Explain Your Product and Compel People to Buy
Every week, SaaS founders tell me:
“We don’t know how to tell people what we do.”
“I don’t know how to tell our product story in a way that makes people want to buy.”
“How do I explain our product?”
These are startups with groundbreaking ideas, innovative products, and whip-smart technical teams.
Describing anything in a compelling way can be difficult, especially if it’s a technical product. So how can startups go from confusion to clarity in their marketing?
Key message development.
Key messages are specific things you want your audience to remember. They also explain the value and/or service you provide.
Here’s how I help our clients develop key messages, and how you can apply the same thinking to your messaging needs and goals.
Feel your customers’ pain
First, abolish all thoughts of your product and get inside the mind of your target audiences. If you don’t have personas defined already, this is the time to do so. They don’t need to be deeply demographic (male aged 35-50 with two kids); you just need an understanding of who they are (Director of Engineering who wants a more productive team).
Gather your internal stakeholders. Take a breath, close your eyes, and pretend you are that persona. What are their goals? What are they hearing from their teams and upper management?
And most importantly, what pains are they experiencing?
A pain is NOT, “My teams can’t automate their workflows.”.
A pain is:
“My teams lose a lot of time to clunky manual processes.”
“My engineers hate our processes and it pushes them to leave or be less productive.”
“I can’t report out on my teams’ results because our processes don’t support that.”
“Security is always up our butts about compliance.”
List every pain your personas experience, and if you have multiple target audiences, do this for each one.
Sit with those pains. Then look at your site and your marketing content and ask yourself, “If I were this persona with these specific pains, would this make me feel that I’d finally found a solution?”
How does your product ease those pains?
Now you can start thinking about your product again. Hooray!
Think of your product in relation to the pain points you listed: How do your features and capabilities correspond to audience pains?
Take for instance this pain: “My teams lose a lot of time to clunky manual processes.”
It is not enough to say, “Our product automates workflows.”
Get more specific. “Our product automates workflows that are easily accessible and editable.” That speaks to the pain of teams losing time.
“Automated workflows” is just a phrase that almost every SaaS provider uses. But when you get specific with the benefits of that automation, you get one step closer to a compelling core message.
When you map these pains to your features, be cognizant of the words and phrases you use. Are they easy to understand? Are you describing your capabilities in the simplest manner possible?
Put the pains and benefits together
Now we’re ready to string words together and craft compelling key messages. The features you’ve mapped to pain points make great proof points (especially if you have a case study or other source of statistics/measurements).
Map those features to the specific pains the persona experiences. From there, you can create one or two key messages for each persona.
Then I tie all of the persona key messages together with a value proposition.
Here’s my formula for value propositions:
[Value] by [how] with [capabilities].
Usually, the hardest part of this is identifying the true value. Repeat this to yourself every 15 minutes: FEATURES ARE NOT VALUE. FEATURES ARE NOT VALUE.
To create a strong core message, you must market on VALUE, not FEATURES.
This is the hardest part of the process, and generally why you want someone with a keen marketing mindset.
Here’s a fantastic real-world example:
The value proposition is: “Ensure continuous availability with automated noise reduction, correlation, and collaboration across your incident workflow.”
A bit jargony? Perhaps, but I bet it speaks to the audience well.
The headline, “Less downtime, more me time,” is simple, clear, and clever, the perfect trifecta.
So let’s work backwards to see how they got there.
We know their key features:
Automated noise reduction
Correlation
Collaboration across incident workflow
So we can deduce a number of pains:
Our downtimes cost us time and money
Our incident responses lack coordination
It’s hard to tell which incidents truly need attention or are dupliates
I/my teams spend way too long sorting through incidents and not enough time doing our actual work
We find out something is wrong only after it has impacted our customers, which loses us money
Wow! All that from just 19 words? That is the power of marketing, and of a high-caliber marketer who can help suss that out.
If you’re looking to implement a key message process like this one, we have a course designed specifically for you. You don’t need previous experience running workshops or brainstorming sessions. You just need to be organized and ready to shift your thinking a bit.
I run these workshops with clients frequently, and they cost … well, a lot more than the course. So if you’re looking for a budget-friendly but still-effective option, it might be the thing for you.
And if you have burning key message questions you’d like to ask, just reach out to me on TikTok, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
