When do you stop iterating on messaging? How often should you revisit it?

Never. That's probably not a practical answer, but I'm always tweaking and refining messaging. Obviously we don't contstantly roll out changes to the market, but I think PMMs should have that mindset. I generally think that every launch is an opportunity to update your messaging, and in the absense of launch you should still be refreshing/updated your sales intro decks once a quarter. 

You can find my thoughts on that in response to this question: https://sharebird.com/whats-the-best-way-to-ensure-that-messaging-evolves-at-the-pace-of-the-company-while-still-maintaining-some-consistency-should-i-give-up-any-hope-of-running-a-campaign-that-lives-more-than-a-few-weeks?answer=aWNAKGMxgy

tl;dr - It depends on the "level" of the message, lifecycle stage of your company, and team priorities. Messages need some time to breath and resonate, but it's never a bad idea to thoughtfully consider (and re-consider . . .) your messages.

Never stop iterating. But first, let's establish that there are degrees of iteration.

To use a home improvement analogy, there's down-to-the-studs rebuild and then there's freshening up the paint. The latter should happen all the time. Basically anytime you have a notable release. The former requires organizational alignment as much as actual messaging work and shouldn't be taken on lightly.

If you're in tech product marketing, you should look at change to the product as an opportunity to improve your "reasons to believe" that support your core value propositions. Do those tweaks as often as the features are updated.

But those are just the product-related signals. You should also be keeping tabs on your customer and market to understand if there are context changes. For example, here at Podium we sell to local businesses and it would be a real miss not to acknowledge current supply chain issues in our messaging.

To keep up on the market, I recommend quarterly pulse checks that feel achievable for your business. Those might include a number of win/loss interviews, surveys, or interviews with key segments of your customer and prospect base.

The simple answer is never, but let’s talk about what this means in practical terms. The cadence at which you revisit your messaging varies case by case. How quickly is your product evolving? How crowded is the space in which you operate? Are competitors closing the gap between their product and yours, undermining your claims of differentiation? Has there been a dip in campaign results? Is your messaging getting tired? Any meaningful changes to your product strategy, portfolio makeup, market landscape, and go-to-market performance will likely require you to revisit your messaging strategy. If there aren’t any noticeable internal or external factors at play, a good rule of thumb is to consider revisiting your messaging every 6 months. That said, there are internal and external benefits to consistency so try to refrain from switching up your messaging on a whim. Internally, messaging frameworks serve as a guiding north star for collateral created by all customer-facing teams. Each time there’s a change in messaging direction you’ll have to invest time in retraining teams to internalize the new approach. And externally, repetition is key to unlocking the full potential of your marketing.

I don't think you ever stop iterating on messaging as long as you're developing new aspects of your product. For a product launch, again, I would make sure that you've tested your messaging with somewhere between 5-20 clients and non-clients and then ship what comes out of those tests. Product marketers and product managers need to be in lock step with the roadmap and what rises to the level of changing messaging. Similarly, if there's a significant market event - m&a activity, new competitor, COVID, etc - it's time to take a look at your storylines again. At the very least, I would say you need to revisit your messaging in accordance with the seasonality of your business - if your business changes in a quarterly cadence as much of my experience in the B2B space, then that will probably be your minimum revision timeline.