta testing: Refine messaging based on user feedback and real-world use cases before the mass launch.

Post-launch:

• A/B testing: Compare different messaging versions on various communication channels (website, landing pages, social media).

• Email and paid ads: Experiment with headlines, CTAs, and body copy to optimize your messages.

Here are the main KPIs I use to measure the effectiveness of my messaging:

1. Awareness: % of people who recall your messaging.

2. Engagement: % of potential customers interacting (e.g., comments, likes).

3. Click-through rate (CTR): % of viewers clicking your call to action.

4. Conversion rate (CVR): % of users taking desired actions (e.g., purchase, signup).

5. Sales cycle and revenue: Measures overall business impact.

6. Customer satisfaction and net promoter score (NPS): Gauge customer sentiment towards your messaging and product.

Keep in mind that testing and optimizing your messaging is an ongoing process. Customer preferences and market trends constantly change, requiring you to adjust your messaging accordingly to ensure better results across all your marketing channels.

The ultimate KPI for great messaging and positioning is always the health of your business and your most important business metrics. Great messaging can doe everything from increasing conversion rates, accelerating the sales cycle, lowering acqusition costs to improving win rates. Those would always be the P0 OKRs to me.

There are great leading indicators too, which are more tangible and direct. Things like ad click through rates, email click through rates, site bounce rates, time on site, and more, that speak to how engaging and action-inducing your messaging is.