Every startup begins with innovation, but not every innovation story drives startup visibility and growth. Often, their messaging is stuck at the bottom of the marketing maturity curve, focused on what their builders find compelling instead of what customers find useful. As a result, buyers don’t understand the potential benefits, so investors don’t see the kind of growth they look for when they decide who to fund.
Maturing from builder-centered to customer-focusing messaging is a critical step for startups. Taking this step requires a laser focus on ICP needs and a plan to address the reasons why startup messaging gets hung up on features.
The startup messaging maturity curve: 3 key takeaways
- Reframe feature-heavy messaging to focus on solving buyer problems.
- Create a story focused on customer outcomes.
- Validate your technology team’s contributions without diluting customer-centric messaging.
How a feature-centric mindset stalls growth
Startups are defined by their technology offering. It’s the reason they exist and ideally it’s what sets them apart in a crowded marketplace. Communicating how the technology works is important for getting seed funding, but that’s just the start of the messaging journey.
To stand out from the noise, startups must develop messaging that’s relevant to customers and be ready to go to market with the features they have. Often, we see feature-heavy explanations created for investors getting re-used to speak to customers, or a desire to keep refining the product’s features that delays launches and updates.
Both of these approaches can prevent a startup from taking off by the end of its initial funding runway, because they waste time and marketing resources. Add direct competitors who roll out products, updates, and customer-centric messaging faster, and wasted time can become an existential threat. If your competition earns more customers and better brand visibility thanks to a more mature messaging strategy, investors are likely to pass on your offering.
Navigating the transition to buyer-centric messaging
Evolving your messaging strategy from your tech to the problem it solves for your customers requires some finesse. You’ll need to work closely with your technology team to ensure that your explanation of product benefits is technically correct, without letting features dominate the customer-focused narrative.
Recognize your builders
Because of this, it can be helpful to start the messaging update process by validating the expertise and achievements of your builder or product team. You can
- Feature awards the team or your product has won on your home and product pages
- Create a page or space on your company’s website where you can place feature-related content
- Share a Q&A or video interview with your CTO or product owner on your site’s features section to highlight their innovation
- Consider whether your CTO or SMEs are a good fit for thought leadership opportunities focused on their areas of expertise.
Identify the benefits that matter to your customers
Look at each product feature through the lens of your customers. Your sales team can be a valuable resource for understanding what customers care most about and the outcomes your product delivers.
What does each feature do that improves how things work for your customers? What’s the potential business result of that improvement? Does it save time, improve compliance, reduce security risks, boost productivity, or something else?
Look for primary and secondary benefits for each feature. You can then highlight different benefits for different ICPs. For example, AI automation that handles ecommerce fraud prevention can also improve customer experience, so you can tailor the information about benefits to security and CX teams.
Create a new, customer-centric story
Take your list of benefits to your technology and sales teams to make sure your understanding of the benefits and their impact is on the right track. Then use everything you’ve gathered to tell a consistent, compelling story about how your product solves customer problems, and how that helps their business.
This core story will become the foundation of your startup’s messaging on your website, with your sales team, in your content marketing, and in your PR campaigns. You can also use it to shape thought leadership development, and you can tailor it to speak more specifically to different audiences while maintaining the same primary message.
Don’t wait to launch your customer-centric narrative
The sooner you start speaking to your customers about the benefits your product offers them, the sooner you can start building visibility and generating revenue. Better brand awareness and a larger customer base make your startup more appealing to investors, whose funding can power larger marketing and PR initiatives for a growth flywheel.
- Apply your customer-focused story to your company’s website so that it’s aligned with the content you’re going to
- Next, produce content focused on solving customer problems, such as webinars, thought leadership posts, and case studies.
- Optimize each piece of content for AI search visibility, because more B2B buyers are using AI instead of traditional search to find and compare products.
- Use the hero asset strategy to create more customer-centric content that expands your reach across channels and audience segments.
Start moving up the messaging maturity curve ASAP
Growing beyond feature-heavy messaging to focus on customer needs can help your startup gain the traction it needs to grow. Working with a team that’s experienced in customer-focused brand story development, strategic content marketing, and PR can jumpstart the process. Contact Moss Networks today to learn more about how we can help you build your startup into a growth brand.