AMA: Upwork Head of Product Marketing, Liza Sperling on Messaging

Getting feedback from stakeholders is valuable to capture insights and feedback from customer-facing teams and to foster healthy internal partnerships. That said, positioning and messaging by consensus is one of the biggest mistakes a product marketer can make. To avoid this, set clear expectations by defining roles and responsibilities upfront. I suggest using a simple DACI framework and asking everyone to agree with their respective roles when you kick off the exercise. DACI stands for Driver, Approver, Contributor, and Informed. This post by Thaisa Fernandes provides a good overview of DACI and a Google Docs template. While roles vary at every company, an example of a positioning and messaging DACI could be something like: * Driver - Product Marketing * Approver - CMO * Contributors - Product, Sales, Research, Customer Support, Marketing Channel Owners * Informed - Brand, Copywriting

It's a good idea to start with overall product positioning and messaging ("P&M") as a foundation for general or evergreen marketing channels and campaigns. Channel owners can then leverage the guidance to craft channel-specific messaging tailored for each channel and audience that ladders up to the product P&M. For feature launches, however, I treat new features (or bundles of features), as separate, thematic launches and develop separate P&Ms to lean into the most relevant customer pain points and benefits and to provide more granular, feature-level messaging. These feature P&Ms, however, all ladder up to the overall product P&M because they are part of the product. Since you have multiple feature-rich products, it sounds like this approach may also work well for you. Finally, since your team is small, but your mandate is broad, I suggest creating and maintaining an easy-to-digest messaging map from the product to the feature level. We recently did a similar exercise, and it really pays off. Your team and internal partners will thank you, and this will go a long way in driving internal alignment and ensuring a consistent, compelling customer experience. 

There are a lot of frameworks and approaches to positioning and messaging, but I’ve found that a simple document including the following elements is most effective: * Tell the story: Starting with a narrative acts as a forcing function to ensure you’ve thought through the positioning and can tie it all together in straightforward, customer-facing language. Amazon’s internal press release is a good framework to get started. * What is it? A single sentence that describes the offering. No fluff. Keep it simple. * Who is it for? Define your target audience or personas. Be as specific as possible and focus on who cares most, not just anyone who may find value in the offering. * What problem does it solve? A short statement that frames the customer problem (the “from” state) aligned with the category POV. Include supporting statistics and data points whenever possible. * How else might a customer solve this problem? Include competitors as well as workarounds, apathy, or the status quo. * What are the key benefits? Focus on the top benefits that matter most to your target audience, not all of the benefits. * How is it different? How the offering solves the problem better, differently, and/or more effectively than the alternatives. * How can you prove this? Proof points or reasons to believe that support out your claims. These may be supporting features, data points, or customer quotes. * Core messaging elements: These are the “greatest hits” or the pre-approved statements that internal stakeholders will use verbatim. They may include a tagline, elevator pitch, etc. All other messaging is developed and tailored to audiences and channels using the positioning and messaging as guidance. To the second part of your question, I don’t think it matters if you are starting from scratch or updating existing positioning and messaging, as long as you include these core elements.

Positioning is a strategic internal exercise to define how your offering is uniquely differentiated relative to market alternatives. Positioning informs all messaging. Messaging is external language crafted to communicate and reinforce your positioning. Messaging is dependent on well-researched, clearly defined positioning. Together positioning and messaging provide strategic guidance to align internal stakeholders on how to talk about your offering externally.

With a team of two product marketers, I'd opt for collaboration. Why? Well, product marketing teams are small, but collaboration is how we make 1+1 = 3. Differentiating your roles by function on a small team doesn't make sense, especially for foundational, strategic exercises like positioning and messaging. Even if one PMM takes the lead on drafting the positioning and messaging, I suggest the other PMM follows fast with feedback, and both partner closely to finalize and align on the output. One of the most critical skills product marketers offer is the ability to collaborate closely to compound value. Together, your work will be more valuable, and you'll elevate the importance of product marketing in your organization, which is critical to the team's success and future growth.

