AMA: Etsy Global Head of Product Marketing, Maureen Sitterson on Messaging

One of my favorite brands' marketing is Reformation. They lead their marketing with the sustainability of their products and they do it in such a bold way that it immediately grabs your attention. Their marketing is clear, provocative, and consistent - you always know without a doubt who and what they stand for. Their tone also evokes a sense of personalization at scale - it feels like they truly know their customers and are talking directly to them in a way that shows that. In terms of Product Marketing leaders, I'm also consistently impressed by the full Airbnb team and the way that they bring features to market and have created an expected cadence of launches with their seasonal releases. The launches are always strong, cohesive narratives that pull potentially disparate features together into a story. I love how they use Brian Chesky's history with the company and voice as a lever - it feels authentic and strengthens their brand story.

Leaning on research and data to project the impact of new messaging and show internal teams why it will matter to customers is most effective. This could come in many formats - showing the potential size of the business opportunity or showing how customers are currently responding to messaging are a few different ways that can help others clearly see your point of view and why you believe a change is necessary. Without a clear articulation of the "why" behind what you're proposing, it's much more challenging to influence others.

I don't have a specific formula for re-iterating on messaging, because I firmly believe that it's important to critically evaluate messaging through multiple lenses with several stakeholders throughout the messaging development process. Landing a strong brief and aligning on it with all key stakeholders as the foundation is the first and most important step - that way, you can challenge whether the messaging is aligned to the brief throughout the development and revision phases. Without a strong brief it's much harder to zoom into exactly what you should say and how you should say it. While that foundation is important, it's also OK to adjust to maximize impact. Especially in a business where things shift rapidly, you have to be comfortable with making quick pivots throughout messaging development.

We've seen success with data - driven personalization. Beyond customer segmentation, for marketing to small business or business customers, helping to provide them with insights and data-driven recommendations for how to grow their business is one of the most engaging messages that we can deliver. I've also found that showing a customer what they could have earned or saved by using a specific product feature you can use opportunistic / "FOMO" - like messaging to drive product/feature adoption and/or a behavioral change in customers.

Identifying the impact of your messaging is critical to determining whether your GTM strategy, and specifically your value props and messaging, were successful. That being said, it can be challenging to isolate the impact of messaging. In order to effectively isolate how a particular message performed, we often do an A/B test between 2 different messages and assess the impact of each. Once you have results from the test, you can incorporate messaging results into future marketing.

This happens a lot as a Product Marketer! While it's great to take multiple stakeholders opinions into account, product marketers have a unique vantage point in their organization that enables them to see the broader company context in a way that not all teams have access to. To manage conflicting opinions, I like to ground teams in what we're communicating, why we're communicating it, and the outcome we want to drive. Usually grounding conflicting voices in those 3 things - and aligning together - can help to move the group toward a shared understanding and hopefully agreement. Strong research can also prove or disprove messaging hypotheses and help to mitigate internal disagreement -- having an unbiased opinion from customers always goes a long way!