→ Your growth practice

Be intentional about your communication and marketing campaigns. Define your audience, aligning your SaaS brand and product messages with its needs and requirements.

→ Quick explanation

💥 Problem

Message dilution.

Creating an impactful communication or marketing campaign is almost impossible when having multiple or less-defined target groups.

Imagine talking about your product to:

• SaaS marketers
• NGO representatives
  

How do you address and personalize your messages according to each audience?

Your product may suit everyone, but you can’t launch a one-size-fits-all message, thinking it will substantially impact everyone.

After all, SaaS marketers and NGO representatives use different terminology and have different needs. And your message should reflect the profile and the characteristics of a specific target group.

► Quick note: You can launch a hyper-personalization campaign, talking to multiple target groups and aligning your messages to their needs. However, this requires many resources.  

A one-size-fits-all approach to marketing and communication will dilute your message. People expect companies to address their detailed profile, interests, and needs. That’s impossible when you don’t have a well-defined niche.

💡Solution

Your SaaS product may be suitable for different target groups. However, to ensure the impact of your communication and marketing campaigns, narrow down your focus by choosing a specific audience.

Go from broad to niche, and then ultra-niche in terms of your target group.

Being clear about your niche audience will give you the necessary insights to launch communication and marketing campaigns that:

• Address people’s specific challenges and needs
• Employ the right terminology or speak the language of your target group
• Improve the perceived value of your product
  

► Quick note: You can offer the same product as your competitor. But you can improve its perceived value by crafting ultra-niche messages for a specific target group. By doing so, you’ll align your offer with the same pain points your niche has, boosting the perceived value of your product.

🤩 Example:

[Broad message]

[Niche message]

Compared to Swapcard, which offers a product for a broad audience, aka people who run events, Bevy went niche and focused on talking to community managers and people who plan events for communities.

The niching exercise helps Bevy to launch specific communication and marketing campaigns. Subsequently, Bevy’s messaging is 100% aligned with the needs and the requirements of community managers or leaders.  

→ Definitions

📓 Perceived Value: The way people evaluate the benefits/merits of your SaaS product and its capacity to meet their needs and expectations.

📓 Personalization: Building a communication or marketing campaign that talks the language of your niche audience, tackling its specific needs and requirements.

Imagine developing an email automation tool. This solution works for marketing and customer success teams. However, the needs of each audience are different. The same is true for the messages you’ll launch for them.

You can go broad and talk about email marketing having a weaker impact. Or you can go niche and speak to a specific audience (marketers or customer success reps), discussing their needs and aligning with their wants. By doing so, your communication or marketing campaign will have a greater impact.

📓 Hyper-personalization: According to Deloitte, “Hyper-personalization is the most advanced way brands can tailor their marketing to individual customers. It’s done by creating custom and targeted experiences through the use of data, analytics, AI, and automation.”

Hyper-personalization is an excellent solution for SaaS companies that have the resources to nurture multiple niche audiences.

→ Types of Niching

• Simple niche: Usually, companies narrow their audience by choosing a specific attribute. For example, this attribute can be a job role, such as marketers or customer support reps.
• Ultra-niche: You can always take a niche and get specific by adding more audience attributes. You can narrow down your target group to their job role, such as marketers, and get even more specific. For example, you can choose to work with SaaS marketers who allocate more than $1M annually to deploy their strategy. Or, you can focus on SaaS marketers running recurring events to generate leads. Ultra-niching is always about adding more layers of specificity and building a well-defined profile. Your messages will become ultra-impactful, helping you connect with the exact audience you want to reach out to.
• Multi-niche: In some cases, SaaS companies focus on multiple audiences. That’s a common strategy, especially if you have the resources to build hyper-personalized campaigns for each target group. If you decide to go multi-niche, you must understand each target group’s characteristics, needs, and requirements, aligning your messages with them. The key is to move away from a one-size-fits-all approach and ensure personalization, talking in the language of each target group.
  

→ Types of Audience Niching

• Industry: You can choose to niche your audience based on verticals. Depending on your product, you can focus on professionals from Academia, NGOs, governmental structures, brick-and-mortar companies, SaaS brands, and more.
• Job role: You can narrow down your audience based on their primary occupation, such as marketers, architects, sales reps, and more.
• Attribute: In some cases, you may center your communication or marketing campaigns on creative people, analytical minds, researchers, and more.  
  

► Quick note: In some cases, SaaS companies narrow down their audience based on job-to-be-done (JTBD). For example, we see companies, such as Asana, Hopin, and Notion talking to professionals who:

• Run events
• Build communities
• Launch lead magnets
• Manage projects
• And more
  

Multiple thriving companies deploy this widespread practice. However, message clarity is crucial to connecting with an audience for smaller SaaS companies. And you can’t achieve this level of clarity when talking to different audiences based on their JTBD.

