[Part 2 from the six-part series on SaaS messaging.]

Not sure how to approach your SaaS messaging strategy when you know it’s faulty? This article is your guide to clarity. After reading it, you’ll know exactly where to start.

But first things first.

Quick Reminder: What’s SaaS messaging

SaaS messaging refers to all communication campaigns and messages built and sent by different teams within a SaaS company. These messages aim to communicate the brand and product to a target audience.

Strong SaaS messaging results in people paying for and actively using the software to achieve their goals. Weak SaaS messaging results in eroded brand trust, lack of interest, and poor business results.

Ensuring a results-driven SaaS messaging is quite challenging, considering its complexity.

Read more about SaaS messaging complexity in part 1.

Consistency, personalization, continuity, and quality are the attributes you must consider to navigate this complexity and improve your SaaS messaging for growth.

Let’s analyze them.

Attribute 1: Consistency

Consistency facilitates a cohesive brand voice, uniform narrative, and shared understandings across all channels, touchpoints, and assets.

Whether someone engages with your messages via social media, product tours, or knowledge base entries, or whether they interact with different sales and customer support reps, there must be a feeling of unified brand identity.

Otherwise, there are cases when a brand’s social media accounts, blog posts, and knowledge base entries feel as if belonging to different SaaS companies.

This may happen because multiple people and teams work on creating and distributing different messages.

It takes extra coordination from executives and managers to ensure that all team members are on the same page.

If there’s no consistency in messaging, the SaaS company risks to:

• Create confusion
• Diminish brand perception
• Provide disjoint experiences
• Complicate the customer journey
• Erode connections with target audiences
• Decrease brand trustworthiness
• Lower perceived reliability
  

All these items translate into poor business results and stagnant growth. To keep this from happening, you must work on messaging consistency by focusing on the harmonization of:

• Terms: All team members must use the same words, whether in the product interface, website content, or one-on-one conversations.
• Semantics: All team members must have and share the same understanding of product, brand, and industry concepts.
• Voice: It refers to brand personality. Team members should ensure brand voice consistency across all channels and assets, whether clinical and straightforward or friendly and approachable.
• Style: It includes the choice of words, sentence structure, formatting, and the overall approach to communicating something.
• Frame: It refers to ways in which SaaS teams present information to target audiences.
  

Overall, consistency in SaaS messaging means ensuring everyone is on the same page and communicates based on clear, commonly shared parameters.

Read more about SaaS messaging consistency in part 3.

Attribute 2: Personalization

From undecided leads and prospects to dedicated customers and community members, SaaS companies engage with multiple external stakeholders. These interactions become even more complex for B2B SaaS companies that must consider various profiles, such as decision-makers and end users.

If there’s no personalization and communication relies on an all-size-fits-all approach, SaaS companies risk to:

• Decrease messaging efficiency
• Lose people’s interest
• Disengage target audiences
• Erode trust in the brand’s ability to understand needs
• Impact brand perception
• Fail to attract business opportunities
  

Personalization is key to connecting and keeping the attention of different people. To achieve a high level of personalization, SaaS teams should map out their external stakeholders, as well as their:

• Challenges: If a SaaS product covers multiple use cases, chances are multiple stakeholders can use it to overcome different challenges. For example, an interactive demo platform can be used by marketing, sales, and CS teams. However, they all have different challenges and will react to different messages.
• Goals: When targeting a business, it’s worth considering that there’s a decision-making hierarchy. Different SaaS messages are usually needed so that some resonate with decision-makers, while others resonate with end users.
• Context: This item includes Industry and market, main competitors, type of business / entity these external stakeholders represent, stages of the decision-making, level of maturity in terms of acknowledging challenges and solutions, tech expertise, and more.
• Language: What terms do your external stakeholders operate with? What’s their shared understanding?
  

This mapping exercise is necessary to understand what makes people react, and craft powerful messages accordingly.

Attribute 3: Continuity

Continuity is when interactions with leads, prospects, and customers are not isolated. Instead, they are sequential, picked up from where they were last left off, creating an ongoing dialogue.

The SaaS teams must acknowledge past interactions with target audiences and naturally continue the conversation from where it was left.

Otherwise, they risk the following:

• Loss of context in conversations
• Interrupted conversations
• Bad lead / customer experience
• Negative brand image
• Difficulty in re-engaging people
• Missed opportunities
  

Subsequently, all these scenarios result in bad business outcomes. To ensure messaging continuity, SaaS teams must focus on two elements:

• Coherence: It refers to the logical, consistent, and orderly connection of ideas in messages. Each interaction must build upon previous communications in a way that makes sense and is relevant to the recipient. This aspect involves mapping out absolutely every single touchpoint in the conversational flow.
• Operational efficiency: This aspect refers to finding the right ways, tools, and dynamics between team members to pick up conversations where they’re left.
  

It’s worth noting that each team may organize its conversational mechanisms differently, but it’s crucial to provide the best experiences to target audiences.

Attribute 4: Quality  

People need to feel they got something in exchange for the time they’ve spent consuming your SaaS messages. And that’s something you can achieve by working on quality.

Otherwise, leads, prospects and/or customers may:

• Experience disappointment or frustration
• Feel the disconnect between your brand and the value it may offer
• Withdraw from engaging
• Lose interest in future communication from your brand
• Question your brand’s credibility and trustworthiness
  

SaaS messaging is part of the company’s overall communication and it takes multiple forms, from articles and knowledge base entries to product tours and discovery calls.

And low-quality engagements won’t cut it. People want to get something more from these interactions.

Luckily, you can always improve and keep working on quality by focusing on the following:

• Value: This element can be expressed through answering a question, sharing an insight, providing an ‘aha!’ moment, and more. Value contributes to the overall messaging quality by improving your external stakeholders’ understanding of something. Sometimes, value may take the form of entertainment.
• Experience: This aspect involves tangibility or knowledge generated by practice as opposed to theory. To ensure high quality, teams must provide applicable and practical elements through their messages.
• Relatability: Leads, prospects, and customers should feel understood and resonate with the messages sent by SaaS teams. High-quality messaging involves empathy and leads to real connection.  
• Simplicity: This element involves clear, straightforward communication that is easy for the audience to understand and act upon. To ensure messaging quality, SaaS teams must distill complex ideas into digestible, engaging content that avoids jargon and technical complexities whenever possible.
  

Achieving quality in SaaS messaging requires great effort, time, and attention.

Final note

Consistency, personalization, continuity, and quality are the four attributes of great SaaS messaging. Also, they’re the four signals of trust, highlighting the SaaS company’s commitment to excellence and long-term connections.

Read the entire series on SaaS messaging:

• Understanding the Real Complexity of SaaS Messaging (part 1/6)
• How to Achieve Consistency in Your SaaS Messaging (part 3/5)
• How to Map Your Audience for Messaging Personalization (part 4/6)
• How to Maintain Continuity in Your Dialogue with Audiences (part 5/6)
• How to Ensure the Quality in Your SaaS Messaging (part 6/6)