Messaging

Messaging is the ability to communicate pains and solutions for a specific persona using the written word. PMM writing is unique because it’s all about distilling a message down to it’s essence and packaging words in a way that will be accepted by a specific group of people. A PMM should write wi...more

I would suggest practicing by creating your own messaging frameworks for some of your favorite products or companies be they B2C or B2B. This should help you to start to think through the different proof points and differentiators because you’ll already be aware of the competitive landscape and h...more

Research, and come with a growth mindset! Look and listen to what competitors in your market are doing. How does their messaging make you feel, how does it relate to your own organisation's. Why do customer go with them versus you?  Also, and something that often goes overlooked; we're all con...more

Practice, practice, practice! Get as many reps in as you can, and have a marketer you admire give you very candid feedback. Bonus points if you can do a working session with someone who’s skilled in messaging — build a messaging framework together, live, so you can get a front-row seat to watch h...more

As others have mentioned, practice. It's hard to find the extra time, so here are some ideas: * Try different frameworks to refresh on basics * Find reasons to tag-team a refresh. I've used it as part of onboarding new marketing folks * Compare with PMMs at other companies. I'm grateful to...more

2 pieces of advice here: 1) Take a look at the messaging from other companies (even outside of your market or industry). Who is really nailing it and what do you like about it? And who are the players that you still can't figure out what they do? See if you can start to incorporate some of the a...more

This is mostly just practice, start writing, and keep writing. However, some specific things you could do include: * Actively consume other marketing content. For example subscribe to your favorite brand's emails, competitor emais. Read the content and think about why it is effective/not ...more

I'd recommend making sure to spend enough time on the planning and information gathering phase that is necessary prior to creating messaging. The most common issue I've seen with messaging is PMMs jumping straight into creating a framework before they truly take the time to understand their targe...more

Messaging for me is both an art and a science. I've seen very good narrative building frameworks and courses around that can you help you nail basic concepts (e.g how to structure a well written value prop) but it needs constant practice and iteration. As an immigrant whose first language is n...more

It's funny, I've been working on a deck looking at exactly this question. It's fascinating how much it varies from company to company. We're moving to a place where the distinctions between product marketing and brand marketing are becoming increasingly blurry. Think of it as simply different pro...more

For companies of a certain DNA (Bay Area, technology), brand marketing is not a priority compared to being able to measure the performance of your own marketing, with a philosophy of investigating what works and what doesn't. That's because the company likely has a demand problem, not a brand pro...more

Just a feedback on the last comment, as I reacquaint myself to the "new" bay area. I have noticed more emphasis on demand gen skills amongst many startups. If there are stakeholders in the company already like product management and technical marketing who are also good at writing, messaging, pos...more

First, you can not decouple analytical skills from brand marketing skills. They are not mutually exclusive. You are right that there is more emphasis on analytical skills in job description for product marketers. Primarily because analytical skills are easier to evaluate. They are also critical b...more

100% agree with Suyog. Nothing we do exists in a vacuum and all of the positioning and messaging we bring to market should be looked at from a brand lens to ensure consistency. Ultimately, the consumer is not going to differentiate what’s brand marketing and what’s product marketing. It’s all the...more

I definitely appreciate this tension -- and in a perfect world you find the right mix of both on the team. Analytical skills will benefit our understanding of market sizing and opportunity, pricing and packaging decisions and so on. The "brand" or creative skillset would aid in storytelling aroun...more

Analytical skills tend to be the preferred skill set of a product marketer because they are "running the business". Product Marketers own a product's P&L and must have the business acumen to drive revenue. Important the ones trying to size and segment the marketplace. Additionally, they'll probab...more

You've hit upon one of the reasons why marketing in tech is a neverending challenge (and the fun part IMO). I think the best marketers have both strong analytical skills and grasp how to build long-lasting brands based on an emotional connection with their customer. If your goal is to one day lea...more

Brand is more than just a logo or color palette or tag line. Brand is the combination of customer touchpoints that create meaning and belonging for that customer...Brand attracts the customer in the first place, for sure, but brand shows up in how the product delivers on its promise, how customer...more

Understanding how Brand Marketing works is critical to succeed in Product Marketing as these two teams work closely together to bring any Marketing and Product work to life. Brand Marketing thinks about creating a long-term, strategic plan to continuously boost a brand's recognition and reputa...more

Developers don't want to be marketed to. Developers are a sharp, no-nonsense group. They work under deadlines and stress that comes from being asked to deliver on the (next to) impossible. They can smell jargon and insincere messaging from a mile away. Since they play a critical role in choosing ...more

Marketing and Product have the same job - to delight their users. Product teams delight users with features and marketing teams delight users with content. Like any segment or persona, developers want to engage with content that is helpful and entertaining. Technical how-to guides, top-notch docu...more

