How often do you refresh your messaging?

There are two big "reasons" to refresh messaging: your product changes, or the market changes.

When your product changes or you add new features, that's a pretty clear time to make sure your messaging reflects the latest benefits and values for your customer.

Changes in the market will impact your customer's perspective and willingness/desire to purchase your product. For example, pretty much every B2B and B2C company changed its messaging during COVID as priorities shifted and lifestyles changed. Economic downturns often drive messaging shifts, emphasizing cost-savings and ROI. Your product may have seasonality that requires a different message at different times of the year: Holidays if you're B2C, tax season if you're an accounting software, for example.

Finally, there may be times in your own company's calendar that make for logical "refresh" points--sales kickoff, a big conference, basically opportunities where you'll be putting your message in front of a large group of people and you want to make sure it still resonates and is accurate--that's a great time to refresh your messaging.

Keeping your messaging up to date is so critical both to ensure you stay relevant in the market and so your internal stakeholders like sales, success, and marketing are using the latest and greatest.

Often times, there will be natural points for you to review messaging for example, if you're preparing any enablement/training, there's a big event or campaign launching, or you're doing message testing. If these don't naturally come up, a good benchmark to set is to review your messaging quarterly and then after any big milestone such as a product launch, business event, or market trend.

For example:

• Product launch: Update messaging to reflect any new personas, features, and value.

• Competitors: If you notice a new competitor that is affecting deals or your current competitors are taking a bigger chunk of your opportunities, it's a good time to look at your differentiation and messaging.

• Company acquisition or merger: Update messaging to tell the "better together" story and expanded set of use cases, personas, features, and value.

• Market trends: New technology such as AI or global shifts such as recession / COVID which may impact buyer priorities. Or the product category you're in shifts -- such as consolidation of vendors.

The best way to remind yourself is to put a block on your calendar to do this. And then make sure you communicate to all your stakeholders the updated messaging.