Does Your SaaS Have a Positioning or Messaging Problem?

Has your SaaS growth reached a mysterious plateau? Do you have happy customers, product-market fit, and a significant online presence—but a distinct lack of new leads or sign-ups?

If this sounds familiar, you might have problems with key aspects of your marketing: positioning and messaging. Both of these concepts are intrinsically linked, and together, they determine how prospects perceive and evaluate your product.

In the following article, we’ll discuss how you can diagnose—and fix—problems with positioning and messaging to unlock new growth.

What is positioning?

Positioning is the context you put your company in to show ideal customers what you are. It determines how customers understand what your product is and who they see as your competitors.

For example, if you positioned your business as a “social networking site for professionals”, people would automatically compare you to Linkedin.

But if you positioned it as an “online professional development center”, people might compare you to websites offering business training services.

Neither choice would be intrinsically wrong or right—it all depends on your strategy and how you want prospects to see you.

Positioning should be a conscious choice, not an accident

Positioning expert April Dunford, in her book Obviously Awesome, explains why consciously choosing positioning is important:

“With so many other products on the market, it’s easy for products to get lost in the noise, or worse, completely misunderstood and framed in ways that make them unappealing, redundant or merely unremarkable.”

“We generally fail to consider other—potentially better—ways to position our products because we simply aren’t positioning them deliberately.”

OK, so what is messaging?

Messaging is what you say about your company. It doesn’t necessarily refer to how you say it, but an overall strategy for the information you’ll communicate about your company and product(s).

Messaging and positioning are obviously intertwined: you can’t tell prospects that you’re a “social networking site for professionals” without writing that somewhere.

However, when messages aren’t resonating with your target audience, it’s not always clear what the problem is. Are you perhaps positioning your company to fight a battle you can’t win (e.g trying to take on Linkedin)? Or is your messaging just not speaking to your audience’s needs and desires in a way that resonates?

Five signs that messaging problems are holding back your growth

Messaging problems aren’t always obvious—but your sales, support, and marketing teams might notice these giveaways:

1. The right people are visiting your website, but they’re not converting.

Depending on your market strategy, you may be driving traffic through opted-in email campaigns or paid ad funnels. Alternatively, you may be using a tool like Zoominfo to gain intel on the people who are visiting your website.

In either scenario, you have a good idea that people from your target audience are visiting your website. You’re grabbing some interest from them, but not getting a conversion—that’s a good sign your messaging (or your offer) is lacking.

2. Prospects aren’t trialing your SaaS

If the right people are discovering your website but not signing up, it’s an indication that they’re not convinced by what’s on your site.

Maybe your copy isn’t clear about what’s on offer. Or perhaps your website just doesn’t make a good enough case for choosing your SaaS over a competitor.

3. People are using your product, but they’re not from your intended market segment

Let’s imagine that your SaaS is a project management tool aimed at engineers. However, a customer survey reveals that most of the people buying your product are marketers.

Of course, any sale is generally better than no sale. But if you’re not appealing to the right audience, then you’re not showing that you can solve the right problems. Or putting out messages that resonate with the people you want to target.

4. Prospects don’t understand what you’re actually offering

Check your incoming queries and chat logs to find out if prospects have the wrong impression.

• Are they asking questions that don’t really apply to your product?
• Are they unsure if your product can help them?
• Are they confused by your features or pricing?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, it could be an indication that your messaging is unclear or unhelpful.

5. Your reviews indicate that the people using your SaaS aren’t best-fit customers

If you’re getting too many less-than-stellar comments on software review sites, it could mean that your product needs more development.

But it could also mean that you aren’t attracting the right kind of customers – the kind whose pain points and expectations align with what you’re offering.

How to know when you have a positioning problem

Prospects immediately compare you with competitors that have stronger features

If your positioning is “email for small businesses”, then prospects will automatically compare you with Mailchimp. It’s just reality. So if you’re being compared with more sophisticated market leaders, it’s worth asking, “are we picking a fight we can win?”

Userlist decided to overhaul its positioning after recognizing that prospects were comparing it to more advanced products:

“Previously, our market category was “email automation tools” which clearly didn’t work. People started comparing us with Drip, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, etc. — and we struggled to explain why we’re better. Email automation tools have way more advanced features that we’re not planning to implement soon (rich visual templates, A/B testing, visual workflow builders, analytics).”

