Few professional experiences rival the excitement and relief of developing and releasing a new product. Your project team has come together to make something great, like a SaaS app that fills a gap in the market. You’re almost done… now you have to show it off. How do you let people know about your product and get them to choose it over other options?
How people perceive your product is a direct result of product messaging, which details how the solution meets your current and potential customers’ needs. This is not quite the same as product positioning, which gives target customers context about where a new product fits within the product landscape.
Product messaging communicates the value of your product to end users. This refers to not just the words and phrases used in advertising and marketing messages, but also the feelings and emotions associated with what the messages say. Great product messaging focuses on the target audience, their pain points, and how product features and benefits can solve their needs or challenges.
Explaining your team’s solution effectively can often mean the difference between project success and failure. Developing the right message takes time, market research, and an effective product messaging framework. There are several different messaging templates, and what works for one business might not work for another.
Key Principles of Product Messaging
A product messaging framework helps marketing teams communicate the value of your product to your target audience. It helps align product positioning and messaging with customer needs for a more effective marketing strategy.
Key elements of a product messaging framework include:
- Positioning statement: Effective product messaging starts with sound positioning. This includes the product’s benefits, category, target audience, value proposition, and key differentiators.
- Product vision: An overarching statement describing what the product is, why it exists, and who it’s for. This helps form successful product messages, aligns stakeholders, and drives effective content marketing efforts.
- Core value: The core value of a product is the “why” for its existence in the market, as well as why a potential customer should buy your product specifically.
- Market research: Understanding your target buyer persona is a key step in effective product messaging. As teams learn more about the target audience, they can further refine and optimize marketing messages.
- Value demonstration: Real-life product experience shows potential customers the value your product provides. This can be done using case studies, use cases, metrics, customer feedback, testimonials, and more.
- Elevator pitch: A short, memorable statement based on the product’s positioning statement that capture’s your ideal customer’s attention and interest.
Use Consistent Messaging Across Multiple Channels
Product marketing efforts should align with brand messaging to ensure target customers and stakeholders understand the message clearly. Each step in developing your marketing strategy should ensure consistency in the brand voice and image.
With the average customer seeing thousands of ads per day, some companies employ cross-channel marketing to engage with end users across every digital channel and any device. This impacts several communication workflows, including:
- Social media posts
- Email marketing content
- Landing page copy
- Call-to-action phrasing
- In-app notifications
- Company homepage
- LinkedIn articles
When you try to sell a product to a huge, undefined audience, you end up talking to no one at all. Knowing your audience and building product messages around them is key to creating content that resonates with customers. The buyer personas identified in your product messaging framework determine who your messaging is for.
Address your target audience directly and personally. Adapt your messaging to fit your audience, using the tone and words they would. Understanding a product is key to adopting and appreciating it, so you must communicate the value of your product with clarity and authenticity so that potential customers understand how your product is the solution to their pain points.
In the race to implement what’s new, it can become easy to ignore or forget past product messaging. This breaks down a brand’s cohesiveness. Instead, maintain a rich, usable archive of past projects to help ensure your latest product messaging makes sense amidst the rest of your messaging ecosystem.
Product Messaging Examples
Messaging highlights the value of your products to customers. Choose your words and phrases carefully to create an emotional connection with your target audience. When a potential customer relates to something on an emotional level, they’re more likely to remember the product.
For example, Volvo’s “A Million More Lives” campaign was based on the car company’s development of the three-point safety belt, which has gone on to save more than a million lives. The campaign features real-life true stories of people who survived vehicle crashes thanks to the safety belt, creating a clear emotional connection with the audience.
Other products, such as CRM for SaaS companies, would not be ideal for emotional copywriting. Instead, product messaging should focus on solving pain points and creating a sense of urgency. The marketing content would address key considerations such as functionality, product features, pricing, and use cases.
Conduct a Project Review
A project review analyzes the project’s successes, failures, and challenges to identify improvement opportunities. This is done by calculating the project’s performance in terms of cost, quality, and schedule following the product launch. Reviewing the outcome of messaging efforts is an important component of product management.
Collect feedback from key stakeholders, such as your marketing and sales team. Review key data points on sales cycles, customer feedback, workflows, and other metrics to improve product messaging and positioning.
Effective product messaging helps you attract ideal customers. Of course, the sales journey doesn’t end with marketing messages that attract and convert end users. A successful product experience also resonates with users, demonstrates the value of your product, and increases customer retention.
Get Expert Assistance
As you can probably tell, product messaging isn’t as simple as picking the best words and phrases. It requires a clear framework that is grounded in market research to communicate the value proposition to target customers.
Marketing and advertising content falls under the umbrella of copywriting, which is a specialized field of professional writing services. Copywriting persuades end users to take some type of sales-related action. This differs greatly from content writing, which is meant to entertain or educate the target audience.
Feeling stuck trying to perfect your product messaging? We can help. ProEdit’s writing team is well-versed in copywriting for product marketing. Contact us today to learn more about our writing and editing services.