Elise Beck

There are a few ways you can validate your messaging: * I like to start by doing a customer listening tour. Spend some time getting to know your target customer and pay close attention to the way that they are describing their process and pain points. When you unveil your final messaging, it's important that you're speaking to your audience in the words that they use to ensure that your message resonates. * I also like to look at market trends and SEO insights to help inform the direction. I'll often spend time on third party review sites like G2 to understand how they're defining categories and features. It's also helpful to comb reviews of your own product and your competitors to again understand how the market is tending to describe certain features and functionality. It's always helpful to root yourself in what your audience already knows, how they're talking about things, and how they're already searching for things in their own words. * When it comes to true messaging, like the actual six words that are going to appear in big bold leaders at the top of your website, you can conduct user tests to understand how this message resonates. This takes time and resources, so I'd only recommend this for really big projects, like a total repositioning of your product vs. a small feature launch. Have your team mock up your top 2-3 messaging variations and see how the audience responds through guided interviews. Alternatively, you can incorporate message testing into surveys or run A/B test on paid ads to see what converts. 

The most important part of messaging is actually your positioning. I like to think of it as a sculpture where positioning is the armature -- the most foundational skeleton or bones of the thing. Without the armature, your sculpture could easily lose shape and fall apart. Without positioning, your messaging could easily lose shape and fall apart. Your positioning should be really explicit about: 1. The name of your product or feature 2. The category that your product or feature fits into 3. The target audience 4. The key benefit(s) 5. The key differentiator(s) 6. The reason to believe ...I typically write this out in a table format, and draft up a short response for each of those 6 prompts. From there, challenge yourself to rewrite it as a simple positioning statement. Does it work? Typically I'll spend a lot of time here with my team, really kicking the tires to ensure that the positioning is clear and defensible. This is the foundation of your messaging. From here, you can begin to draft up some messaging pillars. Think of these as key themes that relate to your positioning. It's really important that altogether, this is shared with your broader marketing team and GTM partners so that any additional marketing collateral, help documentation, sales enablement, etc. all holds up and aligns with the over arching positioning and messaging you've set forth. The reality is that your messaging can change flavors depending on where it shows up. The headline of an ad will be different from the body of an email which will be different from a blog post. Providing your team with the foundations of positioning and some broad messaging pillars will ensure that altogether, the message comes across in the right way no matter what. 

When it comes to aligning the goals of your product and PMM teams, it's important to first look at your company's overarching OKRs--which should act as a guiding star for your entire organization. Once you have a clear understanding of these company-level OKRs, you can start to align your product and product marketing teams around a shared goal. This can be achieved by breaking down the company-level objectives into smaller, more specific goals that are relevant to your product and marketing strategies. As an example, let's say your company objective is to increase revenue by 20%. Your product team has likely honed in on a handful of new features or improvements that will help to hit that target. And on the marketing side, PMM will focus on promoting and driving the adoption of those new features. Things can get a bit challenging when there are conflicting priorities. It's important to maintain open lines of communication when it comes to how each team is thinking about prioritization and how we believe the work will ladder into the bigger picture. At Wistia, we look at our OKRs on a tri-annual basis to make sure we're still aligned and focused on the right things that will move the needle for the business.

I do think it's important to ladder your product positioning into the broader product portfolio and/or company message. I've talked about the 6 components of your positioning (Product Name, Category Name, Target Audience, Key Benefits, Key Differentiators, and Reasons to Believe)... when reflecting on your Reason to Believe, I feel like there is often something in there that will tie back to your broader product portfolio and/or company message. Let's take HubSpot as an example. HubSpot's mission is to help millions of companies "grow better". As a company and as a product, HubSpot deeply values the customer experience and believes in putting long-term relationships ahead of short-term gains. There a lot of ways to dig into and interpret "grow better", but we'd challenge ourselves to really think about how this ethos and core part of our company and our brand ties back to the individual product. In the case of our sales product, Sales Hub, we ended up zeroing in on this idea that if you can focus on your customers, instead of your systems, you'll be able to grow better. That was our brand tie in and reason to believe, and ultimately this ended up being applicable to HubSpot's portfolio as a whole. 

