AMA: Hubspot Former Sr. Manager, Product Marketing, Jeffrey Vocell on Messaging

This is a great question. As product marketers, I think we often confuse this terminology, and due to the common use of these terms it amplifies the perception they are different. From my point of view, there are differences between positioning and messaging which I’ll cover here, but everything else you mentioned — story, pitch, etc — is either an output of positioning and messaging, or is one and the same. First, positioning is an internal resource that covers how your product is uniquely different from other solutions on the market and addresses key buyer pain points. At HubSpot, we believe that this positioning comes to life through a story and is often written in narrative form. Messaging, on the other hand, is the external-facing version of that positioning. Messaging needs to carry the essence of your positioning but should be more concise and oriented around driving the activity you want (free user signups, conversions, etc). At HubSpot, we’ll usually create a pitch deck that carries the messaging of our product/launch but exists as a separate document used by various teams.

Measuring the success of messaging overall generally ties back to product launch goals — whether that’s a sales or revenue number, or more user/signup focused. That being said, if you’re working on positioning and messaging outside of a launch then I’d look at metrics like length of sales cycle, demo to close rate, % of deals closed-won vs, closed lost (and against specific competitors if that’s important to your product line/business), and raw volume of sales and MRR/ARR. You can switch some of those metrics to be more freemium focused if you are working on user acquisition instead of direct sales but the same overall concept applies. Lastly, there are a bunch of tools on the market that allow you to measure and see how enablement materials you are creating are being used. I’d start by establishing some baseline metrics on previous enablement materials — how many views, demos were resources a part of — and how is your new messaging (and the respective assets it’s a part of) doing compared to that baseline? If the internal metrics and external metrics are not headed in the right direction it could signal a problem with your messaging.

I’m not sure there really are exercises. Once we have research, then we can plug it into our positioning template and answer a bunch of questions within that template (i.e. “what is the shift in the market/world that the buyer is experiencing?). Once all of those questions are answered, then it’s relatively seamless to come-up with a narrative based on that pre-work, and thus messaging. The important point is that any messaging — given it’s designed to be broadly applicable — still carries the core of your positioning work. If you have a creative team on-staff or even just an individual who’s great at thinking outside of the box as them to take a look at your positioning and this about how it could be transformed to address the widest cross-section of your audience. Having another perspective can be really valuable here to test concepts and push ideas forward that ultimately help you write great messaging.

This starts far before the content is shared across various platforms or to different audiences. To begin, if the product you are selling has multiple decision-makers or potential buyers you should create a priority matrix. In other words, which persona is the most important and which channels do they prioritize. This matrix can exist in a simple spreadsheet and should help you, and any other teams internally quickly understand who the primary buyer is and which channels work best for them. Once you have the matrix then you need to actually divide up your content and go to market plan and which messaging you’ll be sending to specific audiences. For example, should existing customers receive the same message as prospects? Once we have the content being created for a launch, and our matrix we’ll optimize the messaging for those folks — like a specific message to existing marketers within our install base, and a separate message to Marketing Ops professionals who are prospects. On some channels, like social, this message has to be shorter which may mean a ~15-30 second video instead of a full-length sizzle reel. In my experience, you should optimize for that core buyer/audience here and ensure you are segmenting and targeting secondary audiences with specific messages using channels where you can reach them directly.

Great question. There are a few primary mechanisms we've used to test messaging: * Research Reports / Messaging Surveys - These work pretty well, especially when you're entering a brand-new market and need to test messaging for and audience that isn't in your database already. * In-App - I mentioned this in another answer, but if you can directly control, or work with your product team to edit in-app messaging easily then it can be a great way to test various messaging. Within HubSpot, depending on the product and tier you are on there are a few limited places where upgrade modals will appear. We'll test messaging in some of those spaces especially if we need key feedback or metrics from an existing audience like marketers. * Product Pages - This is probably the most straightforward, and if you have access to a tool that makes A/B or multivariate testing easy then it should be pretty seamless to pull-off. Assuming your product pages get a fair amount of traffic it's possible to quickly test ideas this way as well. Overall, I like to use the three above in different circumstances and if my team is working on a big important launch -- then potential multiple options above.

Oftentimes once we have a draft of positioning or messaging we’ll share it with a key group of folks (for example, sales & services enablement) for feedback. Usually this will go through a few rounds of revision, and once that is finalized we’ll present it to leadership to gain buy-in. One more thing that we’ve found really helpful — especially for larger launches/projects is using the DARCI project management framework to streamline who is giving feedback, and based on specific stakeholders who are labeled as a Decision Maker (D) using them to drive this forward.

