In 2024 and beyond, perfecting your product messaging is one of the keys to allowing your business to thrive. Ultimately, to attract, engage, and convert today's consumers, you must learn how to communicate the unique value your brand offers. And even more importantly, you must do this with a customer-centric approach.
Why? Because buyers are becoming more selective than ever. And not just due to growing financial pressures.
Today's consumers have almost endless options for solutions to remove their pain points. And they can easily find products and services that align with their top priorities. But that's not the only reason to optimize your product messaging. According to Edelman's latest findings, impulse buying behavior is declining, with 58% of consumers doing more research than ever to ensure the best bang for their buck.
With this in mind, you must adopt persuasive copywriting and design strategies that can help convince your target audience to choose your brand and products. Fortunately, this is entirely doable. All you need to do is pay close attention to how you utilize copy and visuals throughout your website, optimizing each element for a value-driven appeal.
So, if you're looking for design and copywriting tips for clear and effective product messaging, here are the best tactics to help you wow web visitors and turn them into loyal (and satisfied) customers of your brand.
Don't Get Cute with Your Site Header
Metaphors, wordplay, and abstract imagery can be powerful tools in the right settings.
They can draw your target audience into the sales funnel. They can awaken consumer wants that had been dormant before. And they might even help position your organization in a positive light, allowing you to engage and convert more customers.
However, when aiming for clear product messaging — that doesn't risk the possibility of deterring your target audience — these symbols and figures of speech shouldn't populate key areas of your website. On the contrary, you must do your best to avoid any confusion about what your solutions do and why that matters to your prospects — especially in the areas of your site that naturally attract a lot of attention.
If you look at web user behavior research, you'll find that people spend a significant portion of their page-viewing time looking at the first screenful of a website. So, to drive proper product understanding, avoid getting cute with your site header.
Instead, to ensure web visitors instantly recognize the significance of your brand's offer, use copy and design to communicate three things.
- Clarify what your business can do for your target audience.
- Describe the specific benefits prospects get by investing in your solutions.
- Highlight all the reasons why web visitors need to choose your brand over the alternatives.
Need inspiration on how to do this? Check out the Real Estate Skills homepage. This brand does a marvelous job with its header copy.
- First, it immediately communicates that it's offering a live webinar (even specifying when it takes place, which is pretty important to most potential customers).
- Secondly, it describes what people get by signing up — knowledge on how to "create wealth through real estate" without being tied down by a 9-to-5 job.
- Finally, the brand points out that it's a genuine authority on the topic it teaches. It proves this by showing off social proof from trustworthy publications like Entrepreneur, Yahoo Finance, Nasdaq, and CREXI.
Source: realestateskills.com
Design for Skimmers with Visual Anchors
Another widespread web user behavior you need to account for when designing for product clarity is people's tendency to skim web pages instead of reading copy.
User behavior research from the NN Group discovered that some of the most widespread reading patterns since 2020 include the lawnmower, pinball, and scanning (especially after encountering intrusive design elements).
So, if you're trying to optimize your site's design to enhance product messaging, use layout patterns, visual hierarchy, and attention-grabbing elements to attract and guide user attention.
These design elements can be as simple or complex as you want. Product photos, icons, and text formatting can all work great to guide users to your most important sales messages. But, if you're looking for the best way to position your solutions as relevant to your target audience, check out how Square does it below.
By employing bold formatting to emphasize headers and images to guide web visitors' attention, Square encourages prospects to interact with each content section. Additionally, knowing that web users don't like large chunks of text, this brand maximizes skimmability by shortening product descriptions. Finally, using its headers to address specific user pain points, Square ensures that every website visitor finds something about the product that speaks to their unique needs.
Source: squareup.com
Create Dedicated Product Pages for All Segments of Your Target Audience
Optimizing your website to align with your target audience's wants and needs is an exceptional strategy for boosting conversions.
Survey data suggests that as many as 73% of people expect brands to understand their unique needs and expectations. Moreover, many consumers want businesses to go above and beyond in demonstrating they care about their customers before they consider buying in the first place.
Making these things happen necessitates in-depth (and continuous) audience research and a complete dedication to CX. Nevertheless, optimizing product messaging for clarity and effectiveness can also help — particularly when targeting distinct audience segments.
If your product has more than one use case, more than one user type, or depends on a network effect between different user types, create custom product pages. Then, direct targeted traffic to these pages to present specific audience segments with product messaging that aligns with their wants and needs.
Check out how Capital Pad does it. This brand dedicated specific areas of its homepage real estate to two different user types — Investors and Searchers looking to raise capital. But, knowing that's not enough for complete clarity, Capital Pad also created separate landing pages for each group. This tactic allows the business to spell out the importance of its solutions to each of the audience segments. Plus, it allows for better page optimization through direct and meaningful copy and design, automatically boosting the brand's chances of appealing to and converting leads.
Source: capitalpad.com
Give (Parts Of) Your Product Away for Free
What's the best way to communicate the value your solutions offer? That depends on your target audience's position in the buyer's journey.
On the one hand, if you're targeting people populating the upper stages of the sales funnel, your primary goal must be building product awareness and understanding. In these cases, focusing on your value propositions and key design elements (like your site's header) can be exceptionally helpful for creating clarity.
However, if you're trying to enhance your product messaging to appeal to people closer to conversion — particularly those in the mid-to-low stages of the sales funnel — your primary goal needs to be hands-on product experience. That's why it's a good idea to give parts of your products away for free.
