The 2 fold secret of SaaS headlines

Well, I recently spotted on a SaaS homepage headline on the hero, which we know from previous episodes of this podcast is a really important feature of the page. Here's what this SaaS homepage headline read. Supercharged software that delivers results. Now, if this sounds confusing to you, it's because frankly, it is, right?

And also, I cannot remember which page I read that on, which probably tells you something else. It's totally unmemorable. It's like saying to someone, hyper liquid water that gets you wet. Well, yeah, duh, obviously.

But why would I buy it? There's a real simple format, a number of simple formats, and we've talked about them previously. There was an episode of this same show called Boring, Unsexy, and incredibly effective within a company and blog post on our website. You can go check that out.

That's about writing SaaS landing pages correctly. But here's a kind of a summary of this. A secret formula that's not a secret. Be opinionated and be specific.

Let me read you some kind of thoughts I have on this. Okay. So the first one about be opinionated. So much of B2B SaaS is vanilla.

there are so many exciting flavors out there right but we always end up choosing the one that most palatable for the largest number of people the end result is that it actually not particularly attractive to anyone at all You can see this all the time on homepage headlines if you don believe me Save time, save money, save both. Get more done. Be faster, be more efficient. It's basically a Daft Punk song, isn't it?

You know, like, harder, better, faster, stronger. We are, that's what we do in SaaS. But have you ever thought about the companies that you look up to, you admire their marketing? And you think about that and you say, why is that?

Well, an example here is Basecamp, one of our clients. You ever wonder why Basecamp have done so well all of these years? Well, frankly, there are a lot of reasons. It's not just because they have a good product, a good team, and they were around before a lot of the other players.

This is a vicious marketplace. It's really, really competitive. One of the reasons is that they've been so specific and they've been consistently opinionated. If I tell you I'm going to use Basecamp, you probably have a fairly good understanding of what I might value about my working life, about my day-to-day, about the way that I like to work.

That doesn't just happen. It's the result of a concerted effort over a long period of time to be opinionated on a specific number of things. They've consistently shared their opinions and because of that they attract people who strongly believe the same things that they do And that comes through in everything not just their homepage headlines although for the purposes of this episode definitely their homepage headlines The second thing is to be specific. Now, the key problem with the headline that I shared at the top of this episode, and reminder, supercharged software that delivers results, just in case you've forgotten how bad it was, is that the key problem is that it doesn't really say anything about what the result is going to be for me if I use the product.

The indiscriminate use of the word results just leaves me thinking, all right, cool, but like, what does that look like for me? Why does this matter? The challenge here is that no one in B2B SaaS looks at buying just one product. Think about the last time that your boss said to you, hey, which product should we buy?

they didn't say to you, which one have you considered? They wanted to see a number of different products considered because they probably care, are we getting the best price? Are we getting the right feature set? How do we know this product is effective?

What does the whole market look like? Are there things we haven't considered? Well, you are not alone. Your boss is not alone in that, right?

Everybody is considering multiple products at any one time if they're buying. And not just them, but multiple people. So you cannot assume that the buyer of the product is the only person you're speaking to. And you cannot assume that everybody in the buying process is a person you get to speak to directly They may just be coming onto your website to review a link that their co has sent them.

And so if you fail to be specific about the benefits of your product over the other products that they're considering, you're leaving yourself open to interpretation. And who's going to do that interpretation? Well, in one scenario, it's the buyer who's going to piece together the narrative themselves and bless them they may be extremely talented at what they do but they're unlikely to be extremely talented at understanding how your product aligns to their specific pains unless you tell them.

That's not a comment on their intelligence it's that products markets they're complicated and insiders need to weave the narrative that helps people to understand them. The second scenario is that your competitor will do it for them. I can tell you this because it's a key part of our methodology here. Competitor comparison pages absolutely do work.

Your competitor will spin a narrative about how your product is good or bad or totally irrelevant but the fact that I just listed off three outcomes there, do you really want to leave yourself open to your competitor doing it for you? You don't know that they're going to be fair, you don't know that they're going to be objective or particularly complimentary about you, Be specific about how your product solves your buyers needs better than anyone else on the market. I'll see you next time.