How important is to identify the impact of your messaging?

Identifying the impact of your messaging is critical to determining whether your GTM strategy, and specifically your value props and messaging, were successful. That being said, it can be challenging to isolate the impact of messaging. In order to effectively isolate how a particular message performed, we often do an A/B test between 2 different messages and assess the impact of each. Once you have results from the test, you can incorporate messaging results into future marketing.

Important! Otherwise, messaging is just a mess of words and concepts that you're pulling out of your head (or the other end) to sound smart. Okay, that was a bit crude, but once again, thinking and typing fast right now.

This question is a bit vague, so I'm going to take some liberties with my answer.

1. Yes, it is important to validate messaging. Ways to validate messaging:

   • Prospect and customer research - interviews, surveys, focus groups. Is what you're saying relevant and resonating?

   • Competitive comparisons - is this messaging differentiated or more of the same? Is it defensible, and can you back this up with proof points like product metrics, customer examples, analyst reports, etc.?

   • Is there a hook? Can we be a bit controversial/edgy? - How does this fit with the current tailwinds and market context? Are reporters hot on this right now, are there opportunities to get press pick up here? What does your comms team think?

   • Forward looking - How does this message ladder up to / reinforce the category you're trying to build or win? Is this providing a path to creating a moat or inspiring the product team? Or is this messaging stuck in the now?

2. Yes, it is important to measure the impact and efficacy of messaging. Ways to attempt that:

   • Check on channel performance - if new messaging is on the website, what's the impact on traffic, seo, time on site, conversion, etc. if new messaging is being used on ad copy, compare performance. Yada yada yada.

   • Message pull-through - Are the major messaging points getting pulled through in external content, like other blogposts, news articles, media coverage? Is the sales team using this? Can you use a sales listening tool to pull out what the themes are?

   • Copy cats - Are your competitors stealing your messaging? No one likes a copy cat but it also gives you a sign that you did something interesting.

   • Research - depending on what ongoing research initiatives you have in play + the goals of the messaging in the first place, you can see whether it's made an impact with your customers on awareness, consideration, understanding. Include questions in your ongoing user surveys to measure before/after over time.

Probably more, but gotta run into a mtg.

It's important. When it comes to marketing, impact is the thing we’re all trying to achieve at the end of the day. If you don’t measure impact, you don’t know if your messaging is resonating with your target audience. If your audience isn’t engaging with your messaging and marketing assets, your overall KPIs and goals will suffer. With that said, I know it’s tough to measure impact as a product marketer.

• Test your messaging on the sales floor or on a call with a customer. This is an efficient and scrappy way to know if you’re hitting the mark.

• Check your email open rates and click thru rates. Marketing engagement is a good signal to see if your messaging is resonating with your audience.

• Track your high level KPI. For my team, that is usually product adoption. Did the customers who interacted with your email, web page, or webinar end up adopting the product?

Incredibly important! Thats not to say it has to be quantitatively measurable..but the business needs to know if there is positive business returns on messaging work. There is a huge sliding scale as to what that can look like and thats where the difficulty often lies. From qualitative brand reporting all the way to 1:1 ROI measurable activities such as purchases etc. Either way you need to ensure you have a foundation to track effectiveness that can align to key business priorities.

Simply put it is critical.

I always think it's important to be able to attribute impact or outcomes to anything we do as a product marketer. But I think it's probably more useful to test your way into winning messages vs launching an effort to assess the impact of messaging vs other elements of marketing like pricing, packaging or even the product itself.

One goal of a product marketer is to continuously improve the effectiveness of your messages, and you do that by a/b testing in landing pages, websites, emails, etc. The best message is the one that drives behavior, and you can really only accurately measure that in real life scenarios where a customer has to take action.

Extremely! As they say, everyone's a marketer ;) So being able to identify the impact of messaging is incredibly important in demonstrating why certain messaging decisions are made. Data doesn't lie.

I think it's important to consider your both your conviction level and your interest and need to defend your messaging choices. Sometimes it's worth shipping changes without quantifying the exact impact because you know it's the right thing to do. Most of the time, however, if you're intellectually honest with yourself, you aren't so certain. Testing can be huge for clarifying the most important insights which helps you build a solid foundation for your messaging that is data-backed and defensible.

I'll elaborate a little further below:

• There are absolutely times when you as a PMM know your customers so well that you can confidently ship messaging updates without building out all the infrastructure to measure impact. At Quizlet we call these “just do it” projects. If the conviction is super high and/or the risk to impacts to metrics is relatively low, you can save yourself a few cycles and just make the change. 

• That said, if you believe strongly in the message change and you think it brings you closer to your customer and helps you better connect their problems to your value offered, it behooves you to find some way to account for that. This is where quantitative A/B testing or other forms of holdout or comparison groups can be helpful. If you can quantify the lift in conversion your messaging delivers, you build your credibility and help educate your organization on the power of strong consumer messaging. This is great for building your career and helping stakeholders see how copy alone can be a strong conversion driver.

• If you don’t feel certain in what the best message might be, I usually ask my team to build out a collective Positioning/Messaging Hypothesis Doc. We’ve gotten in the habit of refreshing this a few times a year. Once we’re all looking at some of the same insights, value props, and style notes, it’s easier for us to start to sequence a series of A/B tests that help us learn what language, style, and CTAs resonate best. This type of testing can be a little laborious, but it ends up building your conviction as you layer and learn from past test results. This ultimately helps you feel comfortable with a less-is-more consistent message, without fear that you’re missing something or focusing on the wrong benefit. Beyond that, anytime you have data to back up your POV, you are in a stronger position to defend your choices with PMs, designers, execs, and other stakeholders.