Your copy is generic and not aimed at any particular audience

When you haven’t internally decided on a specific audience, it’s almost impossible to create copy that speaks to ideal customers. A quick look through your website will reveal generic, “everything-to-everyone” headlines that neither attract nor repel specific audiences.

If you’re a young company and don’t yet know who your audience is yet, this is an understandable starting point. But at some point, you’ll need to establish stronger positioning.

Your team isn’t aligned on what your company does and who it helps

Shari Bareket is a strategic narrative consultant who helps B2B startups establish and communicate their positioning. As she explained to me in a recent interview, one of the signs that a startup hasn’t identified clear positioning is that its staff and customers disagree on who it serves.

“I ask a bunch of your customers, your investors or partners, even internally questions like, ‘who are we?’, ‘What is this company?’, and ‘what are we solving’? And typically, unless you have a clear strategic narrative, you will get 10, even 20 different answers. And that's an issue because everyone is perceiving you in a different way.”

You designed your product for a specific market, but that market has changed

A great example of this is the camera brand GoPro. The brained gained popularity in the early 2000s, with consumers recognizing their products as rugged, high-definition cameras you could take anywhere.

However, as the quality of smartphone cameras took off, and GoPro’s sales dropped in 2015. The company regained some ground in the following years, primarily targeting outdoor sports fans. But in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic put a halt on outdoor activities—and GoPro lost out to market changes again.

In contrast, some brands were perfectly positioned (or repositioned) for the pandemic:

You haven’t looked at your positioning in a while

Establishing your positioning isn’t a one-time exercise. As time goes by, your product and your audience will continue evolving. What’s more, you’ll likely need to adapt to changing threats from your competition.

Accordingly, you should ideally evaluate your positioning at least every couple of years.

To improve your messaging, start by formalizing your positioning

Good messaging flows from good positioning, so positioning is the right place to start.

1. Understand who your best customers are
2. Find out what features or aspects of your service they appreciate the most.
3. Determine what solutions your prospects and customers are comparing you too (and whether you want to be compared to them)
4. Choose a context that makes your offer attractive to your best customers

This context is your position in the market.

Be aware that creating a new category can be a bold and risky move. However, it can also pay off massively, as companies like Drift have shown.

Write down a positioning document for your team

It should include:

● What category and sub-category you are in?

● What are your stand-out features/product differentiators

● Who are your ideal customer groups

● Why your solution is the ideal choice for those groups

Be aware that writing down these statements isn’t what determines your positioning. Your positioning is a conscious decision about what market you’re in, who you’re targeting, and who you will compete with.

Accordingly, your positioning will flow into your marketing strategy, your choice of partners, the features you develop, and beyond.

Create a public-facing statement about what your product is.

This means a name and simple statement about what your product is/does. This should reflect your decision over whether to join an existing category or create a new one.

For example, VWO has similar features to various website optimization tools, but refers to itself as an experimentation platform.

Once you have a public-facing statement about your position, you can start creating marketing assets and campaigns to build awareness. For example, use comparison pages to show ideal customers why you’re the right solution for them.

SaaS positioning example: Ada.CX

Ada.CX is a platform with a range of AI-driven tools that enable companies to automate and scale their customer experiences.

The company originally positioned itself as a chatbot, as we see in its home page from 2021:

Later that year, the company rebranded and positioned itself as a brand interaction platform:

Shira Baraket, who guided the company in creating its new narrative, explained:

“They were really struggling because it was an amazing company, with amazing technology. But what everyone said about them was that they were a chatbot.

Through the work we did together, we learned that they're much something much bigger than that. By listening to customers, we understood that what's important for brands today is not just brand communication, but actually brand interactions.

So now what Ada CX is owning in the space is this whole world of brand interactions, because what they do is much more than a chatbot. They continuously produce social posts, web materials, podcasts, and everything in the brand level is really about this theme.”

Ada.CX repositioned again in 2023, positioning itself as an AI-powered customer service automation platform. With the explosion in public awareness of AI in preceding months, this was a great opportunity to Ada.CX to take advantage of a market trend—another classic positioning tactic recommended by April Dunford.

