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. 

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).

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.

Churn is a critical measurement for my area of the business, which includes services: The best KPIs for churn: 1. Churn rate: direct measurement of churn 2. Customer Engagement Score: Higher engagement usually equates to higher loyalty 3. Net Promoter Score: measure of satisfaction indicates likeliness to churn 4. Customer Retention Rate: another direct measurement of churn

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