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?
- Use case-level: What problems do you solve?
- Buyer-level: How do you deliver value to a specific buyer (e.g. CMO)?
- Capability-level: How do you enable the buyer to get that value?
In every case, you will never regret testing the message with a customer on a call or email. You will always learn something, and if they love it you will gain conviction and ammo to defend that messaging.
- Company-level
- Rigor: Go super high. Use qualitative and quantitative research. Test with customers, analysts, and prospects. Spend the time to align with a broad set of internal stakeholders in GTM and Product.
- Success: Strong positive signals from user research. Alignment to company strategy and differentiation. If you’re messaging is a key input when the company makes big decisions, it’s a huge success.
- Use case-level/Buyer-level
- Rigor: High. Quantitative can help you narrow the use case list and qualitative can drive the clarity you need to understand the ‘why.’ It’s most critical that this aligns with your executive team and GTM teams (these need to be the use cases that they actually see in the market).
- Success: Strong positive signals in marketing and sales channels. Are people resonating with your pitch? Is the content focused on these use cases driving conversions? If your messaging helps accelerate people connecting with your solution, it’s a winner.
- Capability-level
- Rigor: Medium (can be low for small features). You really are aiming for clear and concise messaging at this level. Don’t go for flourish, go for clarity.
- Success: People just get it. If a capability is well explained, your messaging should be the de-facto way that sales, product, and marketing use to describe it.