What's a frugal yet effective way to test messaging for various personas when you are a 1-2 member PMM team at a young startup?
Oh yes - startup mode often requires you to flex the skills of speed and scrappiness. When it comes to testing messaging, there are a few tools out there that are cheaper alternatives to give you signal on messaging effectiveness.
Subject matter experts: One of the best results I've gotten when testing out messaging is by working with SMEs (internal from the company or friends+fam). It not only produces fast results, but can give you deeper insights into what works and what doesn't. This can be done through conducting a quick interview with them, having them react to a doc with potential messaging, or a quick survey. I find that SMEs will generally give you feedback that will give your messaging more authenticity, less fluff (ah, the woes of marketing), and the directness you need to target your personas.
Sales teams: (if you're B2B) leveraging your sales team can give you insights on the effectiveness of your messaging. Since they're are on the front lines with prospects, they can give you a direct line into understanding what message works and what doesn't. Work with them closely on what to track/look out for when talking to potential customers, i.e provide them with talk tracks and have them gauge the appeal/resonance.
Setting up A/B tests: Whether you're B2C or B2B, you can get quick signal by setting up landing page tests on your website. Track what message gets more clicks to whatever CTA you're measuring.
Your Sales/Customer Success teams are your biggest asset! I'd run the following playbook:
1. Test the messaging internally: Round up all the internal teams that work most closely with customers (Sales, CX, Success, Solutions Engineers, SDRs etc.) Host a working session to get their feedback on your initial messaging. This can be structured in different ways based on the size of this group and the culture of your organization - it could be something as simple as a Zoom call with your messaging doc shared, or something more structured like a series of interviews.
2. Refine and test the messaging with a few key customers: Once you've refined messaging based on the initial insights, find an example of a customer that meets each of your personas (ask your customer-facing teams for intros, or if you can join a call with them). 1-2 samples in each persona can give you a ton of quality insight.
3. Don't be afraid to get scrappy: Think outside the box! This may vary based on the type of product you're working on, but you can look into things like UserTesting, recruiting family/friends to provide feedback, posting on LinkedIn and offering a gift card to anyone who connects with you, or even using a Craigslist ad! One of my favorite examples is doing message testing with fellow Facebook employees by setting up a table at a cafeteria and offering a $5 coffee gift card to everyone who gave us 15 mins of their time. We needed international feedback, so we did this across multiple companies and were able to get all the feedback we needed in a quick and effective way. Later, we ran a similar study with a 6-figure budget using a vendor, and we netted very similar results. The simplest way is often the best one!
Message testing is important to help validate the effectiveness of your message. Here are some low cost way to do so for key personas:
Internal stakeholders: Test messaging and get feedback from internal stakeholders. If your messaging is for developers, set up a call with developers at your company and get their feedback. If your messaging is for executives, do the same with your leadership team.
Customers and partners: Do the above but with customers or partners. Whether directly with them on a call or through sellers where they record the call and you listen back to understand the sentiment and response. Leverage your expanded network.
A/B tests for emails, landing pages, ads: Set up A/B tests for emails, landing pages, or ads to understand what performs best.
Message testing platforms: You can use message testing platform like Wynter and pay for 1-2 tests.
Look for opportunities: When you're hosting a webinar, at an event, talking to customers, start injecting your messaging and see how people react. Ask them questions on whether what you said resonated with them or what else they're curious about. Qualitative insights are as important and quantitative.
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