Who should a product marketer work with to QA and approve product messaging?

You will never regret QA-ing your messaging with customers. Not only will it help you land on great messaging faster, but it will give you conviction as you defend your messaging across the organization.

It is different at every company, but at Segment each PMM follows a pretty simple path:

• Develop the messaging
• Test with customers, peers, and their core working group
• Align with me and our VP of Marketing
• Share broadly, refine. Repeat. 

This will depend a bit on the specific market or product, but I'd suggest the following:

• Your customers 
• Your product team
• Your sales team
• Your leadership team
• Industry analysts or influencers

Customers can be a really valuable source of messaging feedback that often gets overlooked. A customer community or advistory board can be a great panel for message testing, and they generally appreciate having the opportunity to participate. Analysts can be helpful, but you'll need to filter their feedback based on their POV of the market which may or may not align with yours.

The approval process may differ depending on your company, but I believe it is incredibly important to get input from various stakeholders throughout the process. Not only can you uncover interesting perspectives but it also gets those stakeholders bought into the process which will help them act as champions of the messaging as you roll it out more broadly. Key stakeholders I typically work with include leaders from Sales, Customer Success, & Product specifically (and of course fellow marketing leaders as well).

The magic formula usually includes these 3 in my experience:

-Product - they'll pull you to vision and differentiation

-Sales - they'll pull you into the here and now of closing business today

-Customers - they'll help you rationalize the product and sales feedback so you can meet somewhere in the middle;)

To ensure messaging resonates with your target audience and aligns with your product value proposition, it’s a must to collaborate and test messaging with various internal and external stakeholders. This typically includes working closely with:

• Customers: This is a real-world validation. Your customers provide invaluable feedback and insights that can help you refine your messaging to better address their pain points.

• Peers: Including product marketers, which allows you to gain diverse perspectives.

• Product team: They can help you create messaging that accurately reflects the product. They’re the ones who have a deep understanding of the product’s features, capabilities and unique selling points.

• Sales teams: They provide a great input on the messaging’s effectiveness and clearly highlight areas that need adjustments.

• Marketing teams: You can use marketing channels to run A/B tests to validate your messaging. In addition, alignment with broader marketing teams including content and brand managers, ensures that your messaging is consistent across all touchpoints and campaigns.

• Leadership: Enables you to ensure that your  messaging strategy is in line with the company's overall goals and vision.

This approach enables you to create, test and refine messaging that effectively resonates with your target audience, while ensuring a faster process.