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What is your advice on creating messaging for multiple audiences for an enterprise B2B product with end-users that are different from the buyer committee? How would you decide what marketing materials to go with each message in a product launch?

For marketing materials like website and press releases, do we need to stay focused on messaging for the end-users only?
Julia Szatar
Julia Szatar
Tavus Head of MarketingDecember 2

Start by defining the personas and the top-level narrative of the product. 

  • Who is it for?
  • What is the problem statement? 
  • What is the value prop? 
  • What are the key benefits?

You could start with the buyer and then modify it for the different end-users (or the other way around). There will be at least some overlap with nuanced differences, and some very different messages.

In terms of choosing the marketing materials, this is also all about understanding your audience. How does they buyer make decisions, what materials do they consume, is there a standard procurement process for the buyer and materials they are used to seeing? E.g. white papers, landing pages, webinars? Same thing for the end-users. What are they reading? What press, newsletters, and blogs do they read? Are you targeting existing customers or trying to get new customers?

Based on those answers you can explore the different materials and channels - 1 pagers, decks, emails, blog posts, videos (loom videos!), press releases, press outreach, webinars, events etc. 

The other factor is time and resourcing. For example, events are expensive and need more lead time.

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Mike Greenberg
Mike Greenberg
SurveyMonkey Director of Product Marketing | Formerly AppleJanuary 4

The short answer is that you'll need to develop messaging with both audiences in mind, and apply the correct messaging (or combination of messages) based on the target audience and funnel stage for each part of your GTM strategy.

Our SurveyMonkey product spans self-serve and enterprise (sales assisted) businesses, with a lot of existing end users we can target for upsell and cross-sell, departmental buyers and administrators who may not be users of our product but key to the buying process, and an untappted market of potential new customers. So there are a lot of potential permutations of our core messaging depending on who might be listening. It's helpful to have customer journeys mapped out to support your GTM strategy, and help your XF team identify who is coming into the buying journey, and when.

To answer your quesiton more specifically, in a broad, general audience resource like a press release or top-level organic webpage, I'd recommend a high-level "greatest hits" of how your product benefits both users and buyers. When we do this, it usually looks like some version of, "End users will love how much easier our product makes it to do [departmental pain point], while IT administrators will appreciate improved [IT buyer concern]." Provide journey paths for readers to self-segment into more targeted and detailed Consideration resources.

As a general statement, end users will outnumber decision-makers in terms of who you can reach, so you can be more efficient getting their attention. If you can convince the user that your product will make their lives better, they can get your sales team or Consideration resources in front of the right decision-maker(s) internally. That mid-funnel discussion is often where some of the more buyer-targeted messaging comes in. But there are no hard rules and you may find a different approach that works for you, or campaigns that directly target buyers for larger accounts.

As your GTM strategy comes together, it may be helpful, wherever you're listing your campaign tactics (we typically maintain a launch activity tracker in Google Sheets), to clearly list what funnel stage and target audience(s) each bit of collateral supports. That'll help you and your marketing communications team align on the right messaging, at the right level, for the right audiences with every piece. 

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Pranav Deshpande
Pranav Deshpande
Vanta Senior Product Marketing Manager | Formerly TwilioSeptember 28

We've followed a three step process in the past that's helped us identify messaging for multiple audiences in an effective and efficient way:

1. Start with listing the core value props of your product at a high level, irrespective of the target persona. For example, if your product is more efficient, flexible or scalable than existing alternatives, the core value props are Efficiency, Flexibility and Scalability.
2. List the core jobs-to-be-done for each target audience. You should already have this as a result of your persona research. If you don't, I highly recommend running a persona research exercise first, where you interview existing customers or prospects representing each target persona.
3. Map the jobs-to-be-done to value props. Each persona might care about different value props, and this exercise helps you identify those explicitly.
4. Draft key messages for each mapping between jobs-to-be-done and value props. This is where the rubber meets the road. Once you've explicitly articulated which value props each persona cares about, it becomes quite easy to draft messages for different formats and channels that can be used in the launch.

Deciding which marketing materials to use depends entirely on the nature of the product and your understanding of how customers and prospects engage with your company. For example, if your product demos well, key messages should be incorporated into live or recorded demos, webinars and if you have a self-serve product, the product onboarding experience. If you primarily engage via B2B content, incorporate it into whitepapers, webinars etc.

I hope this was useful! Happy to chat more. Drop me a note at [email protected]

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Abhishek Ratna
Abhishek Ratna
Labelbox Director of Product MarketingDecember 14

Here are some fundamental things

  1. Research and understand the motivations, needs, and pain points of both the buyers and users of the product.
  2. Create messaging that speaks to the benefits and value of the product for both the buyers and users.
  3. Highlight the features and capabilities of the product that are relevant and appealing to both the buyers and users.
  4. Address potential concerns or objections that may arise from both the buyers and users, such as cost, implementation, or ease of use.
  5. Utilize customer testimonials or case studies that showcase the success of the product for both buyers and users.
  6. Offer resources and support for both the buyers and users to help them understand and maximize the value of the product.

Next, you would like to create separate marketing channels for the two audiences

  1. For example, have a "developer.xyz.com" site for your developer audiences, a xyz.com/buyerpersona1 page for your buyer persona, and xyz.com to speak to both
  2. Create separate "buyer center" content from "user documentation/guides"
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