Messaging is not only one of the most fundamental aspects of your marketing department but also the linchpin in differentiating your company from a crowded, competitive landscape. Yet, surprisingly, many B2B companies struggle to nail it.
A well-executed messaging strategy can bring plenty of benefits to your organization: drawing in the right prospects, improving conversion rates, and increasing closed-won deals. But the journey to crafting such effective communication isn’t always easy.
Many organizations are so focused on internal analysis rather than real-world feedback, statistics, etc., that they create strategies based on assumptions rather than real-world data. To avoid this, subjecting your newly crafted positioning vectors and messaging copy to rigorous testing is crucial.
In this blog, we’ll break down how to build messaging that’s not only clear and compelling but also rooted in data and proven strategies. We’ll show you how to test, refine, and elevate your approach to connect with your audience and drive measurable results.
Ready to craft messaging that sets your SaaS company apart? Download our free SaaS Messaging Template to get started—and keep reading for 10 actionable strategies to perfect your messaging and take your positioning to the next level.
Your messaging is the foundation of how your SaaS company connects with prospects and stands out in a crowded market. But buyers are busier than ever. They’re bombarded with marketing messages daily, which makes it harder for you to capture attention and resonate.
So why does messaging matter more now than ever? Let’s break it down:
In a market where competitors are just a click away, your messaging is often the first interaction prospects have with your brand. If it’s unclear, generic, or forgettable, you risk losing them before you’ve even had the chance to explain your value.
Messaging is more about how you make people feel. Does your SaaS offering come across as innovative and indispensable? Or does it blend into the noise of “another tool promising to save time and money”? Your messaging shapes perception.
Strong messaging is critical for internal alignment. Whether it’s sales, marketing, or customer success, a unified messaging framework ensures every team is speaking the same language.
Messaging that’s too broad misses the mark, while messaging that’s too niche risks alienating prospects. Your framework needs to strike the right balance: tailored to your ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and adapted to their journey from awareness to decision-making.
At the end of the day, good messaging leads to action. Whether it’s a demo request, a free trial signup, or a conversation with sales, messaging that’s clear, customer-focused, and value-driven is a direct driver of pipeline and revenue.
When done right, your SaaS messaging serves as a guiding light for every piece of communication your company produces. From website copy to sales presentations, it ensures every touchpoint reinforces your brand story and speaks directly to the pain points, desires, and needs of your target audience.
In the next section, we’ll explore the common mistakes companies make in their messaging and how you can avoid them. Spoiler alert: you’ll have to step outside the bubble of internal assumptions and into the minds of your customers.
Crafting effective SaaS messaging is an art, but it’s also a science—and one where many companies stumble.
Even the most promising SaaS solutions can struggle to connect with their audience if the messaging isn’t clear, compelling, and customer-focused.
Here are the most common pitfalls we see in B2B SaaS messaging:
In an effort to explain every feature and benefit, companies often end up overwhelming their audience with too much information. Overly technical or verbose messaging can alienate prospects and obscure your core value proposition.
Many SaaS companies emphasize what their product does instead of why it matters. This creates a disconnect, as prospects are left to figure out how your features will solve their problems.
Also, messaging crafted from an internal perspective often misses the mark. What companies perceive as valuable might not align with what their customers actually care about.
Broad, one-size-fits-all messaging can make your brand feel generic and impersonal. When your message lacks specificity, it struggles to resonate with any one audience.
Inconsistent messaging across your website, sales materials, and marketing campaigns can confuse prospects and weaken your brand’s credibility.
When your messaging mirrors your competitors, you risk fading into the background. Lack of differentiation makes it harder for prospects to see why they should choose you over others.
Launching messaging without testing it with real prospects can lead to misaligned positioning. Without validation, companies might miss opportunities to refine their message for maximum impact.
Now that you know the common missteps, you’re one step closer to creating messaging that resonates.
In the next section, we’ll dive into the key elements of a strong SaaS messaging framework and how you can apply them to elevate your positioning and communication.
A strong SaaS messaging framework aligns your entire organization around a consistent, compelling narrative that speaks directly to your target audience. But what does an effective one look like?
Here are the key components of a successful SaaS messaging framework:
Great messaging is easy to understand at a glance. It doesn’t bury prospects in jargon or complexity. Instead, it delivers a concise, compelling value proposition that answers:
When someone reads your messaging, there’s no room for confusion—they know exactly what you do and how it can help them.
