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

--- How to level up your messaging by collaborating with your content and brand teams

--- Why you should never call your company a leader (leave that to the analysts and review sites)

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. Including:

--- Having a ton of conversations with customers to understand their vision for the future, their roadmaps, and the possibilities for the product. 

--- Pairing the vision back to real-world, ready-to-go use cases.

--- Deeply understanding the needs of the user and buyer personas involved. 

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 their intuition every week, including:

--- Having frequent interactions with buyers and ideal prospects (even if it’s a quick coffee or 10 min chat).
--- Passively listening to sales call recordings at scale (one of his colleagues listened to 10,000 in one year!).
--- Sandwiching quantitative data between qualitative feedback to test and validate.

This plus what it’s like creating and building a new category, what it means to be “customer obsessed”, and how knowing your customer is embodied into the daily, weekly, and monthly rituals of the team. 

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 practical pointers on how to pull it off, and more. Including: 

--- How to create messaging for a product that isn’t quuuite ready for the marketplace yet 🤪
--- Why there’s opportunity in chaos 

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. Including: 

--- Getting real about actual win themes and customer value (and never assuming it was just that awesome feature that did it)
--- Listening to your customer’s actual language (and not imposing your own internal spin on it)
--- Making interviews with lost prospects and surveys with ICPs a part of your process

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 on how to crystallize your messaging, including:

--- How to get out of the weeds (and your own head!) when writing messaging

--- The importance of feedback throughout the process

--- Why sometimes you need to walk away from your draft and give it a few days

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 experiencing

--- Clarifying the problems that your solution solves for them

--- Constantly checking that you’re using customer language, not internal vernacular

Personally, I’m a huge fan of Intercom’s messaging and Christine’s team’s work — so I love getting this behind-the-scenes look at how they do things. 

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 on messaging and copy testing, including: 

--- Aiming for excitement (and not boring buyers to death)
--- Being specific and clear above all else
--- Finding the balance between too little copy and too much
--- Avoiding subjectivity
--- Honing hierarchy and story structure