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. Despite its role, it's startling how many B2B companies struggle to get it right.
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 take a look at the significance of messaging and guide you through actively testing your assumptions and messaging. This approach will help you come up with a strategy that resonates with your customers and sets you apart from the competition.
For help creating effective messaging and positioning, download our free downloadable messaging template.
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 will help you resonate with your prospects' needs and values while communicating the unique benefits your company has to offer.
When it comes to the SaaS industry, to effectively communicate your company’s B2B messaging, you need to nail a few things:
Knowing these three things about your company allows you to create a basic pain (pain points), claim, gain message for your company. The pain, claim, gain framework is a fantastic tool to effectively communicate your solution's benefits to customers. 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.
Become an expert on the pain, claim, gain framework by checking out this blog post: Pain, claim, gain: three key components of marketing communication
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.
Top tip: 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. Interviewing your customers to get their perspectives on the strengths and weaknesses of your product will help you judge your positioning and messaging. What the internal team often sees as valuable versus what their customers find useful can be very different.
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.
Of course, these interviews are easier to have with your happy customers. But it’s crucial that you also interview customers who might not be your biggest fans. Interviewing customers with whom you are unsure where you stand or who may have had an issue in the past is just as important. They are less likely to hold back and might help you really understand where your weaknesses lie. Knowing your weaknesses is just as important—if not more so—than knowing your strengths.
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.
When doing this, make sure the sales team uses specific tag lines or phrases that will directly align with the positioning vectors you are testing so that nothing is lost in translation. Keeping track of the questions asked and responses given is also going to be very important so you can measure trends and ultimately decide how successful each call was.
This is probably one of the most effective ways to put your product messaging to the test and gain real-time feedback.
Top tip: Use the most common questions asked during these calls as the basis of your content for your sales materials.
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.
In general, we recommend that you talk about your target audience and not about your company. However, every company needs a good “about” section that tells prospects about its backstory. What was the idea that caused the company to be founded? What problem does it exist to solve? Why were you successful? Why is your team successful now?
This is also a great opportunity to show off your company’s mission statement or “ethos.” This section should be aspirational, showing viewers where your company is going, not just where it has been.
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.
And there you have it! By implementing these seven steps, you'll create a comprehensive marketing messaging strategy and establish a consistent truth for your company.
Creating an effective messaging framework demands time, effort, and commitment, especially in a fast-paced business environment. However, the investment in this foundational element of marketing reaps rich dividends, both in terms of the volume of material you can produce and its effectiveness in converting prospects into leads and leads into customers.
Recognize that in the ever-evolving B2B SaaS industry your positioning and messaging are never ‘finalized’. Your SaaS messaging document should always be a work in progress—kept in a readily accessible place, not shut away in a closet. It should adapt as you gain new insights or launch major features, keeping your team alert and ahead of competitors.
When creating your messaging and positioning, use our template (linked below) coupled with the insights from this blog to get started!
A strong messaging and positioning guide serves as a single source-of-truth that creates alignment between sales and marketing on critical features, benefits, and positioning vectors. Keep in mind when creating yours that the end result should be a reference point that lets your team quickly and confidently create content that is aligned with your brand and speaks to the unique, impactful points that set your company apart.
Are you ready to start the journey toward crafting a compelling B2B SaaS messaging strategy? Don't wait. Take the first step today and download our free guide.
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