I believe that every idea and request can be valuable, and at Wistia, we've worked hard to foster a culture where product ideas and feedback are openly shared. Of course, there's always room for improvement, but we strive to make feedback visible and welcome. It's important to keep in mind that sometimes what seems like a great idea could actually be a bug (this happened to me recently) or something that's already being evaluated. You never know when your feedback could be the missing piece to a larger puzzle. Prioritizing all of that feedback can definitely be a challenge. The key here is to align your priorities with your OKRs. I'll also note that essential user experience requirements should always be a priority (and ideally these should also be reflected in your OKRs so that it's never a question) Beyond looking at your OKRs, tools like User Voice -- or any product ideas forum -- can be a helpful way to quantify and prioritize ideas based on customer feedback. Ticket volume can also be a great way to quantify the importance of an idea or piece of feedback. If a particular point of friction is causing significant support costs, it's definitely worth prioritizing.

Again, I'm a firm believer that product marketing should be in lockstep with their counterparts in product. As a new product marketer, taking the time to forge those relationships and build trust with the product team is an essential first step. It's also important to align around higher-level company objectives. This helps establish common ground and ensures that everyone is working towards the same outcomes. With a strong foundational relationship and a shared goal, it's much easier to influence the product roadmap. There will always be points of tension or areas where priorities will not be interpreted in the same way across teams. And that's okay! If you've established a baseline, you can still have really productive conversations about what you're trying to accomplish and why. At Wistia, we've incorporated GTM input as part of the product team's planning process. Those GTM inputs are directly tied to the company OKRs, so there is some consistency and familiarity there. We've baked in that time for leaders across sales, customer service, and marketing (including product marketing) to share what's most important to their success and the product team is able to weigh that in their own prioritization and planning. Making it part of the process vs. an intrusion is definitely a nice cultural shift that we've been able to achieve.

In product marketing, we often focus on brand-new features that can attract new customers and expand our market. But for existing customers who've already bought in, sometimes the little updates make the biggest impact. To ensure that the product team prioritizes these updates, it's really important to have visibility into how customers are experiencing the product. While average NPS score is a useful benchmark, support inquiries can provide more valuable feedback. By analyzing support tickets and live chat conversations, you can identify areas where customers are experiencing friction and prioritize fixing those sharp edges. A product ideas forum can also be a helpful tool for quantifying customer impact. By tracking the number of upvotes on ideas, you can identify which updates will have the most significant impact on customer satisfaction. By creating a culture that values customer feedback and encourages the sharing of insights across the organization, you can drive urgency and ensure that the product team prioritizes the updates that matter most to customers.

Again, I think this is where it's helpful to align with your company-level OKRs. At a high level, you're all working towards the same goals. If you have an idea that you think might help you achieve those goals, it's important to share that with your product org. Any data you can bring to the conversation will certainly be helpful -- whether that's trends you're seeing in your existing funnel or macro trends like search volume for keywords you might be trying to go after (this is especially valuable if you're trying to advocate for an acquisition-focused free tool, for example). It's also important to understand the tradeoffs that might need to happen on the product side to make your idea come to life. While your idea might be really cool and support the results your after, there may be some unseen tradeoffs that aren't worth making at this point in time, and that's okay. What's most important is that you've had the conversation and made the decision together.

In my experience, it's important for the product team to establish their own OKRs that ladder into the company-level objectives. However, creating a culture of agility that enables quick and reliable product releases can be a real challenge. I've been in scenarios where the product organization has struggled with scoping work effectively or in some cases they've had super ambitious plans for MVPs that would take forever to build. As a product marketer, I've found that building strong relationships with the product team is essential. By becoming deeply embedded with the team and understanding their priorities and goals, I can help create an environment where the product team recognizes the importance of meeting GTM (Go-To-Market) dependencies for a launch. Through these relationships, I can help promote a sense of urgency that encourages the product team to prioritize critical features and ensure timely releases.