Start with the facts. Then add in what actual customers or prospects have said. Or if you don't have that yet - a respected third party - like a Gartner. And only then try to make it clever. I think too often marketing folks start with the clever and work backwards - but especially developers, th...more

Lol, yes, marketing to developers and technical audiences like data scientists is not for the faint of heart.  They are naturallly suspicious of glitzy marketing, and have very low tolerance for buzz words (e.g. "business transformation", "collaborative intelligence", etc). Wining and dining t...more

Background: Worked as a Community Manager and Product Marketer for an open source database software company DataStax; we sold a proprietary version of the open source database Apache Cassandra, targeting the developer and administrator personas. Developers are experts at searching for informa...more

Sales enablement changes when your company is "business to developer" to point at a different stage in the funnel: the charismatic, knowledgeable developer who probably already has a solution.   When you are pitching to developers it helps to build a scientific, clearly logical and reasoned cas...more

Selling to developers can be difficult, often because they have a ton of say over the decision but not explicitly the budget, but marketing to developers is simpler than people think. Quickly and concretely explain what your product does and how it works/fits in with other stacks (as much as deve...more

I love this question, <3 Developers! The fundamentals of sales enablement dont change, it's more the way you communicate the needs of your audience to your sales team that changes. If we unpack developers and what they want, then it makes it really easy to figure out how to approach sales enablem...more

Great question, something I think about a lot. I’m a huge proponent of specialization with technical products. I wouldn’t expect every member of our enterprise field organization (which is in the thousands) to be able to carry a highly technical conversation from end-to-end, nor would I want them...more

When selling to developers your enablement activities are likely to take on a different focus so that the team understands how to engage in a discussion and build a community while keeping their sales pitches locked in a drawer.  It will also require in-depth technical enablement and understan...more

I love this question. First, I would say to save your company's BDR/SDRs time and avoid trying to set up calls with developers. You'll avoid a lot of frustration on both ends. Gating content content from developers and forcing them to fill in forms might give you a short term bump in leads, bu...more

This is a classical problem for many developer-first companies. Without mentioning names, many have successfully figured out the working model with both strong developer engagement alongside a thriving enterprise revenue stream. Learning from these companies, they always focus on the developer su...more

This is a classical problem for many developer-first companies. Without mentioning names, many have successfully figured out the working model with both strong developer engagement alongside a thriving enterprise revenue stream. Learning from these companies, they always focus on the developer su...more

B2d follows a whole different motion. A developer is not eager to talk to Sales (and they don't want to be sold to). Developers want to try out the product themselves, tinker with it, and only if they enjoy the experience (or get to the aha moment) will they evangelize the solution up the company...more

It depends a bit on how your sales team is organized today. But in any event, your product value pillars should always translate to both individual and company-wide gain, so your core message is always consistent, even if the language changes a bit to accomodate the audience. You might consider a...more

I'd say the mindset shift in B2D is that it's no longer "sales enablement", but just "enablement". And that should be a shared goal across your organization, whether it's the marketing team, sales team, product or support team who are dealing with your developer.  You are correct in saying tha...more

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? * ...more

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 presen...more

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 ...more

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 i...more

Great question! The relative importance of these tips depends on your GTM motion (mostly top-down or mostly bottoms-up), but in principle they're all about contributing meaningfully to growing revenues and customer count: 1. Case studies - sales and demand gen love customer case studies. Nothi...more

Educate educate educate. When I started at UiPath i must have had 50-100 introductory meetings in the first few weeks. I spent time with every stakeholder that I needed to work with or that I needed to be an advocate. I did a lot of them by zoom but I also got on the plane and traveled a ton. You...more

To be honest, this has been difficult to figure out. I don't think we have the best solution yet, but for now, we write down positioning statetements for each product, which include key messages, to ensure that we have one clear reference for other teams in the company. Each positioning statement...more

We have a "storybook" with all of our core messaging. It's a powerpoint with a lot of slides covering segmentation, personas, products, and all the appropriate messaging that goes along with it. It can be a bit heavy (to download) but it's the one source everyone knows about. We host it on our in...more

There are a host of good training options out there. Sharebird is a good place to start and you can google alternatives as well. I mentioned a few books earlier on as well - Al Ries and Jack Trout and it's called "Positioning: The Battle for your Mind" and "Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product ...more

You need to listen to people, share positioning work as it develops and be iterative. If you just show up with a messaging strategy without involving leadership in the formulation you are most likely going to get pushback because everyone thinks they know what we should be saying to the market. B...more

I look for a growth mindset, collaborative personality and humility. Obviously they need to be good at the core product marketing skills and have demonstrated success in other roles but for a leader I want to see them drive unity across the org. Regarding a growth mindset - I want them thinking a...more