It feels like every startup wants to create a new category. Category creation has become the holy grail — but it’s not the only way to win.Differentiating your company within an emerging category can be just as powerful.(And it’s not all on you to explain what your new category means.)In the final episode of Season 2, Jason Gatoff, VP of Product Marketing at Pendo, shares a ton of great advice, including:--- Why colleagues and key stakeholders should be part of your messaging journey--- ...

Not enough people talk about using your intuition during messaging development. Because it’s a total secret weapon.The best product marketing teams have a gut sense about which messages will land with their customers, resulting in stronger hypotheses and faster messaging development cycles. And you can learn how to build your messaging intuition too.In this episode of Adventures in Messaging, Jordan Greene, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Outreach, shares how his team nurtures th...

Sometimes product marketers have to launch a little early. Sometimes they have to launch a LOT early 🙂 So how do you create a positioning and messaging strategy for a product that isn’t fully formed or completely understood? When you haven’t got end-to-end use cases or customer feedback?You go back to basics and draw from what you already know.In this episode, Jiong Liu, Director of Product Marketing, Customer Identity at Okta, talks through an awesome example of how she did just that. I...

How do you bridge the gap between your product today and the vision for tomorrow?Pretty much every high-growth startup faces this messaging challenge: striking the balance between “what is” vs “what could be.”Luckily, awesome marketing leaders like April Rassa, VP of Product Marketing at HackerOne, have been there, done it, and developed a simple framework for it. In this episode of Adventures in Messaging, we dig into April’s approach, the real-life experience that inspired it, some pra...

In so many ways, messaging doesn’t belong to your company. It belongs to your customer. Your buyer. And the companies who get closest to the customer — and use their insights and language to help guide messaging strategy — are the ones who win. In this episode of Adventures in Messaging, the awesome Jarod Greene, VP Product Marketing at Highspot, discusses this outside-in approach to messaging and positioning, and some of the ways his team brings the voice of the customer in. I...

When writing messaging, the natural reflex is to start with what’s so great about your product. (Especially when you know how amazing it is.)The trick is to consciously step back and start with the bigger picture.Why does your product matter to your audience? Why should they even care?Answer these first, then you can get into what they’ll experience and the outcomes.In this episode of Adventures In Messaging, Jack Wei, Senior Director Product Marketing at SmartRecruiters, gives great advice o...

The secret to messaging that resonates? Start with empathy, not features.Before you put pen to paper, make sure you truly understand your customer’s challenges, aspirations and feelings. That’s how you find the emotive hook to bring people into your story.In this episode of Adventures In Messaging, Christine Sotelo-Dag, Group PMM at Intercom, gives amazing advice on how to root messaging in empathy, including:--- Connecting the dots between the pains both customers and prospects are expe...

A CEO once told me he stayed awake at night wondering how many ideal prospects visited his site, struggled to understand what his company could do for them, and bounced for good...never to return. As marketers, we can all relate to that fear: is our messaging actually grabbing people? 😱So what can you do to stress test your messaging? To get some feedback and fine-tune? To give you back that good night’s sleep? 😉On this episode, the one and only Peep Laja takes us through his philosophy...

Product Marketers face the challenge of finding the perfect balance for their messaging, identifying which details illuminate the message and which ones just create extra noise. Caroline Walthall, Head of Product Marketing at Quizlet, has a few methods for narrowing it down. In this episode, she’ll share the platforms she uses for effective message testing and detailed customer research. She’ll also share advice she’d tell her younger self when it comes to adapting a test-and-l...

This may sound like heresy, but there are times when speaking to high-level business value isn’t necessarily the best way to go.Like when your buyer isn’t responsible for those top-level business metrics.Or when messages like “reduce costs” or “increase revenue” are a dime a dozen in your space.In this episode of Adventures in Messaging, Jeff Beckham, Head of Product Marketing at Mixpanel, shares advice on how to message your product’s true differentiation, including:--- How use cases can hel...

