How to Use the Power of Copy and Content to Differentiate Your SAAS Product in a Crowded Market
5 Strategies to Help you Create your Purple Cow
Congratulations! After months, probably years of working on your SaaS product, it is now ready for the market.
You have fought with developers, pivoted a few times and spent countless nights wondering if your dream of being a startup founder with a real product will ever materialize.
It finally has and you should be happy. But you’re not. Reason? No one is buying your product. Heck, no one is signing up for your free 30-day trial. Even after you’ve added ‘no credit card required’ in the signup form.
‘What might the problem be?’ you wonder.
Differentiation. It might be that your product is not standing out enough. Check this out, in 2018, there were 6,829 SaaS products in the marketing niche alone.
Your prospective customers are drowning in so many options that they can’t even choose a product.
So how do you differentiate your SaaS product in a sea of sameness? How do you position your product as the only logical choice for your target market? By creating kickass highly targeted copy and content that clearly defines what your product does and who it’s best suited for. Copy and content will help you create trust, own your niche and communicate your unique brand personality.
How do you do that?
Let’s dig in.
1. Clarify your Value Proposition
The problem with SaaS is that most products can do a lot of things. So you feel like positioning your product as an “all your XYZ needs under one roof” solution will attract all kinds of people and get you thousands of clients.
Not really.
When your SaaS product does everything, it does nothing. Your prospects simply get overwhelmed and confused because they don’t know if your product can solve their problem.
How do you solve the curse of features?
Let’s say your product is a Customer Relationship Management software. It can store lead contacts, send e-mails, make sales calls, schedule follow-ups, create tasks and do lots of cool things. You can differentiate it by unifying all these features. How do they work together? What is the overall effect of their synergies? Does it help salespeople close deals? Is its main strength in reducing customer churn?
Put this value proposition on your homepage. Lead with it before you start listing all the awesome features and API integrations that your product has.
Prospects are not looking for features, they want to know what the features can do for them.
Make your solution clear.
Example: Slack. You can share files on slack, send messages, assign tasks and manage different teams at one go. But slack simply puts its values proposition as “Whatever work you do, you can do it in Slack.” All the features that Slack has have been distilled into one overall solution: helping its customers work.
Action Points: Make a list of the features that your product has and try to distill them into one solution. Talk to your customers and ask them the main problem that your product solves for them. Make your value proposition very clear in all your copy and content.
2. Declare your Target Customer
Once again the curse of “all under one roof” rears its ugly head here. While your product works well for small businesses, enterprise clients and even solopreneurs, it probably works best for only one or two of these customer segments.
Being acutely aware of your target customer helps you create an accurate buyer persona. It also helps you speak their language, address their objections and pump up their motivations.
Mention them in your website copy and explain how your value proposition helps them solve their problems. When these customers land on your website, they will immediately know that you know them. They will feel like your SaaS product is capable of solving their specific problem. It also reduces churn because the right people signed up for your free trial or asked for a demo.
This differentiates your SaaS product as the ‘small business x solution’ or ‘the enterprise x solution.’
Example: FreshBooks is a cloud-based accounting and invoicing SaaS product for small businesses. Its homepage says “The all-new FreshBooks is accounting software that makes running your small business easy, fast and secure. Spend less time on accounting and more time doing the work you love.”
Any small business owner who is looking for an accounting solution immediately knows that FreshBooks gets them.
Action Points: Create a buyer persona of your current customers. Identify the customer segment that your product serves best. Address that customer segment in all your copy and content.
3. Provide Social Proof
After you’ve stated the main problem that your product solves and who it’s best suited for, it’s time to back up those claims. How do you do that? By providing social proof of your SaaS product out in the wild doing amazing things for clients just like those you are targeting.
You can place testimonials of satisfied clients on your website copy and in other promotional materials such as e-mails. Case studies of how your product has improved your clients’ businesses are a very powerful type of social proof. Social proof creates trust and reduces the risk for your prospects. Someone else just like them has used the product and has been able to solve problems just like theirs.
Example: ConvertKit is an email service product that features testimonials like this on its website: “Visual automation is everything. It allows me and my team to visually create the marketing funnels necessary to make sure everyone is going down the right path for them, and they are receiving emails they are supposed to. More than increasing my income, it’s helping me serve more people!”
Action point: Ask your customers for honest testimonials about their experience with your product. Interview some customers and write case studies on how your product has transformed their businesses. Put these testimonials on your website and other promotional materials.
4. Own your Niche
Long ago, it used to be that if you build it, they will come. Sadly, those golden days are over. Prospects are crazy busy, they use Adblockers and there are thousands of SaaS products that offer services that are similar to yours.
How do you get your target audience to come to your product? Content Marketing
Content marketing is one of those terms that gets thrown around so much that most people don’t even know what it means anymore. Here is a definition from Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute:
“Content marketing is about creating interesting information your customers are passionate about so they actually pay attention to you.”
And no this is not the press release-esque posts that you see in most startup blogs: “Version 2.1 has been released”, “we’re sunsetting version 1.0” or “we’ve raised xxx billion dollars in funding.”
Nope. Nobody cares.
Create content that helps prospects with problems in your niche. Content that educates them and provides value. If you have a productivity SaaS product create content on “the causes procrastination”, “how to solve procrastination” or “how to manage your time.” These are questions that your target market has and the work of your content is to provide solutions to these problems.
This content can be in the form of webinars, blog posts, YouTube videos, white papers, e-books, and social media posts.
If a prospect has any question about your niche, your content should answer that question. The prospects then see you as an authority which makes your product the automatic choice.
Example: Close is a customer relationship management SaasSproduct. It provides e-mail tracking, call tracking, predictive dialing and SMS services. Its blog offers information about how to close sales deals, how to write cold e-mails and how to close enterprise clients.
These are all topics that someone who is looking for a product like Close’s would be looking for. These are the concerns of someone who would be a good fit for their product. That’s how I found Close. I’m sure that’s how a good chunk of their clients find them.
Your clients can find you this way too.
Action Points: Look at every feature that your product has and come up with the problems that it solves. Think of all the problems that someone who needs your product might have. Create content (blogs, videos, webinars, e-books, and social media posts) that answers these questions.
5. Sprinkle Some Fairy Dust
Your brand needs some personality. It needs to stand out and leave a lasting impression on your prospects. You cannot stand out by being robotic, ‘professional’ and cliché.
Your brand can be fun, quirky, honest, helpful or friendly. Your unique brand personality can be expressed in the voice that you use to write your content, your graphics (not the gangly humans with long arms please!) and how you engage with customers on social media.
A strong brand personality will attract customers who get you and make your brand memorable. This is the magic that no one can copy.
Example: Toggl is a time management app that has a fun, quirky and helpful brand personality. When you land on their site, you know that this brand is different. It’s in the riotous colors, the quirky mascot, and the fun copy. Everything about Toggl is simply exceptional.
Action Point: Do some research on who your customers are, what they like, how they talk, what they struggle with, pretty much anything and everything. Infuse your findings into your copy and content. Keep doing research to refine your brand personality. Create a branding guide for your writers and designers to follow (don’t forget to update it!).
The Takeaway
Differentiating your SaaS product with content and copy starts with having a laser focus on your target audience and then positioning your product according to your findings.
As more players get into the SaaS market and products become homogenous, differentiation will play an even bigger role in determining who succeeds and who doesn’t.
Luckily for you, you’re already in on a magical differentiation secret: content and copy.
Go get em’!
