Sophia (Fox) Le

Once you are clear on the value proposition of a product/feature and/or a positioning statement for the company or product, you are ready to pull together a messaging framework that your cross-functional stakeholders (from marketing to product) can leverage. In terms of a messaging framework, I have found that formats vary by company but all fundamentally cover a combo of key elements based on what your teams require for a successful launch (ideally delivered as a 1-sheeter or 1 slide format): * Product name/quick descriptor * Target audience (your best-fit prospective customer and the more specific, the better!); include primary (and secondary if applicable) business goal - new customer acquisition, or existing customer adoption/renewal/retention? Your persona work, if any, would also fall into this category. * Target market/geo (as-needed) * Pricing/packaging (as-needed) * Value proposition or position statement (internal language); your competitive positioning/greatest advantages should be covered here and “proven” in the reasons-to-believe or key benefits section. What are your actual competitive advantages? Who or what are the actual alternatives to your solutions for your “best-fit” customers and how will you or your product solve the need better? * Short and sweet elevator pitch or tagline (external language) * Reasons-to-believe and supporting evidence (external language) OR Key features/benefits/value statements and proof points/claims (external language) Pro tip: Do the pre-work to get approved proof points ready to use! Value claims that directly support your key benefits or reasons-to-believe will amp up the strength of your messaging, and third-party validation claims including star-ratings and/or reviews will often show lifts in trust and conversion

Yes! Glassdoor, under the leadership of Bonnie (Head of Market Insights), established two market research online communities (MROC): one for consumers (B2C) and one for customers (B2B). We regularly field message tests to these two research communities to get quick, detailed feedback on messaging. This is what Bonnie had to say about MROCs: 1. MROCs make message testing easy, efficient, and effective! Once your online community is fully recruited, you can send them a survey and usually get a sufficient number of responses back within 48 hours. Automatic reporting dashboards make it easy to share insights with the team. Fuel Cycle is our MROC provider and our partnership enables us to conduct far more research than we could before when we hired research vendors to launch our message tests for us. 2. One of the reasons we chose Fuel Cycle is because they’re partnered with Alchemer (formally Survey Gizmo). Alchemer is a fantastic survey platform, especially for team on a budget. In addition to all the usual survey question types, they have text and image heat maps which are some of my favorite tools to use while message testing. The PMM team loves to see which words and phrases engage the audience the most as well as words and phrases that are confusing or disliked. We can also cut the data to look at it by different demographics or audience segments to see how a message may affect groups differently. 3. When we run message tests, we’re not just looking to see which message is the best performing, we want to learn: 1. Which audience is engaging the most and why? 2. Are there messages that appeal especially well to specific target audiences, even if that message did perform the best overall? 3. Who are the product/feature acceptors and what do they think about the message linked to the product/feature? 4. Which messages are most likely to lead to the desired outcome? Pro Tips: * Sophia’s pro tip: Leverage the tools you have to get feedback. If you can’t field a survey, could you conduct a few in-depth interviews with customers that represent your target audience to see how they react? * Bonnie’s pro tip: Whether you’re using qualitative or quantitative methodologies, know your target audience and make sure to test the message with them. Getting feedback from outside our target audience may lead your messaging strategy astray. * Patti’s (Head of Consumer PMM) pro tip: In addition to surveys, when available, you can A/B test through the growth team in marketing and/or product. We recommend testing every part of the funnel to understand conversion and get a more nuanced understanding of what actually drives greater appeal (is it the color, design, certain parts of the copy/specific key phrases, etc.)

Per our head of PMM (Eric Petitt), it is important to think about and understand the market leader positioning because the leader often defines category expectations… as well as their weaknesses. And when a challenger tries to play catch up to the market leader, the copy-cat will die over time because they are not adding value. The recommendation then is to pick a tighter target audience and a differentiator that will “de-position” the market leader. Your strengths should call out their weaknesses.

