How to Improve your SaaS Product Messaging Strategy

Product messaging in the SaaS industry can be hard to navigate, especially with the ever-changing market and fierce competition.The first thing to understand about SaaS product messaging is that it is not something you make a decision on one time. SaaS product messaging is dynamic and ever-changing as your team will continue to learn more about your product. Your team will want to have a good, clear, well-designed starting point for your messaging and then stay agile and flexible in adjusting to results.

Here are steps you should consider to improve your SaaS product messaging strategy:

1. Building buyer personas

First things first, you have to jump into understanding your customers. Your buyer personas are a created “profile” of your ideal customers that help your team narrow down and better understand your potential customers. The best way to identify personas is to brainstorm as a team who would benefit the most from your product. Here is the information you will want to collect or brainstorm to help with messaging:

• What industry they work in and their role
• Their work tasks
• Their biggest pain points
• What they are currently using in terms of other products
• Where they are online and where they do research
• They best places to reach them

You don't need to stick to a singular persona. Usually there will be a clear buyer persona and others that are more secondary. The idea is that you want to use these to create messaging that speaks to their problems and positions your product as the solution.

2. Speak to them in their own language

Not just people from different countries, regions, or cultures speak different languages. Each group, even the really small ones, have their own way of speaking. If you want to use your personas to better engage your customers then you need to speak to them as they speak to each other. Who's your audience? Are they lawyers? Then your messaging maybe should have a more formal tone. Are they developers or tech-savvy pros? Then you can confidently speak to them about the technical stuff. Are they trendy influencers? Then it's time to fire up the emojis and gifs!

3. Touchpoints: map out where your leads will interact with your product

The next step will be to determine where you will interact with your buyer personas/potential leads. The understanding you’ve created of your buyer personas will come in here. Your team needs to map out all the places leads will interact with your brand and product. When they do research, where will they be searching? What will that look like for your product? Will they come across a blog post on your website when research the problem they’re experiencing?

Some common touchpoints to note:

• Search engine results
• Ads on social media
• Social networks like LinkedIn or Instagram
• Networking events or conferences
• Your website or blog
• Your social pages

It’s best to actually map out the journey of a potential lead finding and interacting with your product from what you know about their buyer process. For example, what will they search to come across your landing page or blog? Where do they go from there? Getting an idea of all the places they will interact with your brand this way will help your team to understand what your messaging needs to work within.

4. Know your mediums

When you have an idea of the touchpoints potential leads will go through with your brand, you can take note of the mediums your messaging will need to be adapted to.

Here are some common mediums:

• Google search results
• Blogs and landing pages on your site
• Professional blogging sites
• Social media pages
• Ads and paid media features

Your messaging has to be impactful and encompassing when one of your buyer personas interacts with it in one of these places. Keeping this in mind is key to creating successful, compelling messaging.  

5. Create clear, simplified initial messaging

Once you have a good grip on these different elements, it’s time to create your initial messaging. The ideal is to get the purpose and value of your product down to one or two sentences - an “elevator pitch”, if you remember that older concept. This could not be more relevant online. Except, you have more like 5 seconds of someone’s attention span rather than 30. The language you use to describe your product has to click right away and speak to what your product does differently to help users solve problems. Your initial messaging should be more broad, direct and as simple as possible. A good example is our headline on our site:

Update and engage users effortlessly.Beamer helps product teams announce what's new, prioritize what to build next and close the feedback loop.

This is very simplified. It doesn’t speak to industry-specific use or focus on one buyer persona and the value of the product is communicated immediately. The starting point for your messaging should be similar.

6. Balancing consistency and dynamism

There's a branding mantra that I have read time and time again: consistency is key. If product messaging is a tool to guide customers, then brand consistency is vital to assure your audience that you'll lead them to the right place. A consistent brand generates trust, awareness, and recognition, an indispensable toolkit for rich interaction, improved sales, and customer loyalty. Consistency is not restricted to just visual identity it must be applied to every single touchpoint to really be effective. Even though consistency is very important, it's not a synonym for keeping everything the same forever. "Customers are people" may sound a little obvious, but marketers work with metrics, averages, trends, and abstractions. For your product messaging to be effective you must always remember that pain-points are not just a concept but real frustrations, experienced by real people. Your data must help you understand your audience, not replace it. Your audience will be ever-changing (especially if you are growing as a company, something I hope you're doing). There's a balancing act that you need to master if you want to remain consistent as a brand and dynamic as a company. Good product messaging can help you with that.

7. Use A/B testing for improved results

Your product messaging should not only communicate your value, but also attract leads and convert. Here’s when doing A/B testing can help you find the best-performing lines.For example, if you are running ads, you can test different copywriting, color palettes, or images to the same audience or to targeted groups. You may use A/B testing in onboarding emails to test subjects and wording, or in landing pages to look for the perfect call to action and to find out what message will get you more conversions. A dynamic market requires dynamic solutions. As your audience changes, your buyer personas and customer journeys will reflect that reality. Test, measure results, learn, and adapt!

8. Find engaging ways to communicate with your users

Different channels follow different rules and you must understand the rhythms and best practices in each one of them. A message fit for an online ad won't necessarily work in a newsletter. Think about what you want to accomplish with them! While social media may make it easier to grow an audience, it can also be so quick that your posts can be buried in your potential customers' feeds. Emails may provide you with a good way to contact users directly but you'll need to deal with undread messages, inboxes filled to the brim, and spam. And both methods are out of context! As a complement to traditional channels think of tools like Beamer, a changelog that helps you grab the attention of your audience directly on your website or inside your app. Users just have to click a “What’s New” tab on your navigation or icon in your interface to open the sidebar and explore updates. Your customers will be able to read updates and release notes without leaving your product and they can even opt-in for push notifications. You can include photos, videos, GIFs, and CTAs to get users engaging. Your team can see open, click through rates, reactions, and comments on your updates to better understand what messaging and updates resonate with different user groups.

9. Segment your product messaging

We can all agree that a single product messaging won’t be the most efficient way to target all your buyer personas. Segmentation allows you to identify a target audience and provide them curated content. You can use multiple parameters like country of origin, language, membership tier, previous interactions, and more. For example, you may use segmentation to target users for a special offer during a country's national holiday, you can recommend advanced features to regular users, send different promotions for each one of your payment plans, or contact users that haven't logged in recently to rekindle their interest. If you can track a metric, you can use it to deliver your message in a way that will definitely engage their curiosity and interests. As you refine your personas and fine-tune your product messaging, you'll find patterns that allow for better segmentation, and the cycle will continue.

10. Use feedback to consistently improve your messaging

As mentioned at the beginning of this post, your SaaS product messaging is something that should be agile and ever-changing according to what your team is learning. Feedback, both direct and indirect, is important for learning what is working and what is not with your target customers. Your team has to be aware and quick to make changes.

Ways to collect feedback on messaging:

• Landing page and blog traffic
• Heat maps: better understand what messaging gets users to stay and take action
• Click through rates on buttons and CTAs
• Comments, reactions, etc. on social and Beamer posts

As your audience or user base expands engage them and grow with them. All the concepts we have been discussing, need to be refined constantly and feedback is an excellent tool to measure your users' satisfaction levels, learn about their pain-points and concerns in their own words, and then fix your product and messaging in response. You can check on your users through comments, reviews, surveys, and reactions. Then improve your product messaging and repeat the process and you'll have the perfect loop!

Your team will likely make plenty of changes to your messaging as your product grows and develops and you discover more about your target customers. Starting with these basic principles to create impactful messaging can help you get results sooner. Try Beamer for an easy way to engage in a way that is effective with leads and users.