To attract and hold on to customers in a competitive market, it’s not enough to create an in-demand product or solution.
Subtle yet powerful strategies like product messaging can find new and relatable ways to communicate the value of your products to customers.
Of course, product messaging is more than an elevator pitch. It’s a roadmap your marketing team and sales teams can use to drive stronger product positioning that sways customers — and solidifies your value proposition.
Whether you’re ready to optimize your current product messaging framework or need to develop a strategy from scratch, we’ll show you how you can improve your messaging to increase your sales and market share.
What Is Product Messaging?
Product messaging is the story you tell your customers about why and how your product will benefit them.
In other words, it’s the strategic communication of a product's value, features, benefits, and unique selling points to your target audience. That’s why effective product messaging is so crucial to the overall marketing efforts of your brand.
A solid product messaging strategy offers several benefits.
First, it helps to attract and engage your product’s target audience by highlighting the product’s unique advantages. It also positions the product in the customer’s mind — meaning they will be far more likely to remember it when they’re ready to make a purchase.
Second, effective product messaging gives your product visibility, which builds customer trust and credibility in turn.
It can also create a sense of urgency that drives customers into action. By highlighting the product’s immediate benefits and solutions, brands can motivate customers to make a purchasing decision sooner rather than later.
Your brand can develop a comprehensive product messaging strategy to maximize the impact of your marketing efforts. In the next section, we’ll show you how.
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What Makes an Effective Product Marketing Strategy
There's no universal product messaging template. However, you may notice that the most effective product messages share similar qualities.
Below is an overview of the top four qualities of an effective product messaging strategy.
Focused Messaging
Excellent product messaging strategies are direct, memorable, and — above all — focused on the key needs of its target audience.
When customers feel understood, they are more likely to remember your message because it resonates with their identity and desires.
Nike’s “Just Do It” campaigns are a great example of what this philosophy looks like in practice. Their messaging, which targets athletes and fitness enthusiasts, spotlights individuals who achieve their athletic goals by pushing beyond their own limits.
Because their messaging is focused on how top athletes maintain an active lifestyle, it creates a strong and focused emotional connection with their target audience of runners and other athletes.
In a similar capacity, Mastercard focuses its product messaging on the intersection of value, convenience, and lifestyle. Their "Priceless" campaign is arguably their most successful, creating the timeless slogan "There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's Mastercard."
Storytelling
Effective product marketing strategies do more than tell customers about a product.
Rather, they weave a story that shows customers what their product is capable of achieving for them — using the product as the story’s main character.
The goal of a product messaging story is to create differentiation within the market. It also gives customers an easy way to identify the product, the product’s value, and how the product stacks up against its competitors.
For example, Tesla’s product messaging story does more than sell electric vehicles. It shows customers how their cars can support a sustainable future while disrupting an otherwise stagnant automotive industry.
Tesla's messaging showcases its cutting-edge technology, performance, and commitment to environmental sustainability, setting them apart from traditional car manufacturers.
Credibility
Customers who perceive a brand as credible are more likely to trust the company and its products. That’s why the best product messaging often features customer success stories and case studies to support its claims.
Airbnb is a brand that uses product messaging to successfully communicate the credibility of its rental and hospitality marketplace.
The company’s product messaging centers its customer review process in order to inspire trust. Based on Airbnb's research, a rental host with an excellent reputation brings in more customers than a rental host who shares the customer’s interests.
People will trust an Airbnb host who is highly recommended for providing excellent services over someone with a relatable profile but a low customer rating.
Urgency
Persuasive product messaging should create a sense of urgency in your customers by showing them how the product can immediately improve their life or solve their problems.
It can even highlight the disadvantages of not using the product. This approach can motivate potential customers to take immediate buy action.
You can use several different methods to create a sense of urgency. Limited-time offers, exclusive deals, or time-sensitive benefits are just a few examples of how your messaging can convince your target customers to make an immediate purchase. The urgency concept is what drives discount sales and shopping events like "Cyber Monday" and "Black Friday."
Time-sensitive offers can encourage customers who don’t want to miss out on an opportunity to purchase a fantastic product at a lower price point.
Amazon and Alibaba are leading examples of companies that put urgency at the forefront of their great product messaging strategies. Both brands announce frequent but time-limited discounts and upcoming deals that compel their customers to act as soon as possible.
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How to Develop Your Product Messaging Strategy
Let’s take a look at how you can put the above strategies into practice to develop or improve your current product messaging strategy.
Define Your Product’s Core Values
Core values are the fundamental principles your product stands for and the solutions it provides to major customer pain points.
Identifying your product’s core values is not enough. Instead, take your product messaging one step further by defining the product’s core values in the context of the customer’s life.
Your product's core values are also its greatest strengths. To create messaging that resonates with your target audience, define those values by showing how they align with customer needs.
Consider an escrow payment app. The general product benefits of an escrow payment service are safety, convenience, and transparency for customers and sellers who want to protect their transactions.
To show how such an app can help customers perform safer transactions, the escrow company could develop messaging that emphasizes the app’s ability to secure and protect customer funds to avoid the risk of losing money or goods to scammers.
Perform Market Research and Create Buyer Personas
Compelling product messages require a deep understanding of one’s ideal customers.
