Truth 1. SaaS tools facilitate knowledge work.

Truth 2. SaaS tools are built for knowledge workers.

And that’s something SaaS people ignore when crafting their messages for leads, prospects, customers, and users. As a result, they fail to understand and capitalize on the main characteristic of their audience.

What’s a Knowledge Worker?

Knowledge workers are people who use their cognitive abilities as opposed to manual labor. They usually engage in tasks that require creating, analyzing, synthesizing, interpreting, and applying information.

Knowledge workers manage a great deal of information to solve problems, make decisions, innovate, and add value.

Fun fact: This term was coined by management consultant Peter Drucker in his book The Landmarks of Tomorrow (1959).

Who Is a Knowledge Worker?

There’s a great variety of knowledge workers using different SaaS tools. Here are a few examples in no particular order:

• Retail marketers
• Event organizers
• Financial analysts
• HR professionals
• Product managers
• Graphic designers
• Administrative personnel
• Social media managers
• Data scientists
• Insurance agents
• Supply chain managers
• Virtual assists
  

… and many more.

Even you, dear SaaS human, the one reading this article, are a knowledge worker.

So What if My Audience Are Knowledge Workers?

You know that thing you do before communicating your product? Yes, the one called defining your target audience.

There are multiple ways you can do it.

You can choose from different frameworks. You can create buyer personas, ideal customer profiles (ICP), value proposition canvas …

And that’s great.

Usually, that’s the only way you can understand your target audience’s context needs, challenges, and decision-making processes.  

However, that’s not enough.

Let me ask you a question: Have you ever thought about your leads, prospects, customers, and users as knowledge workers?

If not, chances are your overall communication strategy and messaging practices fail to resonate with your target audience.

What Is It Like to Be a Knowledge Worker?

Stay with me.

You’ll soon understand why analyzing your audience from the knowledge work perspective will help improve your brand and product messaging.

But first things first.

What does it mean to be a knowledge worker? Why is this important to consider when defining your leads, prospects, customers, and users?

Understanding knowledge workers provides insights into a second, more visceral layer of challenges your target audience confronts. And these insights are crucial to your messaging.

You see, knowledge workers suffer from:

1. Information overload

Emails, presentations, collaboration boards, social media notifications, TikTok challenges, articles, SubStack newsletters, fan fiction, Tinder notifications, like it or not, knowledge workers drown in data.

OpenText highlights that “80% of respondents experience information overload, driven by factors including constant information 24/7 or too many apps to check each day.”

2. Communication burnout

Do you know that knowledge workers spend more time communicating than doing the actual work?

According to the 2024 State of Business Communication by Grammarly, knowledge workers spend 88% (!) of their workweek communicating across multiple channels.

3. Decision fatigue

Or, better said, decision fatigue because of too many choices.

From choosing between countless task management apps to selecting the perfect presentation font, the crazy amount of choices leads to decision fatigue or, worse, decision paralysis.

4. App sprawl

Here’s a real Reddit question someone asked a while ago: “Do you ever feel overwhelmed by too many SaaS apps?”

And here’s one of the answers it got: “I can feel your pain! In our quest to streamline operations, my team and I find ourselves buried under a myriad of tools, each with its own login and interface.”

The struggle is real.

5. Task saturation

Communication and management add complexity to a knowledge worker’s daily life.

It’s also common for tasks to accumulate rapidly, leading to saturation. As a result, the workload exceeds manageable levels. That’s overwhelming and challenging.

6. Task-switching

Task-switching becomes inevitable from reading a research paper, finishing an email, preparing for a meeting, and then jumping into a different project.

We all suffer from that without realizing that task-switching is awful, as it takes more time to return to your zone than to complete the task on the first try. Also, this leads to fragmented attention, reducing the capacity to process information effectively.

7. Technostress

“Will AI take my job?” “Will my work be relevant in 5 years?” “How can I stay up to date with technological changes?”

Knowledge workers have multiple concerns regarding the ever-changing technological landscape. This translates into anxiety, uncertainty, and stress.

8. Cognitive load

A good part of knowledge workers are under increasing pressure to:

• Learn new things
• Adopt new digital tools
• Manage the incrementing complexity
• Stay updated with industry trends
• Keep up with the regulatory changes
• Collaborate effectively with different team members
• Continuously improve skills
• Create a personal brand
• And more
  

All these aspects increase the cognitive load, making it extremely challenging to process and make sense of the information.  

So what do we get?

At the end of the day, you’re not communicating with ‘buyer personas’ or ‘users’ who are highly interested in solving a pain point.

You’re communicating with knowledge workers who are tired, overworked, anxious, and struggling to balance their lives.

What Does It Mean for Your Messaging?

You may spend a lot of time crafting the perfect value proposition or persuasive messaging aligned with the profile of your target audience.

Yet, how much time do you spend making your messages as simple and clear as possible?

Your audiences are knowledge workers, meaning you’re talking to people tired of complexity and uncertainty.

You can bombard them with messages on how great your SaaS is or ways they can achieve their goal using your platform. However, by doing so, you’ll only contribute to their overwhelm and overload.

Seeing your target audience as knowledge workers will help you focus on distilling and simplifying the heck out of your message. You’ll make these messages easy to perceive, understand, remember, and share.

As a result, your target audience may actually say to themselves, “Hey! That’s not bad. I can follow that.” After all, there’s a relief when there’s zero complexity and 100% certainty regarding the meaning of your messages.

And that’s not easy. I struggle with it daily, trying to transform complex ideas into quick messages.

By doing that, you can get a foot on your audience’s door.