Messaging Strategies in SaaS: How To Tell the Product Story Through Consistent Messaging Across Different Channels?

Solid messaging strategies are the key to grabbing your audience’s attention and nurturing their interest in your product.

But how you can create a really good messaging strategy that will support your product marketing goals?

In this article, we’ll be discussing everything you need to know about messaging strategies. You’ll also learn about the most common channels, plus some strategy examples.

Ready? Let’s begin!

TL;DR

• A brand messaging strategy is an approach chosen by a brand to increase its awareness and boost adoption.
• A message strategy guides your communications. It aligns every message with your customer’s needs.
• A good messaging strategy should have a clear goal, differentiate your brand from the competition, provide personalized messages for a specific audience, and tell the brand story at each stage of the customer journey.
• The emotional marketing strategy uses emotions to increase the memorability and virality of a message.
• The unique selling proposition strategy highlights the main selling point of a brand’s products or services.
• The positioning strategy highlights your brand’s favorable position compared to the competition in concrete terms.
• The pre-emptive strategy involves being the first to make a claim concerning your products or services.
• Whatever your chosen strategy is, your message should be consistent, personal, and extensively tested.

What is a messaging strategy?

The brand messaging strategy is how your brand communicates what your brand is to your target audience. It is what you say, how you say it, and how you ensure your communication succeeds.

Why should you have a messaging strategy?

In order to communicate your brand message, you need a strategy. Communication aligned with the customer’s goals and desires is what makes a messaging strategy effective.

As a result of this alignment, brand awareness increases. By targeting a specific audience with a clear message, your target audience will have a clear understanding of who you are and what you stand for.

A message that resonates with your audience also sets you apart from your competitors. By making your brand recognizable, you set it up for success.

What are the elements of a good messaging strategy?

You must consider several factors when crafting your brand message strategy. From your audience to your brand offering, these factors shape your final message. To be effective, though, your message strategy should have these four essential elements.

A great messaging strategy has a clear goal

A good messaging strategy is goal-driven. It’s impossible to craft a winning message when you’re unsure about the message theme. But your chosen goals must also be ideal for your use.

The best goals follow the SMART goal format. They are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

Differentiation from competitors

What makes your brand different from others out there? An effective message strategy sets out to highlight why your brand stands out from its competitors. This could be anything from product superiority to better civic value propositions.

Strategic messaging is personalized for a specific target audience

Who are you talking to? Your message must consider the recipient if it’s to reach their hearts. Before defining your message strategy, first, create your buyer persona.

Next, take advantage of social listening channels to learn about your customer’s pain points and desires. Only then can you curate a message that reaches their hearts.

Telling the brand story at different touchpoints across the customer journey

Customers move through multiple channels and platforms while interacting with your brand. An authentic message strategy is designed to meet the customer at each step of the customer journey.

To be effective, your message must reflect what customers are looking for at each step. It must meet customer expectations.

Most common messaging strategies

Ready to elevate your overall marketing messaging? Consider five of the most common messaging strategies from which you can craft a killer message for your brand.

Building an emotional connection through strategic messaging

Human emotion is a powerful driver. It influences how we think and act, and directs how we respond to others around us. This is why it has been at the heart of marketing messages for thousands of years.

An emotional marketing strategy uses emotions to make a message more memorable and effective. It uses feelings to sell; tapping into an emotion like fear, happiness, or anger, to get a customer to act. Amongst its benefits are:

• Memorability: A message that builds an emotional connection with its target audience is easier to remember than one that doesn’t.
• Virality: The more emotional your message is, the more its likelihood of being shared.
• Increased purchase: According to a 2016 Nielsen Study, ads that elicit an above-average emotional response from customers enjoyed a 23% greater increase in sales than regular ads.
• Increased brand loyalty: Customers who share an emotional connection with a brand are likelier to become brand advocates. According to a Motista report, emotionally connected customers have 3 times the lifetime value and 1.6 times the recommendation rate of the average customer.

Communicating the brand message with a unique selling proposition (USP)

It is critical for a business to have a unique selling proposition (USP). This is the business’s main selling point.

You can find your USP at the intersection of what you do best, what your customers desire, and what your competition lacks. In order to successfully implement this message strategy, you must first identify what sets your practice apart from others and what resonates with your customers.

Identify your brand’s uniqueness through a positioning strategy

Positioning as a strategy focuses on where your brand stands when compared to its competitors. This form of messaging often highlights the uniqueness of the product using boldfaced statements such as “#1 in Quality Control”.

Positioning statements may appear similar to taglines. Unlike taglines, though, these statements are primarily for internal use. They guide the operating and marketing decisions of your business, helping you make decisions that shape your brand perception.

To create an effective positioning strategy, you should:

• Ascertain your current brand positioning.
• Identify your competition and understand how they position their brands.
• Contrast your positioning with your competition to identify room for improvement.
• Curate a value-based positioning idea that highlights your uniqueness.
• Finally, craft a compact positioning statement that highlights this uniqueness.

