How do you test your messaging? How can you know what your target audience likes/doesn't like? Is interested in or finds boring?

We test our messaging various ways:

• Talk directly to your customers and prospects, interview them, survey them 
• Test messaging with analysts who cover your space
• Talk to partners, consultants and subject matter experts 
• Get feedback from sales
• Present it to executives and get their feedback
• Join sales calls with prospects and listen to them deliver the message or deliver the message yourself
• Make it a part of your executives talk track and get their feedback (our CEO tests our messaging for us because he's always talking to executives)
• Test different messaging in marketing campaigns and webinars
• Conduct proper win/loss analysis and interview both the sales rep and the customer/prospect 
• Hire consultants or contractors to help validate and collect feedback

Always look at the qualitative and quantitative data to determine where you iterate next.

One way you know if your messaging is working is setting your OKRs and the outcomes you want i.e. if the prospect engages in a sales cycle with you or if they open that email from your SDR. If they don’t, then you go back to your messaging and keep iterating until you get the outcome, attention and closed deals you want.

One of the best ways to actually test your message is to speak with analysts. They speak with other vendors in your space, and take inquiries from customers all the time!

Another great external resource is your customer base. Select 2-3 customers that you think would offer some strong advice and ask them how they feel about your messaging. Is it unique? Would it capture the attention of their peers? Is it even relevant to the challenges their peers are dealing with each day? Is it any different from the other vendors vying for the customer's time and attention?

One of my favorite ways to test messaging is to ask people outside of my team/company/and even industry to review content I create. You can do this on a grander scale with things like usertesting.com but you can also hack it together on different platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter. Sometimes I will even reach out to a friend or family member and ask them to review a piece of content if I'm feeling like it's getting a little too "inside baseball". 

In terms of staying in the loop on what my audience likes and doesn't like - this comes back to knowing your user segments inside and out and constantly updating them. This means knowing where they spend time and making sure you've got a pulse in those communities. I like to also stay informed with what competitors are doing, we use tools like Crayon to understand what changes are happening in the market - this can be a good way to make sure that our content isn't coming off too similar to our competitors and being drowned out.