Question Page

How do you promote new / updated messaging internally?

Aliza Edelstein
Route VP of Product MarketingDecember 3
  • Ensure you have leadership buy-in
  • Roadshow it across teams in the company, starting with those that will be using it on a regular basis
  • Get your leadership team to amplify it—everywhere (town halls, all hands, internal emails, etc.)
  • Ask customer-facing teams to include it in various public places, like their LinkedIn profile description
1565 Views
Lindsey Weinig
Twilio Director of Product MarketingAugust 17

I don't know about you, but I'm drained from an all-digital environment and love when people add some creativity to their internal enablement. Come up with a tagline, a theme, or some other creative thread you can tie all of the internal activities around. Since it's for internal audiences you can usually have a bit more of a leash without having to stay as aligned with voice and tone for the company brand. For example, years ago SendGrid launched support for handlebars syntax in our email template editor and the PMM team wore fake mustaches when enabling internal teams of the new feature and adjusted messaging.

Then activate the new messaging with training as you would for a product launch, with live presentations, added as agenda items for key team meetings, internal communications via email and slack, as well as shared resources to support the new messaging including examples of it being used in the wild. 

6467 Views
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Alissa Lydon
Dovetail Head of Product Marketing | Formerly Mezmo, Sauce LabsOctober 12

Messaging is notoriously difficult to train teams on because it is all-encompassing and ever-changing.

To help make messaging more accessible, I find maintaining a few different assets helpful. Firstly, you will want a primary messaging doc that is multiple pages long and includes every detail related to: 

  • The defined problem in the market
  • How your product solves it
  • Personas
  • Use cases
  • Business impacts
  • Feature maps 
  • Etc. 

But while that is useful for someone in marketing who needs that level of detail, no salesperson will ever take the time to read it. For them, I distill the primary messaging doc into shorter, more snackable messaging guides. They are often in table or grid form for easy scanning so folks can get exactly what they are looking for and move on.

To help with the always-shifting nature of messaging, I try to incorporate new/updated messaging into almost every training that I do. For example, when we are getting ready to launch a new feature, I always have a callout during training on how this impacts our messaging framework. Or using roadmap updates as a natural place to reaffirm existing or introduce new messaging. This way, it feels more tangible rather than just the things we say on our website.

392 Views
Jeff Hardison
Calendly VP of Product Marketing | Formerly InVision, Clearbit, Amazon (consultant)May 18

Repeat, repeat, repeat. As our CMO Jessica says, once you start getting tired of sharing the messaging, then you're just getting started.

Of course you need to email, share on Slack, host on Asana, and so on. But that's just the beginning.

Speak publicly about the messaging. Present on the messaging in not just one-to-many meetings but also small meetings with demand gen, content, different sales teams, etc. Get their feedback in small, "safe" situations. Record Looms of you presenting the messaging too, for those async communications fans.

Get people using the messaging. Don't just hand the messaging off to people, but also create shared OKRs with different teams to use the messaging. For example, we have new Enterprise Messaging at Calendly. We agreed on a shared OKR with product marketing, program management, lifecycle marketing, content, and more teams to use the messaging together and test the results with customers. People understood the messaging so much more by using it together.

Watch Gong calls to see if people are using the messaging in Sales and CS calls. If they're not, ask them why and if you can help better explain or support them.

Promoting new messaging is a daily exercise. Never stop!

577 Views
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