Imagine you’ve developed a webinar software, which can be used by marketing, sales, and customer support teams. What messaging is more impactful?

• Broad: Run successful webinars (based on JTBD)
• Niche: Attract high-quality leads into the pipeline by running engaging webinars (based on role aka marketers)
  

→ Your growth opportunities

• Differentiate yourself from the competition, who may have a broader approach in terms of audiences.
• Craft the right messages to connect with your audience.
• Attract the right leads and prospects.
• Position yourself as a thought leader. That’s much easier when speaking to a niche audience than having a broad approach to your marketing and content strategies.
• Gain more insights to craft better products and marketing campaigns. When you’re dealing with a specific niche, you have access to a greater level of understanding of this niche’s needs and requirements.
  

→ Case examples

>> Banzai, an event technology platform

Countless event management platforms are promoting their solutions to professionals who run events. And although it’s a platform that suits the needs of multiple target groups, Banzai decided to focus on marketers who run events.

This decision transformed the company’s messaging from broad to narrow. Banzai also built an entire content strategy based on the marketers’ needs, tackling subjects such as:

• How marketers can make the most out of running events
• New marketing frameworks
• Driving marketing ROI
• Marketing battles
• And more
  

Moreover, the company launched an entire movement called “Engagement marketing,” which aims to change the way marketers do marketing.

Although it’s an events platform, Banzai is heavily focused on talking and connecting with marketers, basically owning the niche.

>> Demio, a webinar platform

Similar to Banzai, Demio is a solution that fits the needs of multiple target groups.

However, the company decided to focus specifically on marketers from its inception.

As a result, Demio built the entire website copy, content strategy, and marketing campaigns around marketers.

>> ConvertKit, an email marketing platform

ConvertKit is specifically centered on creators interested in:

• Growing their audience
• Foster their community
• Earn a living online

The company grew, adding different niches of creators, such as:

• Musicians
• Authors
• Podcasters
• Coaches

The company’s messaging and marketing campaigns are laser-focused on creators interested in building an online audience.

Moreover, the company launched media products, such as:

• Creator Stories
• Creator Sessions
• I Am a Creator
  

→ What to consider?

Questions:

• What are the particularities of my niche? What are my audience’s needs and requirements?
• What are the words my target group uses to express its pain points?
• How much more specific can I get? Should I just niche, or can I go ultra-niche? In some cases, ultra-niching may play against you as you reduce your market. But in other cases, ultra-niching is necessary to identify the right audience. For example, there are countless marketing professionals. Do you want to engage with everyone, or do you want to ultra-niche and get specific about their industry and budget?
• When should I start creating multiple niches? You’ll have to consider your resources to create personalized communication and marketing campaigns to answer this question.
  

Requirements:

• There are no specific requirements to deploy this growth practice. You can narrow down your audience whether you’ve launched or not your SaaS product. However, it’s much easier to clarify your specific target group before launching your product.
  

→ Your action framework

📒 How to niche/choose your audience when you:

• Didn’t launch your product yet
• Have multiple target groups
  

✅ Talk to representatives of different target groups.

✅ Identify the JBTD of each target group and its perceived importance. For example, a solopreneur may run webinars to increase brand awareness in time. On the other hand, SaaS marketers run weekly webinars to generate leads and grow the opportunity pipeline. In this case, the perceived importance of webinars is higher in the case of SaaS marketers (whose job is in the line) than of a solopreneur.

✅ Learn how much different target groups are willing to invest in getting the job done. According to the previous examples, SaaS marketers may be willing to invest more than a solopreneur. And all that because of the perceived importance of the JTBD.

✅ Choose an audience niche that is actively seeking to achieve a specific result, has a recurring interest in using your product consistently, and is willing to invest great resources.

📒 How to niche/choose your audience when you:

• Launched your product
• Have multiple customers and different target groups
  

Let’s say you’ve launched your product, but your communication and marketing campaigns are a mess. You know you can have a more significant impact by narrowing down your audience. However, you have multiple target groups and customers, and you don’t know which audience niche to choose.

In this case, let the data speak.

✅ Make a list of your customers.

✅ Identify your customers’ profiles based on their industry, job role, or attribute.

✅ Check the revenue each target group brought into the pipeline.

✅ Focus on the audience niche that contributed to your profit the most.

For example, you may discover that you’re customers are marketers from industries such as:

• SaaS
• NGOs
• Education
  

However, after running the data, you realize that most of your customers are from the SaaS industry, generating the biggest chunk of your revenue. As a result, you can choose to narrow down and focus your communication and marketing campaigns on SaaS marketers only.