Communicate business values through brand messaging strategy

This messaging strategy focuses on communicating a business’s value propositions in the clearest form possible. The value proposition captures what your company does and what value it brings to the market.

Having a solid value proposition is the trigger behind effective messaging. This proposition will differ from one company to another. For instance, whereas a clothing line for kids may highlight its affordability, a digital solutions company will highlight its affinity for innovation.

Whatever the value proposition may be, it should be presented in a clear, succinct manner that leaves customers in no doubt. CRM Software provider, Pipedrive, adopts this strategy in its messaging, promising a 28% increase in sales with its software.

Gain an advantage over competitors through pre-emptive strategy

The preemptive message strategy involves making a claim about your product or service before your competition does the same.

The success of this strategy depends on establishing superiority by being first. Thus, you must thoroughly research your competition and their marketing strategies and approaches to be sure they’re not already making a similar claim.

There are two primary options when using the preemptive message strategy:

• Make a claim of superiority based on your product’s features or benefits, which cannot be made by any competitor.
• Be the first to promote your product’s attributes and their benefits, even if competing products may share those attributes. Although you do not claim superiority, you enjoy the benefit of being first to the claim.

Messaging strategy examples for different channels

The effectiveness of a marketing message also depends on the channel through which it is delivered. We will highlight messaging strategy examples for some key channels in this section.

In-product messaging strategy

In-product messages are messages displayed to your customers inside your product as they use it.

Note that this doesn’t include push notifications sent outside the app, but includes communication methods like tooltips, modals, product notes, and microsurveys.

In-app messages are received immediately and are highly relevant to the user’s current needs. They’re targeted and personalized based on the actions of the customer, making them a very powerful communication method.

Your messaging strategy for in-app messages should center on acquainting new users with your product via user onboarding, engaging users via tips and success messages, and increasing product revenue via upsells, referrals, and subscription expiry notifications.

Notice how Kommunicate uses in-app messaging to inform customers about a new product feature:

Email messaging strategy

Email marketing remains a highly effective marketing strategy for driving growth and boosting new user activation – when used correctly.

This messaging channel brings you directly to your customer’s source of information, keeping you within view. However, you want to ensure that you’re not just adding to the noise in their mailbox.

A good email messaging strategy should:

• Be personalized to the user and their goals/needs
• Be properly formatted for any device
• Provide a clear opt-out option
• Be specific to a purpose or goal, and
• Include a clear call to action for its readers

An example of a good message is one that informs the reader of a new feature or service, such as this one from the CMS platform StoryChief.

Social media messaging strategy

Unlike most messaging channels, social media provides you with instant feedback on how your message was received. This makes it an excellent gauge for your marketing messages.

Always test your social media messages to find the best performers across different audiences. Track your posts, images, infographic, and topics, and double down on those that deliver the best results.

To ensure your social media messaging is effective, you should:

1. Be human. People appreciate talking to persons rather than “brands”, so communicate with a sincere, human voice.
2. Take advantage of visuals to enhance your message.
3. Design your message for the specific social media channel.
4. Design the post to drive engagement.
5. Craft your content to match current issues.

Consider this sample social media message from the project management tool ClickUp and how it offers a solution to a major project challenge its customers may face.

External channels messaging strategy

External channels communications encompass all of the media through which you capture the public’s attention. This includes everything from shareholder-centered presentations to press releases, newsletters, conferences, and even your positioning on Product Hunt.

To ensure your external channels message strategy is effective, you should:

• Know your audience and what resonates with them.
• Choose the best platform for your target audience, brand, and message.
• Offer real value with your message.

For instance, the annual Userpilot State of SaaS Onboarding event hosted on Product Hunt connects Userpilot with its target audience – product developers and marketers.

Messaging strategy best practices

At this point, you should have formed some ideas on what your brand messaging strategy should look like. Before signing off on any strategy, though, ensure it adheres to the following best practices:

Keep consistency across different channels

Your message should sound the same, regardless of your chosen channel or platform. Your website, blog posts, newsletters, and social channels should feel like it was written by one person for one customer. Stay consistent to avoid confusion.

Make it personal

Whatever your chosen strategy, your message should feel personal to the reader. It should identify their pain and address them in their language. The more your message resonates with the customer, the more impactful it’ll be.

A/B test your messaging campaigns

A/B testing isn’t meant for product managers alone. Before settling on a messaging strategy, test how it performs with the audience. Try different texts, visuals, CTAs, segments, and channels, and note the best performers.

Userpilot enables you to set goals for your A/B tests and track test performances.

Conclusion

The key to a successful marketing campaign is understanding your market and reaching them effectively. A well-defined message strategy is key to ensuring your campaign succeeds.

Want to learn more about your customers and their needs and refine your messaging strategy? Book a demo with Userpilot to learn how!