Sharebird
Sign Up / Sign In
Back to Your Feed

What is your approach to testing different messaging and your criteria for success?

4 Answers
Kevin Garcia
Kevin Garcia
Retool Head of Product MarketingApril 16

As a rule of thumb, you should always test your messaging. The level of rigor and criteria for success should be sized appropriately the higher you go in the messaging hierarchy.

For this answer, I’ll use a pretty simple messaging hierarchy:

  • Company-level: Who are you and what do you do?
  • Use case-level: What problems do you solve?
  • Buyer-level: How do you deliver value to a specific buyer (e.g. CMO)?
  • Capability-level: How do you enable the buyer to get that value?

In every case, you will never regret testing the message with a customer on a call or email. You will always learn something, and if they love it you will gain conviction and ammo to defend that messaging.

  • Company-level
    • Rigor: Go super high. Use qualitative and quantitative research. Test with customers, analysts, and prospects. Spend the time to align with a broad set of internal stakeholders in GTM and Product.
    • Success: Strong positive signals from user research. Alignment to company strategy and differentiation. If you’re messaging is a key input when the company makes big decisions, it’s a huge success.
  • Use case-level/Buyer-level
    • Rigor: High. Quantitative can help you narrow the use case list and qualitative can drive the clarity you need to understand the ‘why.’ It’s most critical that this aligns with your executive team and GTM teams (these need to be the use cases that they actually see in the market).
    • Success: Strong positive signals in marketing and sales channels. Are people resonating with your pitch? Is the content focused on these use cases driving conversions? If your messaging helps accelerate people connecting with your solution, it’s a winner.
  • Capability-level
    • Rigor: Medium (can be low for small features). You really are aiming for clear and concise messaging at this level. Don’t go for flourish, go for clarity.
    • Success: People just get it. If a capability is well explained, your messaging should be the de-facto way that sales, product, and marketing use to describe it.
2617 Views
Pranav Deshpande
Pranav Deshpande
Vanta Senior Product Marketing ManagerMay 10

There's both qualitative and quantitative ways to test messaging, and in my opinion both are equally important in the long run. 

The qualitative approach involves directly validating messaging with your target audience by:

1. Joining sales calls, pitching the product yourself, and seeing how they respond. 

2. Interviewing your sales and customer success team to understand which aspects of the messaging you've drafted for them are resonating.

3. Listening to recorded customer conversations. At Modern Treasury, we're huge fans of Gong. I spend about 2 hours every week listening to Gong calls. 

4. In-person events are a great place to test messaging. Some of the best signals I've received in the past have come from conversations at events.

5. Trade publications, newsletters, and other industry media that your target audience consumes are great places to find new messaging ideas!

The quantitative approach involves:

1. Buying LinkedIn or display ads targeted at the roles that comprise your ICP and running different messages for the same CTA to measure relative performance. This can get expensive though, because you need to reach a large enough number to achieve significance.

2. A/B testing copy on your website. You need to make sure you can get enough unique views over your test period to achieve significance. 

3. Similar to 2, email campaigns are also a great way to test different copy.

If you're at a startup that's just found p/m fit, quantitative testing can be harder to do because your sample sizes might be too small. In that case, I recommend starting with qualitative approach first! 

460 Views
Sarah Lambert
Sarah Lambert
Symphony Talent Head of Product MarketingOctober 20

This really depends on the channel: For websites and demand gen, you can always use A/B testing to determine what works, but for messaging further down in the funnel, tracking interactivity with different content on your website is helpful and then even further down the funnel are customer presentations and demo scripts. Here it's helpful to have a good relationship with Sales to ask for constant feedback on what is resonating with customers and what isn't. Keeping track of win loss rates can also help track the effectiveness here.

Lastly, for new features or products by current customers, track both attendance to launch webinars as well adoption rates to determine if messaging about value, impact and performance are resonating with customers.

1303 Views
Diego Lomanto
Diego Lomanto
Ada Chief Marketing OfficerMay 11

We use varioius external forums for testing messaging. We do a lot of informal conversations with customers but we also have formal customer and product advisory boards where we preview messaging. I also like to get analyst feedback before launching anything. These forums usually provide useful insight to improve messaging substantially.. 

354 Views
Top Product Marketing Mentors
Eric Bensley
Eric Bensley
Asana Head of Solutions Marketing
Teresa Haun
Teresa Haun
Zendesk Senior Director, Technology Marketing and Communications
Sherry Wu
Sherry Wu
Gong Director of Product Marketing
Aliza Edelstein
Aliza Edelstein
Route VP of Product Marketing
Nisha Goklaney
Nisha Goklaney
HubSpot Senior Director of Product Marketing
Mary Sheehan
Mary Sheehan
Adobe Group Manager, Lightroom Product Marketing
Madeline Ng
Madeline Ng
Google Head of Marketing, Google Maps Platform
Christine Sotelo-Dag
Christine Sotelo-Dag
ThoughtSpot Director of Product Marketing & Customer Marketing
Grant Shirk
Grant Shirk
Cisco Head of Product Marketing, Cisco Campus Network Experiences
Amanda Groves
Amanda Groves
Crossbeam Senior Director Product Marketing