What's the best way to ensure messaging evolves with the pace of the company while maintaining consistency? Should I abandon the idea of running a campaign that lasts more than a few weeks?

First of all, I feel your pain! With the company moving fast, it can sometimes feel that your messaging is always playing catch up.

In cases where your product and business evolve quickly, I recommend anchoring your messaging on the elements that remain most constant:

• The market trends around you
• The top pain(s) your audience feels
• The top use cases your company solves
  

If you work for a mobile attribution company, your product might change every day. But the growing number of digital touchpoints (trend), difficulty connecting all of the dots (pain), and the desire to effectively manage your marketing budget (use case) will stick around a long time. So anchor campaigns on what won’t change.

An example from Segment is our “What good is bad data?” campaign. Does it talk about our product directly? No. Does it address our differentiated features? Lightly. But it does speak to a pain that a lot of technical audiences experience, so it has worked as a multi-quarter campaign across both brand and demand generation.

Above all, meet your company where it is. If you’re a small team just getting started, you’re likely going to have nail a brand identity and core message, and then be flexible as you evolve from there. If you’re part of a 500 person marketing team, you’re going to navigate some different challenges related to step-wise refinement of your messaging.

A few tried & true rules here:

1. Define & Know your Core Nouns 
2. Assign them value props and core messages of 25, 50, and 100 words
3. Establish clear ownership for #1 & #2, and make a company ritual around reviewing and adopting nouns and messages
   

To faithfully complete #1 - #3 at Coda, a team across marketing and sales met to first propose what our list of nouns were, and which were most core to the product. We shared this framing with the company to get resounding buy-in.

From there, we met at regular intervals to propose definitions, sample usage, and revisions to build out company dictionary. We continue to meet to tweak language, propose new nouns, and/or retire old nouns that were driving confusion.

This makes sure we have the ingredients we need to spin up new messages quickly and consistently, since a shared vocabulary should help to articulate your product and company’s past, present, and future.

In terms of campaign lifespans and giving them time to breathe, grow and be iterated upon, it’s helpful to present campaigns or launches in phases before your go-live date. What tactics will you employ on Day 1? What are the intervals at which you’ll stop to evaluate and iterate? What drumbeats do you plan to hit in the weeks/months after the campaign initializes? What do those drumbeats do to sustain momentum or even cultivate additional momentum? Do you need any assets or resources beyond launch day to hit those drumbeats (tip: the answer is yes . . . or conversely, if you never ask for those resources, the answer is always ‘no’)

Documenting & proposing phases upfront helps secure internal trust and buy-in, and gives you an artifact to go back to should you feel you are being pressed to move on from a campaign too soon. If it’s not written down, it’s not a plan.

Brilliant question. If developed correctly, your messaging pillars should be evergreen (i.e. should not change on a dime) from campaign to campaign. Ultimately, your messaging pillars bring to life the core value your product/service delivers to customers and hence should be foundational. As you release new product features, think about how they ladder up to your core messaging pillars (aka the value you deliver to customers) and map them as such. 

Here are some best practices to ensure you get maximum traction from your messaging and that there is consistency across how channel marketers, PR teams, sales etc. use them. 

1. Develop a 'How to guide' - In a how to guide, your role is to essentially breakdown and provide guidance to your key stakeholders on how they should be using your messaging - are there direct copy points they can leverage for the website, social, ad copy? Can your PR team directly leverage speaking points or use your messaging pillars? Can your sales team directly use your pitch with a talk track? Break it down for them with instructions, so it’s easy for your stakeholders to use and re-use your messaging. Good messaging is used on an ongoing and consistent basis across 360 channels - to promote customer recall. 

2. Roadshow - Showshow your messaging across your sales, customer success, marketing organization - and explain how each team can effectively utilize your messaging. 

3. Centralize where you store your messaging - so its easily findable and referencable by all stakeholders. Encourage folks to bookmark it 

I think the key to keeping at pace with the needs of the company while maintaining consistency is to have brand messaging that is aligned to your unique value propositions (UVPs). Then you can run integrated campaigns throughout the year that support each of those UVPs. This ensures you stay consistent with the agreed-to brand messages while still creating new campaigns that refresh every few months. You can see which campaigns resonate the best and continue to refresh your campaigns with those UVPs as the foundation. According to a recent presentation at our SMART event, the best ads drive sales over long periods of time. So it's important to stay consistent with your main message while refreshing the campaign that supports it.

The best ways I've found to ensure your messaging lives for more than a few weeks:

1) Collaborating with your company leaders to not just review, but also develop the messaging
2) Testing the messaging with real customers (and sharing their responses with your coworkers)
2) Training — and sometimes testing — your coworkers on the messaging so they know how to use it
3) Spreading the messaging everywhere — website, video, emails, etc. — you can and measuring the effectiveness (and sharing that measurement with coworkers)

When I haven't done at least two of the above, someone often steps in and starts tweaking the messaging. As Netscape's CEO once said, "Show me the data. If all we have are opinions, we'll go with mine."

That said, if you work in a fast-moving company, the messaging will evolve as you get new data from customers, the competition, and so forth. Being flexible and riding the waves is something we all have to learn as product marketers.

This is definitely a question / problem that most PMMs will face and exactly why we create value pillars to help ground us.

I like to think about it this way: you messaging house shouldn't be touched more than once a quarter (and even this is a bit aggressive but if you're at an early stage start-up, you might have a need to make tweaks more often than others). A good template for a messaging house will include:

• the problem your product is solving

• purpose of the company

• mission statement

• emotions you want your persona to feel

• ideal customer profile information

• target persona information

• tag lines

• boilerplate

• power statements / keywords

• solutions messaging

Within solutions messaging, I like to have a few drop-downs:

• value drivers -- sets of three are ideal

• definition of value drivers

• why your persona cares about those drivers

• supporting evidence -- how does your product's feature set enable this

• useful content related to each value driver

• specific pain points each driver solves for

That solutions messaging, should act as a foundation for everything you do. This means, when it's time to run a campaign, that campaign should use this messaging as a foundation to tweak upon.

I also find it's helpful to treat each campaign as a time-boxed experiment. And if that experiment does well, you run it again. That way, you will naturally have a deadline on each experiment that will give you the opportunity to iterate and get into a planning cadence that is proactive vs. reactive.

Definitely not! Customer problems drive your positioning and messaging so unless the problems change, you should stick with your current messaging.

It takes at least a year to claim a position in your market, and once you own it, stick with it for an extended period of time. This assumes customer problems don't change - they rarely do - and your positioning and messaging is:

• Unique - they differentiate you from the competition

• Important - they address your customers' most pressing problem

• Believable - the claims seem inherently true

• Useable - they adapt to all marketing situations and requirements

But it seems like you may have another problem - lack of buy-in to your messaging. You can overcome lack of consensus and buy-in by involving key stakeholders - especially sales - throughout the positioning process and getting management approval as the final step.