How to improve your messaging fundamentals

After getting clear on your positioning, you can now start to evaluate, improve and test your messaging.

1. Create user personas

Your messaging should focus on your ideal customers’ problems and highlight how your solution solves them. To do this, create user personas that detail the motivations, challenges, and buying journeys of your prospects.

As you do conduct more research, add Voice of Customer data to these profiles so you can ultimately speak to users in their own language.

2. Research your target audience(s)

Your goal is to get an in-depth understanding of why some prospects choose your solution, and why others don’t.

• Perform message testing on your current site to see how impartial participants who align with your user personas interpret it. Services like Wynter and UserTesting.com can help you both recruit and run tests with audiences.

• Interview or survey your existing and potential customers to learn how they talk about pains, objections, desires, and their buying journey. As your messaging is tightly linked with your product, the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework can be helpful here.

• Perform desk research on Reddit, software review sites, Linkedin groups, and other relevant sources to get insights on how your audience sees the market.

• Talk to your sales and support teams to learn about the questions, struggles, and decision-making processes of prospects and users.

3. Map out your customer journeys

To optimize your messaging for each user persona, you need to understand their motivations, doubts, and experiences at each step of their buying journey.

Customer journey maps are super helpful for this. Use them to visually plot the typical journeys your user personas take, plotting out their thoughts and needs at each touchpoint:

Your user research should inform what you include at each step. (Need more guidance? Here’s a blog I wrote explaining how to create customer journey maps.)

4. Check out what your competitors are doing

Hopefully by this point, you’ve already developed and positioned your product strategically against your competitors. But this is still a good moment to revisit your competitors’ websites. How are they describing their product? How do they talk to users about their problems?

Don’t get too hung up on what your competitors are doing. But if you’re up against very similar products, you should have a rough idea of what you’ll say (or avoid saying) to differentiate your from competitors.

5. Build your messaging around how your differentiators solve your prospects’ desires and problems

Ineffective messaging often comes from a starting point of “how can we tell users about our features?” Instead, start from “how can we show prospects that our product solves their problems”.

Typeform’s home page explains how it solves the problem of surveys asking customers too many questions:

As your users move further along their customer journey, tailor your messages further to their current stage of awareness. Again, you’ll want to speak to their motivations and pain points, and this is where your customer journey map comes in handy.

Here’s a great example from Loom. Notice how the page relates Loom to the jobs engineers do in this copy snippet:

You’ll also want to tailor your messaging so it speaks to prospects in their own language. Here you can refer to any Voice of Customer data you captured and recorded in your user persona profiles.

Notice how the Loom copy above uses terminology that engineers would relate to:

6. Ensure that your copy is clear, simple, and specific

SaaS companies are often overly conceptual, vague, or jargon-filled in their copy. Tighten everything up with these writing tips for startups:

• Minimize use of conceptual terms like “Localization” and “innovation” and replace them with action-based language where possible.

• Make your copy as specific as possible. Talk about your product in terms of actions and results, using figures and visual language where appropriate.

• Use a level of jargon that matches your audience’s sophistication. If your audience is made up of non-technical businesspeople, don’t use engineering language.

7. Validate your changes

It can be tempting to just ‘go live and see what happens’. But when there’s a lot riding on your messaging, like an important product launch, consider validating your changes.

• A second round of message testing can also help you to identify any major weakness in your new copy.
• A/B testing is a great way to evaluate whether your new messaging translates to more conversions.

8. Work in your positioning narrative

Copywriters and CRO specialists sometimes get tunnel-vision over individual marketing materials, thinking purely in terms of improving conversions.

Maximizing conversions from a given page is all well and good—but to own your positioning, you need to look at the big picture. That means creating an overarching narrative that comes through consistently in your messaging.

CXL positions itself as the most advanced marketing training available for digital marketers. This comes across consistently, even in its pay-per-click ads:

To do that, you need a framework for ensuring your positioning comes across consistently in all your marketing messages.

How to make sure your positioning comes through clearly in your marketing materials

This is the part where your positioning and messaging come together. Once you’ve decided on your positioning, it should come across in key touchpoints—from banner ads to blog content, product landing pages, and beyond.

