Website Messaging: Connecting with customers

Introduction

In this episode of "The Perfect SaaS Website," I sat down with Alicia Carney to dive deep into one of the most critical aspects of B2B marketing: messaging. While many founders and marketers obsess over design elements or conversion tactics, the foundation of any successful website is clear, compelling messaging that genuinely connects with your target customers.

Why Most B2B Messaging Falls Flat

Alicia opened our conversation with a provocative question: "What is your value proposition?"

The answer isn't about the technology you've built or what it can do. There's actually only one correct answer: who is it for and who are you talking to?

"The way that you describe your value proposition is highly unlikely to match the way that your ideal buyers would describe it," Alicia explained. "Our job as product marketers, as growth marketers, anyone who is building customer-facing content and messaging, is to speak their language first."

This might seem obvious, but it's where most B2B companies go wrong. They approach messaging from their perspective rather than their customers'.

The Art of Right-Altitude Messaging

According to Alicia, one of the most common messaging mistakes is talking at the wrong "altitude." Most companies default to the lowest altitude—simply describing what their product does. But this approach leaves prospective customers asking, "So what? Why should I care?"

"If you think about your buyer, they are not thinking about your problem or your product as much as you are," Alicia pointed out. "They've got probably a stack of problems they're solving. So your job isn't just to sell your solution, it's to sell why this matters and why they should solve it now."

The opposite mistake is going too aspirational—setting your messaging at such a high altitude that it loses connection with the tangible value your product delivers. Alicia recalled making this error herself when repositioning a customer service platform, going "way too high in the sky, way too aspirational with our messaging."

The sweet spot lies somewhere in between: connecting your product's features to meaningful benefits that address what your customers truly value.

The VBF Framework: A Practical Approach to Messaging

During our conversation, Alicia introduced the Value-Benefit-Feature (VBF) framework, which she's used successfully since 2015. This framework provides a structured approach to developing messaging that resonates with your target customers:

1. Value: What your customer needs to achieve (the outcome they desire)
2. Benefits: The advantages of achieving that value
3. Features: The specific product capabilities that deliver those benefits

The VBF framework helps ensure your messaging connects concrete product features to meaningful customer outcomes. It prevents the common trap of feature-focused messaging that leaves customers wondering why they should care.

Alicia shared a comprehensive messaging template created by Myk Pono that brings this framework to life. The template includes sections for:

• Top-line messaging (elevator pitch)
• Overview of benefits
• Positioning statement
• "What you get" description
• Target customer details
• Value messaging (using the VBF approach)

This template serves as a blueprint for all customer-facing communications, from your elevator pitch to your website messaging and sales collateral.

Real-World Messaging Success: Deliveroo Case Study

To illustrate these principles in action, Alicia shared her experience launching an ad platform at Deliveroo in 2018. The project faced significant internal skepticism—many believed restaurants wouldn't want discount offers—along with high expectations from leadership to drive substantial business growth.

Rather than focusing on the technical aspects of the platform (an "MVP product of an ad platform that was discount-only offers"), Alicia conducted extensive research with restaurants across multiple markets. She discovered a critical insight: restaurant margins are extremely thin, making growth not the primary focus for many establishments.

This understanding allowed her to narrow her target audience to "growth-minded restaurants at any size of scale." Instead of using technical jargon to describe the platform, she positioned it as "a way to grow your business and attract new loyal customers and transform the way that you're engaging with your customers online."

The results were remarkable. After launching with this focused messaging approach, the platform grew from 200,000 orders to 3 million incremental consumer orders over 16 months, eventually accounting for about 10% of Deliveroo's global order volume.

The Importance of Customer Research

Throughout our conversation, Alicia emphasized that effective messaging stems from rigorous customer research. When developing messaging for Ravio (a B2B platform connecting compensation professionals to global benchmarking and compensation management tools), she conducted about 20 interviews with customers ranging from compensation novices to experts.

