Sixty percent of marketers find it hard to produce high-quality content consistently. SaaS marketers have an even more difficult job due to the technical nature of content production. Without an easy content development strategy, marketers have an insurmountable task of continually creating interesting content for an audience they don’t understand.
Globally, B2B SaaS marketers without the ability to consistently produce and activate quality content will experience:
- High website bounce rates and low time on site
- Low page views
- A low percentage of return visitors
- Low conversions
- Low open and click-through rates on email campaigns
Our Advice
Critical Insight
Marketing content that identifies the benefit of the product along with a deep understanding of the buyer pain points, desired value, and benefit proof points is a key driver in delivering value to a prospect, thereby increasing marketing metrics such as open rates, time on site, page views, and click-through rates.
Impact and Result
Marketers that activate the SoftwareReviews message mapping architecture will be able to crack the code on the formula for improving open and click-through rates.
By applying the SoftwareReviews message mapping architecture, clients will be able to:
- Quickly diagnose the current state of their content marketing effectiveness compared to industry metrics.
- Compare their current messaging approach versus the key elements of the Message Map Architecture.
- Create more compelling and relevant content that aligns with a buyer’s needs and journey.
- Shrink marketing and sales cycles.
- Increase the pace of content production.
Develop the Right Message to Engage Buyers Research & Tools
Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:
1. Develop the Right Message to Engage Buyers Executive Brief – A mapping architecture to enable marketers to crack the code on the formula for improving open and click-through rates.
Through this blueprint marketers will learn how to shift content away from low-performing content that only focuses on the product and company to high-performing customer-focused content that answers the “What’s in it for me?” question for a buyer, increasing engagement and conversions.
Infographic
Further reading
Develop the Right Message to Engage Buyers
Drive higher open rates, time-on-site, and click-through rates with buyer-relevant messaging.
Analyst Perspective
Develop the right message to engage buyers.
Marketers only have seven seconds to capture a visitor's attention but often don't realize that the space between competitors and their company is that narrow. They often miss the mark on content and create reams of product and company-focused messaging that result in high bounce rates, low page views, low return visits, low conversions, and low click-through rates.
We wouldn't want to sit in a conversation with someone who only speaks about themselves, so why would it be any different when we buy something? Today's marketers must quickly hook their visitors with content that answers the critical question of "What's in it for me?"
Our research finds that leading content marketers craft messaging that lets their audience ”know they know them,” points out what’s in it for them, and includes proof points of promised value. This simple, yet often missed approach, we call Message Mapping, which helps marketers grab a visitor’s initial attention and when applied throughout the customer journey will turn prospects into customers, lifelong buyers, advocates, and referrals.
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Terra Higginson
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Executive Summary
| Your Challenge
Globally, B2B SaaS marketers without the ability to consistently produce and activate quality content will experience:
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Common Obstacles
Marketers struggle to create content that quickly engages the buyer because they lack:
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SoftwareReviews’ Approach
By applying the SoftwareReviews’ message mapping architecture, clients will be able to:
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SoftwareReviews Insight
Marketing content that identifies the benefit of the product, along with a deep understanding of the buyer pain points, desired value, and benefit proof-points, is a key driver in delivering value to a prospect, thereby increasing marketing metrics such as open rates, time on site, page views, and click-through rates.
Your Challenge
| 65% of marketers find it challenging to produce engaging content. Globally, B2B SaaS marketers without the ability to consistently produce and activate quality content will experience:
A staggering 60% of marketers find it hard to produce high-quality content consistently and 62% don’t know how to measure the ROI of their campaigns according to OptinMonster. SaaS marketers have an even more difficult job due to the technical nature of content production. Without an easy content development strategy, marketers have an insurmountable task of continually creating interesting content for an audience they don’t understand. |  Over 64% of marketers want to learn how to build a better content (Source: OptinMonster, 2021) |
Benchmark your content marketing
Do your content marketing metrics meet the industry-standard benchmarks for the software industry?
GrowRevenue, MarketingSherpa, Google Analytics, FirstPageSage, Google Analytics, HubSpot |
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Common flaws in content messaging
Why do marketers have a hard time consistently producing messaging that engages the buyer?Mistake #1Myopic Focus on Company and ProductContent suffers a low ROI due to a myopic focus on the company and the product. This self-focused content fails to engage prospects and move them through the funnel. |
Mistake #2WIIFM Question UnansweredContent never answers the fundamental “What’s in it for me?” question due to a lack of true buyer understanding. This leads to an inability to communicate the value proposition to the prospect. |
Mistake #3Inability to Select the Right Content FormatMarketers often guess what kind of content their buyers prefer without any real understanding or research behind what buyers would actually want to consume. |
Leaders Will Avoid the “Big Three” Pitfalls
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Implications of poor content
Without quality content, the sales and marketing cycles elongate and content marketing metrics suffer.
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50% — Half of the content produced has no backlinks. (Source: Moz, 2015)
Content matters more than ever since 67% of the buyer's journey is now done digitally. (Source: Worldwide Business Research, 2022) |
Benefits of good content
A content mapping approach lets content marketers:
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Avoid value claiming. Leaders will use client testimonials as proof points because buyers believe peers more than they believe you.
“… Since 95 percent of the people are imitators and only 5 percent initiators, people are persuaded more by the actions of others than by any proof we can offer. (Robert Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion) |
Email & Social Post Example
Use the message mapping architecture to create other types of content.
Insight Summary
Create Content That Matters
Marketing content that identifies the benefit of the product along with a deep understanding of the buyer pain points, desired value, and benefit proof-points is a key driver in delivering value to a prospect, thereby increasing marketing metrics such as open rates, time on site, page views, and click-through rates.What’s in It for Me?Most content has a focus on the product and the company. Content that lacks a true and deep understanding of the buyer suffers low engagement and low conversions. Our research shows that all content must answer ”What’s in it for me?” for a prospect. |
Social Proof & AuthorityBuyers that are faced with a new and unusual buying experience (such as purchasing SaaS) look at what others say about the product (social proof) and what experts say about the product (authority) to make buying decisions. |
Scarcity & Loss FramingResearch shows that scarcity is a strong principle of influence that can be used in marketing messages. Loss framing is a variation of scarcity and can be used by outlining what a buyer will lose instead of what will be gained. |
Unify the ExperienceUse your message map to structure all customer-facing content across Sales, Product, and Marketing and create a unified and consistent experience across all touchpoints. |
Close the GapSaaS marketers often find the gap between product and company-focused content and buyer-focused content to be so insurmountable that they never manage to overcome it without a framework like message mapping. |
Related SoftwareReviews Research
Create a Buyer Persona and JourneyMake it easier to market, sell, and achieve product-market fit with deeper buyer understanding.
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Diagnose Brand Health to Improve Business GrowthHave a significant and well-targeted impact on business success and growth by knowing how your brand performs, identifying areas of improvement, and making data-driven decisions to fix it.
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Build a More Effective Go-to-Market StrategyCreating a compelling Go-to-Market strategy, and keeping it current, is a critical software company function – as important as financial strategy, sales operations, and even corporate business development – given its huge impact on the many drivers of sustainable growth.
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Bibliography
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Cialdini, Robert. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Revised ed. Harper Business, 26 Dec. 2006. Print.
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