Notice how Fullstory has a consistent message across different mediums, from its Google listing…

..to its home page….

…to its twitter profile:

By creating a consistent message across platforms in this way, Fullstory reinforces its positioning clearly.

But establishing your positioning is about more than just creating a single, catchy headline or slogan

For SaaS companies, it’s more creating a thread that can run through all of your marketing assets. To do that, you’ll need to decide on your unique value proposition.

(If you’re thinking “seriously, more abstract marketing concepts?” at this point, don’t worry—we’re about to see practical examples of what this looks like!)

What is a unique value proposition?

A unique value proposition (UVP) is a statement that communicates the one thing you do for your ideal customers better than anybody else.

To effectively speak to your audience, your UVP should be:

1. Relevant to your ideal audience
2. Different to what your competitors offer
3. Promising a specific, tangible, and ideally provable benefit to your prospects

Your UVP should be written out as a statement. However, it’s not meant to be a company slogan, tagline, or website headline (although it can double as those things).

Instead, it’s a thread that should run through all of your marketing touchpoints—like a theme that appears repeatedly in your messaging.

Once you have your UVP, go through all your marketing touchpoints to see where you can add it to your messaging

You’ll want to change any generic statements so that they reflect the UVP you’re offering prospects.

For example, you can change a pretty generic social proof line like this….

…into something that tastefully reflects a UVP, as ConvertKit does here:

Notice how both of the above websites are essentially saying “trust us, we have lots of customers”.

But the first example is pretty generic, while in the second, Convertkit tells us that creators use its product to “connect with their audience and earn a living online”.

It’s a clear statement about who Convertkit’s audience is and what the benefits are for them.

Let’s see a full example of what this looks like throughout a website

Calendly seems to have summarized its UVP in the footer of its website:

Now, as a standalone statement this doesn’t tell you that much about what Calendly does. But with this UVP as their foundation, they’re able to have a strong overarching narrative running through their messaging.

For example, in their homepage hero, we clearly see the association with the previous “easy ahead” statement:

The themes of “easy ahead’ and “accomplishing more” are continued as we move down the page.

Without the foundation of the “easy ahead” UVP, Calendly might end up with more generic messaging. Which is what we see here from one of its competitors, Acuity:

Side note: Notice how the site says it is “more than a scheduling tool”. Even though the site is telling us that it’s “more than”, Acuity has put itself in the “scheduling tool” category here. This is a positioning decision—whether or not it was intentional!

Elsewhere, when Calendly is explaining specific user cases, we see the same theme of ease and simplicity.

And we even see it in blogs that announce new features:

By continuously referencing the “easy ahead” theme, Calendly establishes itself as not just a scheduling tool—but THE solution for professionals who want to make their working life easier.

While it’s not the most original idea, Calendly is clearly positioning itself based on key outcomes it provides.

Would Calendly’s approach work for a smaller, up-n-coming startup?

Calendly’s initial use of “easy ahead” is quite broad and it still leaves some questions about what the app actually does.

However, Calendly can get away with this broad message because it’s the market leader. Most businesspeople have heard of it before, so the company has less work to do in terms of explaining what’s on offer.

If you’re a newer startup, differentiating your product is important—but it’s also vital that prospects instantly understand what you do. So err on the side of a clear and straightforward UVP over a “clever” one.

Lastly, consider calling out your competitors and alternatives directly

This takes a little boldness but declaring yourself as ‘the alternative to X’ can set the right context for your product.

However, the alternative doesn’t have to be a company; it can also be the old way of doing things. This is exactly what Slack did in its early years by positioning itself as the alternative to email:

Final points to remember about improving your positioning and messaging

Whew, that was a long ride! But you now have a framework for recognizing and improving issues with your positioning and/or messaging.

After going through this process, remember that:

• Positioning is an on-going mission that will evolve with your product, customers, and competitors. Revisit yours regularly and update when necessary.

• Messaging might seem like just a few words on a page, but it has a lot of work to do in helping you stand. Ensure yours consistently reflects your positioning, while addressing your customers’ pain points and desires in their own language.

Lastly, working on these things can be tricky, and sometimes you need a fresh perspective. When that happens, don’t be afraid to call in a messaging expert who can help you get everything in place.

Good luck!