Strong messaging speaks directly to the needs, challenges, and goals of your target audience. It’s written in their language, reflects their priorities, and empathizes with their pain points. It’s less about what your product does and more about what it does for them.
Good messaging makes you memorable. It highlights what makes you different and why prospects should choose you over competitors. This differentiation is built on your unique strengths, whether it’s a groundbreaking feature, exceptional results, or unmatched customer support.
SaaS buyers might justify their decisions with data, but emotions often drive them.
Strong messaging strikes a balance, combining clear benefits like cost savings or efficiency gains with emotional triggers like confidence, relief, and trust.
From your website to your sales pitch to your support team’s emails, strong messaging tells the same story across every touchpoint. This consistency builds trust and ensures that your audience recognizes your brand, no matter where they engage with you.
Trust is the foundation of B2B sales, and great messaging includes the evidence to back up its claims:
Great messaging evolves with your company and market. It’s not set in stone; it’s tested, refined, and updated as you learn more about your audience and the competitive landscape. It’s a living, breathing part of your strategy.
Ultimately, the best messaging motivates. It makes prospects think, “I need this solution right now,” and guides them to take the next step, whether that’s booking a demo, starting a free trial, or reaching out to your sales team.
This is what strong SaaS messaging looks like; a tool that aligns your team, resonates with your audience, and drives measurable results.
By using our B2B messaging framework template and following these tips, you will see your messaging from a few different perspectives. It includes 10 exercises, all designed to provide your organization with a holistic understanding of how to effectively position itself in the market.
This template will help you resonate with your prospects' needs and values while communicating the unique benefits your company has to offer.
Crafting strong SaaS messaging requiresa deep understanding of your audience, competitors, and brand.
Using our B2B messaging framework template and these ten actionable strategies, you'll gain a holistic view of your company’s positioning and build messaging that resonates deeply with your prospects.
At the heart of great SaaS messaging lies a clear grasp of how your product changes lives. To articulate this effectively, focus on three pillars:
A pain-claim-gain framework is an excellent tool here. In fact, we use it with all of our clients to simplify and solidify their messaging so that it’s concise, impactful, and speaks directly to their target audience.
Highlight the pain points, show how your solution resolves them, and emphasize the resulting gains. This approach creates concise, impactful messaging that cuts through the noise.
Conducting competitive research is one of the first exercises you should do when building out your product’s positioning and messaging. Knowing where you sit compared to your competitors is important to make you stand out instead of fading into the noise.
A few key areas to track in your competitive research are:
Comparing your B2B messaging and offerings with your competition will help you view yourself as your target audience does when doing their research. When doing this exercise, you’ll likely notice that most of your competitors will all sound the same. Take this as an opportunity to take a risk, be bold, and stand out.
To take your competitive research even further, conducting some mystery shopping will help you add more detail to your findings. A great way to do some mystery shopping while staying under the radar is to get a team member to reach out as a student doing research.
For more help conducting competitive research, take a look at this blog: How To Do Your First Competitive Research?
No one says it better than your customers. Not even your marketing team.
Your customers are your best source of truth. Interviewing your customers to get their perspectives on the strengths and weaknesses of your product will help you judge your positioning and messaging. This will help you understand:
In your customer interviews, you should come with direct and pointed questions. Let them know that you are working on positioning your product and the following capabilities are the areas you want to highlight. Additionally, spend some time asking open-ended questions to get a feel for how they use the product and how it has helped them in their day-to-day.
Don’t just talk to happy customers, seek out neutral or dissatisfied ones too. Their insights can reveal gaps in your messaging and areas for improvement.
Use customer feedback to inform everything from taglines to product descriptions, ensuring your messaging reflects real-world value.
Getting your sales team to test out your positioning and messaging in sales calls, cold outreach, and their own materials is another great way to get unbiased feedback. If possible, have the sales team record these conversations for the marketing and product teams to gain insight into the live reactions.
Equip them with specific messaging and encourage them to:
This real-time feedback loop ensures your messaging resonates in high-stakes scenarios.
This is probably one of the most effective ways to put your product messaging to the test and gain real-time feedback.
Repurpose FAQs from sales calls into content like blog posts, videos, or sales enablement materials.
If you're looking for more ways to validate your messaging, here are some additional strategies to consider:
If you’ve done all of the above exercises but still feel unclear or would like stronger confirmation, then conducting formal market research would be a great next step. Perhaps the most common method of conducting this sort of research is through surveys. There are a couple of ways you can tackle the survey method.