The best way to understand your target audience is through market research and the creation of buyer personas.
Regular and up-to-date market research gives your brand the latest and more accurate insights into your customers’ demographics, preferences, and motivations.
Use market research data to develop targeted buyer personas. Buyer personas are a set of fictional customer profiles based on the characteristics and purchasing habits of your real-life customers.
The best market research methods for buyer personas include, but are not limited to surveys, interviews, focus groups, and competitor analyses.
Collect your market data, then segment the information into different buyer personas according to common or shared characteristics, behaviors, and needs.
We can revisit the escrow app example from earlier to see how market data is turned into meaningful buyer personas that advance a brand’s product messaging goals.
In this example, the escrow app’s market data shows that the majority of their customers want a safe and reliable tool for conducting business transactions with unknown people. This becomes Buyer Persona #1.
Buyer Persona #2 considers customers who use the escrow app to sell products and goods online. These customers are most worried about dubious buyers who exploit the charge-back feature to secure a refund without returning the item.
The escrow company can now examine these buyer personas to discover how their product messaging can better address the pain points of each customer.
Highlight What Makes Your Product Special
If your product messaging can only tell your customers one benefit of your brand, make sure that benefit aligns with the product’s key differentiator.
The key differentiator is the reason why customers should choose your product over its competitors. It’s about what your product can offer customers that no other product on the market does.
For example, an escrow payment app’s key differentiator could be its real-time support for different currencies and up-to-date currency conversions. The right message strategy should emphasize the product’s key differentiator to attract more customers who want to sell products overseas.
As one example, the messaging could call attention to how their currency conversion support enhances the user experience by making international transactions faster, seamless, and more accurate.
Build Trust
We’ve covered how customers are more likely to choose new products and brands they think they can trust over products they don’t.
Your product messaging strategy can demonstrate its credibility by:
- Providing Evidence. Also known as “social proofing” your product, your product messaging can employ customer success stories, case studies, testimonials, and reviews to highlight the product’s effectiveness. When potential customers learn about someone’s success when using the product, they become more likely to buy it.
- Establishing Authority. Effective product messaging should turn the customer’s attention toward your brand’s position as an industry expert. Share relevant knowledge, insights, and thought leadership to demonstrate authority and highlight the utility and value of your product.
- Highlighting Partnerships or Certifications. If your brand is certified or has partnerships with reputable organizations, be sure your product messaging features those credentials to instill your audience’s trust. Certifications will be most critical for brands that belong to the science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) or finance industries.
- Being Transparent. Be honest about your product's features, limitations, and pricing. Product messaging should be as transparent as it is persuasive to maintain the trust of its customers.
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The Best Product Messaging Examples
Studying successful product messaging solutions from established brands to learn how you can make your own product messaging more powerful.
Kilberry
Kilberry centers their product messaging around the motto “Towards a more certain future.” The leadership advisory company’s motto inspires confidence and trust in customers who need their high-quality and boutique services.
Kilberry’s web design features clean typefaces, forward-thinking imagery, and dynamic videos as part of their consistent product messaging strategy.
Atlassian
Atlassian uses a multi-pronged product messaging strategy to position its software solutions as the best in class. This includes social media and content marketing efforts to win over new customers.
Atlassian describes its product solutions as collaborative and easy to use. Likewise, their marketing messages target the needs of their primary customers: software developers, product managers, and dev teams who can benefit from Atalassian products like Jira, Confluence, and Trello.
MailChimp
MailChimp has used outstanding product messaging to make their brand synonymous with email.
After getting their start as a dedicated tool for email campaign management, the company shifted their messaging to highlight their product’s intuitive user experience and powerful, full-featured email marketing and automation solutions.
MailChimp also relies on animated content and short, declarative sentences to craft user-friendly messaging for wider appeal.
Webflow
Webflow’s product messaging strategy is all about customer reviews and user metrics. The brand highlights their superior customer experience as social proof of their SaaS product’s effectiveness.
Webflow developed its popular software for non-technical users who want an easy solution for building a website. That’s why their user-focused messaging strikes a chord in its target audience.
For example, Webflow’s product messaging tends to highlight their software’s drag-and-drop functionality, which makes web design more intuitive for customers without coding skills.
Boosted.ai
Boosted.ai delivers innovative SaaS solutions for investment managers. Their information-rich website, built by Anyday, uses a sharp, clean design that is consistent with their practical but industrious product messaging.
Boosted.ai’s landing page also includes a demo feature. Consumers can test the product in a simulated environment before committing to a purchase, which is one of the best ways to inspire confidence and trust in a software product’s customers.
Oppono
Oppono’s engaging product messaging and web design creates a sense of urgency by centering the mortgage loan application process.
As soon as users land on the page, they’re invited to submit an application. Prospective customers appreciate the company's direct, no-nonsense messaging and the straightforward user flow of their website, which was built by Anyday.
Conclusion
Use focused messaging and compelling storytelling in your product messaging strategy to communicate your product’s credibility and inspire urgency in your customers.
There are many ways to tell your product’s story, just as there are many ways to demonstrate credibility — and urge your customers to make a purchase.
What works for one brand may not work for your own. Try different strategies until you find the right one, or reach out to Anyday for a brand messaging consultation. We’ll help your brand make a great impression — and an even greater impact.
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