By creating product demos, enabling free trials, offering free downloads, or encouraging your audience to try a freemium version of your subscription, you can position your solutions as the ideal answers to your prospects' needs.
Moreover, this strategy may help your audience solve some of their pain points, which is a great first step toward encouraging them to further integrate your solutions into their lives/workflows. Plus, it's a marvelous opportunity to prove that your brand's products actually do what they promise.
There are various ways you can adapt this product messaging strategy to your specific goals and your target audience's preferences.
For example, you can do something similar to Rockstar Communicator. Knowing how challenging it is to perfect product messaging for communication coaching services, this brand offers free workshops. This tactic doesn't just effectively attract new leads. It also allows potential clients to experience the value of the brand's offer, making it that much more likely that they'll sign up for paid sessions down the road.
Source: rockstarcommunicator.com
For SaaS businesses, implementing this strategy can be even simpler by offering an attractive (and sufficiently long) free trial period. For instance, Sloneek uses its website header to invite prospects to sign up for a free trial, utilizing conversion-enhancing microcopy that emphasizes the 14-day trial period and the fact that testing the software doesn't require a credit card.
Source: sloneek.com
Finally, if you're willing to go further in using free product demos to communicate your solution's value and capture new leads, you could do something similar to SoftwareHow. This brand invites web visitors to use and download free versions of its utility apps. That's a great way to clarify what the brand does and what type of quality customers can expect from some of its more advanced products.
Source: softwarehow.com
Align Your Product with an Existing Business Activity
Positioning your product as relevant to your target audience is key to earning their business. However, this can be difficult when selling niche solutions or targeting customers in the topmost stage of the buyer's journey.
After all, if people aren't aware of your product or service (and maybe don't even fully understand their pain points), explaining what your solution does can be next to impossible. For this reason, it's not a bad idea to approach your copywriting strategy from a point familiar to the people you're trying to attract.
For example, if there is a use case you can target with content that is related to what your product does, you can use this opportunity to clarify what your brand offers. Then, you can emphasize your solution's benefits (and how that relates to your potential clients' experience). Finally, you can use subtly-positioned conversion elements to create new leads and gently nudge them toward becoming customers of your brand.
Check out how Aura does it. With its overview on retail arbitrage, the brand captures the attention of a B2B audience with a very specific intended outcome. The brand uses high-quality copy to provide readers with exceptional informational value. Then, it uses subtle opportunities to link its product to the target activity — online arbitrage — in a way that helps readers understand that Aura's repricing solution is an irreplaceable tool for driving Amazon sales, seeing how these hugely depend on pricing strategy.
Source: goaura.com
Use Progressive Disclosure to Avoid Information Overload
Contrary to popular belief, the most crucial aspect of clear and effective product messaging isn't going into extensive detail about what your solutions do (and how they do it). Instead, it's about using copy and design to present your leads with information optimized to enhance their product understanding.
In other words, if you sell a complex product and service, don't try to communicate everything it does upfront. This UX mistake will, ultimately, lead to information overload. It will overwhelm your users. And it might even decrease their purchase intention or harm brand trust.
So, to design landing and product pages that won't alienate your audience but will, instead, gently guide them on their product discovery and evaluation journey (and encourage them to convert), try to use progressive disclosure.
Essentially, by introducing leads to basic information first, you can help them establish that they're in the right place to solve their pain points. Then, you can provide additional details.
However, it's crucial that you do this in a way that allows web visitors to process and understand the value of each of the features you introduce. That way, you can avoid the effect of them concluding that your product is too complex or has too many niche features they won't use.
For example, check out how PandaDoc uses progressive information disclosure for product clarity. By only mentioning the basic purpose of each of its software's features (Create, Collaborate, Automate, Sign, etc.), the brand provides awareness-stage prospects with a solid overview of what to expect. Then, by automatically expanding each of these sections (and supplementing them with animations), the brand effectively describes the value of these capabilities without allowing them to come off as too elaborate or excessive for casual users.
Source: pandadoc.com
Write for the Skeptical Reader
Finally, as you explore design and copywriting tips for conversion-inspiring product messaging, don't forget that many of your web visitors will have some doubts about your claims.
Of course, you can (and should) use social proof to elevate your brand's credibility and inspire brand trust. Nevertheless, you can take further steps to ensure your product messaging is reassuring.
By anticipating your target audience's concerns and misconceptions and proactively addressing their doubts and objections, you can eliminate most conversion obstacles from your website and shorten your prospects' sales cycles.
For example, integration is a big concern for many consumers (44% of software buyers prioritize this factor when making purchase decisions). So, Quaderno dedicates a section of its homepage to addressing this conversion obstacle. By pointing out that setting up its software is quick and describing the process, the brand effectively reassures potential clients and gives them the final nudge they need to contact sales.
Source: quaderno.io
Final Thoughts
Optimizing the copy and design elements on your website can do a marvelous job of creating product clarity and driving understanding. So, if you're trying to enhance the effectiveness with which you convince your target audience of your solution's value, the strategies outlined in this article can be really helpful.
To ensure the best results, you need an in-depth understanding of your ideal customers' wants, needs, and priorities. It's also essential that you're willing to experiment with copy and design. This will help you identify the best tactics for your brand and, hopefully, uncover advanced opportunities for enhancing your site for conversions.