Great question and critical to the success of any product launch! At Glassdoor, we start by creating a digestible framework with initial messaging recommendations and “seed” this throughout the process with key stakeholders. The initial messaging recommendations are developed using insights from previously conducted research and feedback from key stakeholders or subject matter experts/SMEs. Two of our greatest advantages at Glassdoor Product Marketing are (1) our Head of Market Insights who is literally a part of our PMM org, not adjacent or in a different department, and (2) an amazing GTM team who are experts in our field and genuine advocates for our customers. Because we are centered around market and customer insights, most of the time, half the battle is won in getting buy-in because the content we propose is grounded in research learning. Once PMM feels good about where the initial messaging has landed with key stakeholders and cross-functional partners have had the messaging “seeded” with them (hence, bought-in), then we go on an internal roadshow to “share” and get final feedback and approvals. Pro-tip: the messaging framework is delivered with an already-approved value prop or positioning statement, a product-on-a-page, and an outline of the initial GTM launch plan so that stakeholders can see the full breadth of how the messaging framework would be applied.

* Quantitative and qualitative market research. Working with expert market research partners will help you get to solid customer segmentation, customer journey mapping, competitive landscape analysis, market trends, and market sizing, TAM. This can be costly, but always worth it! * Qualitative customer interviews. This is probably the easiest and most powerful thing you can do yourself in partnership with product or product design counterparts. You can do 1:1 interviews or even leverage tools like usertesting.com to get qualitative customer insights. * Most analysis is shared in a very clear slide deck that outlines research goals, key learnings, and implications. * I highly recommend checking out my former colleague and friend, Sonia Moaiery’s Sharebird AMA on Market Research (https://sharebird.com/h/product-marketing/ama/intercom-product-marketing-lead-platform-sonia-moaiery-on-market-research) as another great resource!

Data, data, data! Once you are able to identify your customer’s unmet needs, motivations, and attitudes, you can put your customer at the center of your business cases to influence product priorities. And couple that with market insights on your competition, your product counterparts will have to listen. Are you able to identify any gaps that your current feature set does not address? Is there an opportunity for your product to be first to market by fulfilling an unmet need that they cannot get anywhere else as part of their journey to find a solution? For SaaS products, is there any point in the funnel that there is significant drop off that you can test your way into optimizing conversion? Do you have any NPS data or verbatims that you can share areas for enhancements or net new solutions?

Change is inevitable! So whenever possible, going to market with “final” messaging should include room for evolution over time based on various external and internal factors. Markets change and evolve, and customers’ needs or perspectives also change and evolve based on whatever is important to them in that moment--sometimes even driven by trends or current events that cannot be ignored (think, Covid!). If in a B2B org, you can quickly leverage feedback from the field to validate whether your messaging and/or positioning needs does not hit or needs refinement. And, if possible, leveraging your marketing arm to test and optimize along the way and on an ongoing basis will help ensure your messaging sticks and evolves as the market does. Internally, you may have business strategies shift, so having the agility to also ensure your messaging aligns will be helpful.

It is so easy to fall into launching with technical jargon when you've been living and breathing it as a PMM! Two ways that I have found helpful in simplifying, and even transforming/replacing techncial jargon are (1) launch customer interviews, listen and use the language they use, and (2) crowd source ideas internally and externally with as many different POVs as possible. Pro tip: Get inspired by looking outside your field to see how others are taking tricky technical language and turning it into customer-facing messaging that resonates!

* Build relationships. Show up to add value; ask, remind, repeat. * Bring the voice of the customer to the table. Leverage customer interviews, NPS verbatims, third-party research findings, competitive intel. Bring data to validate and strengthen your recommendations with the customer wants, needs/unmet, and motivations at the center of said suggestions. * Bring your marketing calendar with you. Create shared aspirations to get as much exposure and adoption of products set to release while opening discussions on what else can be invaluable product additions to the overarching brand story your marketing team will be pushing out. Time and again, we are finding at Glassdoor that when we are able to anchor or couple product releases with marketing campaigns, it is stronger in every sense. * Bring your GTM launch proposals to get feedback. Involve your product counterparts in the sausage-making. How might your team help move these products off the shelf? How might your team help arm product with data to help with prioritization, especially in high growth orgs where ruthlessly prioritizing is the name of the game?

At Glassdoor, we have a not-so-secret secret weapon… we have a Head of Market Insights within the product marketing org that is at the center of what we do from influencing product roadmaps to positioning and messaging, and enabling our GTM and marketing channels. One of the biggest things being established is a customer advisory board (both in B2B and B2C) to create a feedback loop to ensure that messaging (and our product!) is “hitting home”. I have seen the success of these types of programs in previous companies I have worked in including Granular (farm management software) with farmers and their seed reps to Zenfolio (portfolio websites and e-commerce solutions for photogs) and Richard Photo Lab (photography services) with photographers direct.