When it comes to category creation, success lies in intimately knowing your product and the market, and then getting creative with that knowledge. In this episode of Adventures in Messaging, Derek Frome, Head of Marketing at Ouster, will get into detail about the category creation process he’s used in his past few roles, including his current company which just went public. He’ll also touch upon where to test your messaging, how to identify good versus bad feedback, and how to enabl...

Finding your product’s unique space in the marketplace is everything.That’s why positioning and category definition are two of the most important (and juiciest!) things a product marketer can do.And if you want to do it right, you gotta start with your customers. In this episode of Adventures in Messaging, Jason Perocho, VP of Product Marketing at Braze, shares how customer insight helped define a product category during his time at Salesforce, including:--- Testing their initial hypothe...

Research does more than just inform product positioning and messaging — it helps build conviction around how to move forward as a company.The key is to ask specific and nuanced questions; listen to what the research is telling you; and pivot accordingly.In this episode, Kevin Garcia, Head of Product Marketing at Retool, offers awesome advice on how to approach research with an open mind and rigorous practices like:--- How to define the scope of your research based on time, goals and prioritie...

“Your job communicating isn’t done until you’ve been understood.”Words. To. Live. By. 🙌Just because you’ve put a message out there to your team — on a deck, a doc, an email — doesn’t mean you’ve effectively communicated the idea. You have to consider different communication needs, different audiences, and different contexts.That’s how Andrew Stinger, Corporate & Product Marketing Lead at Coda, approaches internal and external messaging.It's not a one-and-done thing, but an ongoing pr...

Messaging should be like an API inside your company – a living, breathing narrative that any team or region can plug into and get what they need. That’s how messaging becomes a multiplier inside an organization.Indy Sen, VP Product Marketing at Matterport, is full of clever messaging analogies like this one. (You’ll definitely want to borrow a few.)In this episode, Indy shares stories from his time at companies like Salesforce, Google and Mulesoft, including:--- How simple, fresh messagi...

So much goes into creating new positioning and messaging. You have to decide who you want to be as a company. You have to get alignment across different teams. You have to understand what your customers think.Then you have to find the right words to bring it all together!In this episode Mary Sheehan, Head of Product Marketing at Adobe Ad Cloud, breaks down her process for creating a new messaging strategy, including:-- Surveying internal stakeholders (and creating lovely word clouds).-- ...

It’s one thing to get asked to position and message a small new feature. But what do you do when the CRO asks you to lead the charge on new positioning, messaging and competitive differentiation for the entire company? In your first few months on the job?First, you jump up and down with excitement. (Because this is a product marketer’s dream, right?) Second, you get out there and research (like you’ve never researched before) and bust your ass for weeks on end to get it right.In thi...

At what stage of product development should product marketing be brought in? When should you start creating and testing messaging for a new product?Savita Kini, Director of Product Marketing at Speech A, Cisco, has worked in engineering and marketing at companies of all shapes and sizes.And she believes both sides should begin the product innovation journey together. In this episode, Savita explains why having marketing’s influence from the get go makes for the creation of a better ...

The best messaging gets into your buyer’s head. It connects the dots between their world and your product.Personas can help you get there. But not if you retrofit them into your own product narrative.In this episode, Daniel Palay, Head of Product Marketing at SignEasy, talks about how your narrative should fit into what your customer is thinking about He discusses infiltrating your buyer’s thoughts (“The Inception Moment”), triggering their sense of ambition or self-preservation, and cra...

With spells at WhatsApp, Slack, Instagram and Facebook, Judy Abad’s resume reads like an iPhone home screen. 😉She knows what serious demand feels like — the twists, the turns, the thrills — and it’s given her a unique perspective on taking popular products with clearly-defined users to a wider global audience in a short amount of time. In this episode, Judy talks about how to broaden your message to go enterprise and expand into new verticals, regions and audiences. I love how her e...