I think it’s hard to showcase messaging in an interview unless you’re specifically bringing up documented work. At HubSpot, we like to give candidates an exercise before an interview that typically ties into positioning and messaging. Oftentimes this exercise will tie back to a recently released product or feature, and we’ll ask the candidate how they would position the product and bring that positioning to life through a launch campaign. This approach has actually worked really well and taught us some new ways of approaching messaging that we hadn’t considered before. Once a new PMM comes on-board, we have standard templates for positioning we use and will share them with product marketers so they can see how a particular product came to life and what the process was like. In an interview, I think there are numerous questions you can ask to understand the adeptness of creating positioning or messaging, but from what I’ve seen it’s ideal to have an exercise and actually put those skills to the test.

I love this question because I’ve seen many product marketers create positioning and messaging solely based on gut instinct. To truly answer this question though, I think you need to back-up before positioning and messaging is even written. Before writing anything you should ask yourself what data you have to inform your unique POV — such as analyst reports, research your company has created, or third-party studies. This data should inform how you create positioning and messaging. Once you have written, then my recommendation is to test various statements on high-traffic pages like a product page or in-app resource. We try to do this as much as possible within HubSpot to inform the positioning and messaging we bring to the market, all backed by the data we begin the process with.

Great question. Ultimately I think this depends on your target audience, product, and buying cycle. If you sell enterprise software that has a long sales cycle then you can apply copy tweaks to incentivize behavior but it may not be realistic to convince a prospect to buy now for a large informed purchase that has many decision-makers. That said, a lot of this urgency is at the intersection of design and messaging. The design of specific pages (like a product page) need to be compelling and highlight how you want the visitor to convert using key CTAs. At HubSpot, we’ve put a CTA at the top of our product pages, and then have pricing information within the page that leads to a conversion CTA as well. I’d focus on making sure you have the right conversion opportunities on the page — like CTAs, and Chat — then match the messaging to what a buyer will expect there (like “Get Started” for a free/low-cost tool as an example. The best advice I can give here is do some testing. Change H1/H2 copy, test different CTA copy and or live chat messaging and use that data to inform what convinces buyers and shortens your sales cycle.

At HubSpot we have a “master” positioning guide that exists for every core product and is shared on a central wiki that everyone can access. This positioning guide helps inform the work of marketers, sales enablement, and many other customer-facing teams. To ensure alignment we work closely with these other teams, such as sales enablement, to build assets like “Demo Like a Pro” that carry our positioning and messaging and transform it into an actual sample demo from a sales rep. This is just one example, but we typically carry this across departments to ensure messaging stays consistent.

Great question. This gets at the heart of managing others, while also is central to our role as product marketers. As a manager, it's your responsibility to ensure that the right milestones are being hit which means that was the right process followed for creating messaging? Did that product marketer do background research, or run a research report to inform their positioning? Did they talk to any customers, prospects, or closed-lost accounts? Did they share the messaging with the right stakeholders? These are just some questions that come to mind, and as a manager, you should define the systems and process around them (and other questions that tie-in to your business). For me at HubSpot this translates into: * Regular weekly 1:1s where I make sure to ask about what their goals are for the next week, and any elements of content/messaging/launch that are at-risk. The answers to that latter question especially can be informative because it allows you to jump in and help clear roadblocks proactively before they become bigger problems that can have a significant effect on your launch. * Stoplight chart. We use a spreadsheet which ties together every marketing aspect of a launch from positioning to paid ads to individual blog posts, and emails. Within this spreadsheet we can easily see at a high-level what is on-track, delayed, and at-risk and then drill in further by team or asset to understand more detail.

The best way I've found is to start small, and grow over-time. To explain that further, when a brand-new product marketer starts I will typically walk through step-by-step the messaging process with them at a granular feature level just to get them some repetition practicing. After doing that a number of times, I'll let them take on some of those (very) small releases on their own and will read messaging (i.e. blog content, in-app messaging, etc) ahead of time to make sure they're on the right track. Once a new product marketer feels comfortable handling the smallest scale feature-releases and messaging, I'll ask them to take on a component of a larger launch (i.e. customer marketing). This gives them a defined chunk of work for a larger launch, without being overwhelming and is still contained. Much like I mentioned above, I'll still read through their copy ahead of time to ensure it's hitting the right tone. After time of essentially repeating this process throughout multiple aspects of a launch or campaign, then a PMM should be ready to try this on their own. As a manager, it's important to be available for help - but it's also critical to let your team push themselves and rise to a challenge. Lastly, while the process above has worked very well for me at HubSpot it's always supplemented with core book recommendations like Positioning, and then follow-up discussions around the book and key concepts. I've found that these things combined can be a really effective way to bring someone who may not have any formal product marketing experience onto the team and coach them on how to write great messaging. Good luck!