Don Fuss

Messaging is the way you describe and present your product or service to the market. It will describe the customer or market challenge, your solution or product capabilities and the benefits provided. Positioning focuses more on what differentiates your product or service in the market. Messaging: Our product helps you automate tasks to create efficiencies and cost savings. Positioning: Our product leverages artificial intelligence to automate tasks. 

There are plenty of resources to leverage to hone your messaging skills. LinkedIn Learning and Udemy have value proposition courses that provide overviews of how to build a messaging framework. Interview other product marketers who have shown great ability to message. Continue to test your messaging with various audiences and learn from their feedback. messaging is very much an art versus science.

Messaging can best tested in numerous ways. Customers are a great source of feedback for messaging. Leverage key accounts or your Product Advisory Board to gather input. You should also test your messaging with customer facing employees (sales, customer success). The analyst community (IDC, Forrester) provides a great resource to use for testing messaging. 

Yes, we share some KPIs with growth and customer marketing, but you must clearly define the measurement and ownership of those metrics. One example is product adoption metrics which we share with product management to measure how our products are being used. Another example is content views and download metrics that we share with both the content and campaigns organizations.

Outside of pipeline or revenue we leverage the following metrics: Product awareness: surveys, brand score, website traffic Product adoption: percentage of users of use the product after purchase Net Promoter Score: good indicator of customer satisfaction of the product Conversion rate: measure effectiveness of particular marketing campaigns

While there are other key metrics to leverage I find the following the best options: Brand sentiment analysis: obtain feedback from social media or customer reviews CSAT score: measurement of customer expectations Customer churn: low churn equates to positioning that aligns to customer expectations Sales feedback: qualitative feedback of customer reactions to messaging

Alignment with product teams is essential to ensuring capabilities and features and positioned correctly. We leverage for following sources to derive potential names for new features and functions: sales, customers, outside agency, and our brand team. Additionally, we research out competition to better understand how our new features compare.

B2C messaging usually taps into the personal components and can be more emotion driven. Benefits and value propositions are focused on outputs such as personal satisfaction and somewhat immediate needs. B2B aligns with a longer sales cycle and appeals to the business objectives of the business audience (influencers and buyers).

Focus groups and customer interviews are the optimal tools for voice of the customer research. We do leverage Qualtrics for specific survey feedback. It is critical to vet the key customer questions with the product and sales teams to ensure the feedback aligns to the specific goals of the research. We have leveraged our analyst relationships to gather voice of the customer feedback as well.

We incorporate our commissioned research into many of our product marketing decks, including first call decks, sales enablement decks, and go to market presentations. Competitive positioning and market data are critical to building out a strategic plan to capture market share and provide opportunity for upsell and cross sell of products and services.