* Conversion rates across the funnel - Did the messaging drive the desired actions at each customer touchpoint from initial engagement to sign up/trial/purchase * Landing pages, emails, posts, and ad performance - How did individual assets and channels perform relative to benchmarks? * Sales asset usage and engagement - Which assets, talking points, and messaging were used, and how did prospects and customers engage? Highspot will show you which sales assets are being used the most and which are driving the most customer engagement, while Gong.io provides sophisticated insights into sales calls to determine what’s working and what’s not. * Finally don’t forget to capture qualitative feedback on your messaging from customers, prospects, and internal stakeholders. While presumably, you’ve done this pre-launch, another round of feedback post-launch will provide further insights you can quickly apply to post-launch campaigns for a fast follow.

We generally start with the launch goals and then define more granular metrics leading up to the launch goals to measure the effectiveness of our messaging. Here are some initial ideas to consider: * Conversion rates across the funnel - Did the messaging drive the desired actions at each customer touchpoint from initial engagement to sign up/trial/purchase? * Signups, purchases, and/or adoption (depending on launch goals) * Landing pages, emails, posts, and ad performance - How did individual assets and channels perform relative to benchmarks? * Sales asset usage and engagement - Which assets, talking points, and messaging were used, and how did prospects and customers engage? Highspot will show you which sales assets are being used the most and which are driving the most customer engagement, while Gong.io provides sophisticated insights into sales calls to determine what’s working and what’s not. * Finally don’t forget to capture qualitative feedback on your messaging from customers, prospects, and internal stakeholders. While presumably, you’ve done this pre-launch, another round of feedback post-launch will provide further insights you can quickly apply to post-launch campaigns for a fast follow.

In general, I don't think you can determine that a platform approach makes sense or begin developing platform positioning and messaging until you know more about your product(s) than just capabilities. First I’d develop positioning and messaging for your product(s), including clearly defining your customer, the problem you are solving in the market, and how your offering compares to alternatives. This exercise will result in many of the inputs required to determine if a platform (or another approach) makes sense. Including clearly understanding the market(s) you are in, if your customers overlap or are related, and if you are solving similar or related problems.

I love this question because balancing what feels like competing goals is one of the most challenging aspects of being a product marketer. The reality is that these aren't competing but complementary goals, and it's our job to do both -- deeply understand our customers' needs AND develop clear, compelling messaging. While we don't have the luxury of choosing between 80% "right" messaging or 100% "right" messaging, the good news is that 100% right is an unrealistic goal, and there are many incremental improvements you can make right away to improve on 80%. Here are some ways I've tackled similar challenges * Develop separate, distinct personas - You mentioned your existing users, but are you addressing the needs of new users or buyers? It's possible that the messaging you consider 80% for existing users is 100% for new users and vice versa. Because each persona's needs often vary wildly, create separate personas to guide messaging that speaks to each. * Tailor messaging for each persona - Effective messaging resonates with a specific audience, and it's unlikely that one-size-fits-all messaging will work well for all audiences. The easiest way to get from 80% to 90% is to tailor your messaging specifically to the needs of each persona. * Test, improve, repeat - Lean into both quantitative and qualitative testing. A/B test landing pages, emails, and ads. Conduct user testing and share variations of the messaging with a good sample size for each persona. Ask internal stakeholders (product, sales, customer service, etc.) for feedback and partner with them to quickly test messaging "in the wild" with prospects and customers. * Seek inspiration - It's comforting to keep in mind that someone else has probably faced the same challenge, so I look to other companies for inspiration. Ask yourself which other products translate complex needs or complex offerings into concise, compelling messaging -- bonus points if they also speak to multiple personas. A few that come to mind for me are Descript , Drift , Zendesk. * Keep it simple - Complex customer needs and complex products do not require complex messaging. Messaging should simply convey why a customer should care. Granular details can be captured in FAQs, documentation, and supporting product materials. When in doubt, leave it out.