One is to conduct the marketing research yourself by creating or purchasing a list of your ideal customer profile and personas, building out the survey, and reaching out to each contact. Remember that many people are bombarded with messages and surveys daily, so offering them a small gift card in return might improve your chances of a response.
Another way to go about it is to have a specialist, or even a survey platform, conduct the survey for you. If hiring a specialist is outside of your budget, there are cost-effective platforms, such as Pollfish, that you can utilize to run your surveys.
Structuring your survey questions and keeping them as pointed as possible is going to be key to success. Creating generic surveys that try to cover too much ground will only bring you more questions than answers. Websites are a good asset to structure your survey around as they are where your positioning, messaging, and overall branding are all rolled up into one.
While your messaging should focus on the customer, it’s also important to tell your brand’s story. Include:
How do you want your company to come across to prospects?
Many companies think a lot about what they want to say to their audiences but often don’t think about how they want to say it. Cultivating a great brand voice involves tying it to your company’s mission statement and core values and deciding how you want to embody those values in how you communicate.
To do this, we recommend doing a high-level branding exercise with your executive team. This forces you to position your brand into “who we are”, “who we aren’t”, and “who we want to be”. It also helps you prioritize brand attributes until you’ve settled on clear and unique messaging that will power your brand's actions long into the future.
Read about how to create your own branding here: 4-Step company branding exercise
Also, check out some awesome examples of branding here: Great brand value examples
Your company’s value propositions build upon the previous three sections of your messaging framework to give specific, tangible statements on why your company is the perfect solution for your target audience and why it's better than the competition. It’s important to choose the top three to five value props your company has to offer. This forces you to narrow down your positioning even further, focusing on communicating a few key advantages to prospects.
What's more, you need to support these value propositions with “reasons to believe.” These are copy descriptions of how each unique value proposition directly benefits your target audience. Here, you need to clearly articulate the benefit you provide to customers in as few as ten specific words or as many as 100+.
It is also very important to attach your value propositions to specific target personas. This will allow you to create direct, targeted messaging for each of your value propositions. Organizing your messaging by persona will allow your team to quickly reference which key points they should speak to when creating content for any of your target audiences.
Read how to show your value propositions here: Competitive B2B positioning strategies to show your value proposition
Alternatively, find out how to utilize personas here: 3 B2B SaaS buyer personas every campaign needs
From your competitive positioning, you can build out your company’s positioning statement. A position line is a sentence or phrase that defines your company for employees, customers, prospects, investors, and the world at large.
It’s meant to summarize your mission, describe the products or services you offer, or capture the practical/emotional benefits for the end user. While it's just a sentence, it’s important to take the time to get it right. Use the positioning statement to put a flag in the ground on who you’re for and why you matter to them.
Learn how to create a top positioning statement by reading this blog: 16 examples of positioning statements and how to craft your own
Finally, take your positioning statement and make it customer-centric by creating a brand promise.
You can do this by taking your product's main value propositions and translating them into the benefits they provide your customers. This helps you quickly and efficiently convey your company’s impact on customers in a way that is easy to incorporate in marketing and sales materials, as well as in elevator pitches and presentations.
Like the positioning statement, this is just one sentence, but it is important to get it right, as it will become the foundation for the rest of your company’s marketing communications.
Creating a solid messaging framework is an ongoing journey.
By implementing the strategies outlined here, you’ll establish a comprehensive messaging strategy that aligns your team and resonates with your audience.
But rafting effective messaging requires time, effort, and commitment.
Change is constant; customer needs evolve, new competitors emerge, and products grow. This means your messaging document is never “complete.” It’s a living, breathing resource that should adapt to:
Instead of treating your messaging guide as a static document tucked away in a folder, keep it accessible and update it regularly. This ensures your team stays aligned and ready to respond to change, keeping your brand ahead of the competition.
At Kalungi, we specialize in helping B2B SaaS companies like yours refine their messaging frameworks, differentiate from competitors, and maximize impact.
Let us partner with you to create messaging that resonates and converts.
Book a free discovery call with Kalungi today and see how we can help your SaaS company scale smarter, faster, and with confidence.
Expand your SaaS business confidently with our B2B SaaS Go-to-Market Checklist. Discover strategies, insights, and tips for successful market entry.
Unlock the power of Account-Based Marketing (ABM) for your B2B SaaS business. Learn strategies to target high-value accounts and drive growth.
Discover why blogging is essential for early-stage B2B SaaS companies and how to build a strategy that ranks, converts, and scales with Kalungi's...