A key insight emerged from these conversations: people put their reputations on the line when sharing compensation benchmarks with CEOs or making offers to candidates. The concept of "confidence" kept surfacing—the need to stand behind data when justifying decisions to CFOs or hiring managers.

This insight informed Ravio's core messaging: "bringing confidence to compensation." It addressed the emotional, reputational aspects of compensation decisions—not just the functional benefits of the platform.

Alicia's research process includes:

1. Conducting 10-20 customer interviews (enough to identify clear patterns)
2. Pain mapping - extracting themes from interview transcripts and mapping them by pains, gains, aspirations, and triggers
3. Identifying common denominators of pain across different customer groups
4. Creating targeted messaging for each champion buyer based on their specific pain points

While AI tools can help analyze transcripts, Alicia finds value in manually reviewing the raw data: "It's usually those raw tidbits that are the most memorable... those little tidbits that make messaging feel really human."

The B2B Elements of Value Pyramid

Another valuable framework Alicia shared is Bain's "B2B Elements of Value" pyramid, which categorizes how B2B buyers perceive value across different levels:

At the bottom are functional elements like time savings, reduced effort, and cost reduction. Most B2B messaging focuses exclusively on these lower-level benefits.

However, the most compelling messaging also incorporates higher-level elements like reputational assurance, reduced anxiety, and personal value. These emotional and aspirational benefits help buyers see "what's in it for me" beyond basic functionality.

"The more you can do to make a buying process and a sales narrative feel personal to the buyer... you're going to accelerate your sales cycle," Alicia noted.

Tailoring Messaging to Different Champion Buyers

One particularly insightful aspect of our discussion was how to handle messaging when you have multiple champion buyers with different needs.

Alicia explained her approach with Ravio, which targets both compensation novices (HR professionals who handle compensation as one of many responsibilities) and compensation experts (specialists who focus exclusively on compensation).

While Ravio's homepage addresses common jobs-to-be-done shared by both audiences, separate solutions pages target each champion buyer with tailored messaging:

• For compensation novices: "Managing compensation with confidence with instant access to reliable real-time benchmarks all in one place"
• For compensation experts: More technical messaging focused on "going under the hood" and taking their "already higher baseline to the next level"

This approach allows Ravio to speak directly to each audience's specific pain points while maintaining a consistent overall value proposition.

Practical Tips for Creating Better B2B Messaging

Based on our conversation with Alicia, here are some actionable tips for improving your B2B messaging:

1. Speak human language: Avoid technical jargon and use the actual words your customers use. "Sometimes we have an aversion in tech to using just plain language... but at the end of the day, we're selling to humans."
2. Avoid empty words: Terms like "next generation" or "better" often serve as crutches when you don't truly understand what value you're delivering.
3. Connect features to outcomes: Always explain why your features matter by linking them to tangible benefits and meaningful customer outcomes.
4. Focus on urgency: Your messaging should answer not just "why this matters" but "why solve it now."
5. Get your whole team involved: At Ravio, everyone from the CEO to engineers is encouraged to capture valuable customer language and insights.
6. Test your messaging altitude: Ensure you're neither too feature-focused (too low) nor too aspirational (too high).

Building a Complete Messaging Framework

Effective messaging isn't limited to your website or sales deck—it should be woven through every aspect of your business. As Alicia emphasized, "Messaging needs to be a consistent thread that is woven through every single component of your business."

This extends from your customer support experience to how you prioritize your product roadmap and beyond. Every touchpoint should reinforce your core value proposition and speak to what matters most to your customers.

By conducting thorough customer research, organizing insights by pain points rather than job titles, and using frameworks like VBF to connect features to meaningful outcomes, you can create messaging that genuinely resonates with your target audience.

The result? Faster growth, accelerated sales cycles, and a stronger connection with the customers who matter most to your business.

This post is part of "The Perfect SaaS Website" series, where I explore best practices for B2B SaaS websites with industry experts. If you're looking to improve how you communicate your product's value on your website, check out Glimps to learn how micro-demos can help educate and convert your visitors more effectively.