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10 Answers

Rekha Srivatsan
Salesforce Vice President Product Marketing • August 11
Great question! You can consider your target buyers and prioritize messaging based on your top personas. This will help your field tremendously too. You can also identify common customer outcomes and make sure you map your buyers to expected outcomes to the general vision of the platform. Alignin......Read More
467 Views

Diana Smith
Twilio Director of Brand and Product Marketing, Twilio.org • July 16
You nailed why platform products are difficult to message. This is also why I think they are more fun than working on “point solutions.” (Please forgive me for using that heinous jargon.) In the best-case scenario, you can identify an overarching value proposition for using the platform that r......Read More
2693 Views

Kristen Ribero
Handshake Senior Director of Corporate Marketing • October 29
This will depend on what your product/service/platform does and who the target audience is. For instance, in one of my previous roles, we had one product for one audience. Of course the platform was extensible, had different feature sets, but the value was easy to articulate to one audience. On t......Read More
1727 Views

Apurva Davé
Google Head of Marketing, Cybersecurity • May 25
Think about what matters most to your customer, and then what matters most to your company. * Is your base platform something which your customers will natively interact with and drive value from? * Is it something that a new user in your target accounts will benefit from (eg, developer......Read More
2146 Views

Vishal Naik
Google Product Marketing Lead • January 25
In my opinion, the most important thing in prioritizing your messaging is finding the common denominator across your platform. Does it create a new output, or solve a new problem, or enable a new style of working, for example. Then you prioritize that in your messaging hierarchy, and use the vari......Read More
931 Views

Your platform sits within a hierarchy itself (e.g., working bottom-up, messaging at the feature/function level are subordinate to product, to platform, to suite, to solutions, to corporate, to brand messaging). In other words, messaging cascades downwards from your mission and brand promise. Mess......Read More
406 Views

Krithika Muthukumar
Retool Head of Marketing • December 19
When I was at Stripe, we offered upwards of a dozen products on our platform that go way beyond payments processing—from products for incorporation and billing management to fraud prevention and managing corporate spending. To manage the growing complexity, we introduced the concept of Anchor Ten......Read More
3578 Views

Div Manickam
Mentor : Career | Leadership | Product Marketing • December 5
Often times, we say our platform has unlimited possibilities, it's the art of the possible -- because it truly is. But it doesn’t help the customer understand our unique differentiator vs any other option in the market. Starting with themes has been helpful to simplify the messaging hierarchy. We......Read More
1006 Views

Savita Kini
Cisco Director of Product Management, Speech and Video AI • August 2
Thank you for some wonderful frameworks and inputs on messaging and positioning. I have seen a trend especially across many segments - particularly in enterprise - to move from products to solutions to platforms. I had written a blog last year what that means, especially if the goal is to positio......Read More
836 Views

Daniel Palay
3Gtms Head Of Product Marketing • February 27
I generally look at it like this: Use Case -> Business Case -> Story. Starting with the use cases, I think about what people actually do with this platform (cue the "two Bobs" from "Office Space"). Then I think about how those capabilities translate into solutions to real problems, as differen......Read More
635 Views
Related Ask Me Anything Sessions

Google Head of Marketing, Cybersecurity, Apurva Davé on Platform and Solutions Product Marketing
May 25 @ 10:00AM PST

Calendly Head of Product Marketing, Jeff Hardison on Messaging
May 17 @ 10:00AM PST

Demandbase Director Product Marketing, Ruth Juni on Messaging
May 4 @ 10:00AM PST
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Kristen Ribero
Handshake Senior Director of Corporate Marketing • October 29
For my company, it's currently shared between product, product marketing and design, but that's mostly a factor of being a startup and in the process of building out each of those functions. I think about it in two ways: 1. Is the in-app copy descriptive of the product itself? Things like featu......Read More
1325 Views
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Sarah Lambert
Symphony Talent Head of Product Marketing • October 20
You have to start with understanding your audience and your product. For the audience – understand their key business issues and pain points and for the product, understand the differentiators / value drivers so you can craft a message that connects your product as a solution for your audience’s ......Read More
985 Views
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Diana Smith
Twilio Director of Brand and Product Marketing, Twilio.org • July 16
I think you can have two flavors of product marketers. The first are very analytical and business-minded. They identify the key top customer problems and benefits for the product. Then, they might need to collaborate with someone in brand, content, or copywriting to make those messaging points sp......Read More
2843 Views
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Derek Frome
Ouster.io Vice President Marketing • September 5
I'll take a more extreme position on this question. You're setting yourself up for failure by asking us how to "defend" your messaging. Instead, I'd ask you to listen to those people who you are used to "defending" your messaging from. It's not your messaging - give up that pride of ownership in ......Read More
1139 Views
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Priya Gill
Momentive (SurveyMonkey) Vice President, Product Marketing • December 8
In many cases when you’re trying to reposition a mature, market-leading product, it’s because 1) you’re either trying to change your target market’s perception of your product / product portfolio or brand relative to the competition. Interestingly enough, this is exactly what we did earlier this......Read More
880 Views
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Matt Hodges
Atlassian Head of Marketing, Confluence • October 31
I can’t think of any one example I have received recently, but here’s my advice on what I think makes a good feature launch email: * It’s thoughtfully targeted and relevant: A poorly targeted email is about as effective as a love letter addressed “To whom it may concern” (credit: Des T......Read More
1586 Views
Related Questions
Where does in-app copy fit in your org? (Under Product Marketing, Design or other?)What is your overall process when developing a messaging platform from scratch?Do you need to be good at writing to create good product messaging?How do you defend the messaging that you’ve created when everyone in our company has an opinion about messaging. Can you share your perspective and best practices for repositioning a mature, market-leading product? Any examples of best in class feature launch emails you have seen?