How did we reposition heybooster, a SaaS company?
From a data analytics platform for everyone to a data analytics tool specifically for eCommerce firms with a certain marketing budget and without a data analyst on their team...
Here is a repositioning story of heybooster, a SaaS company.
heybooster is a tool that analyzes the digital marketing data of leading eCommerce brands. It offers its users revenue growth opportunities and cost optimization. Its AI system analyze digital marketing data and sends notifications when anything abnormal occurs. heybooster has been on its journey for over 2 years, helping its customers maximize the efficiency of their marketing budgets. So it’s a boring, right?
Here is the story
At the beginning of this year, heybooster was in a situation where incoming users were not converting to customers and long hours were spent explaining the product. In other words, we were convincing people to use the product, but we weren't making much progress in persuading them to pay for it without the extra efforts of our sales department in sales calls. We were telling the right story to the wrong audience. So we made several changes to fix this, and this post is a summary of those efforts.
Lack of a narrative
We started by identifying the problem. heybooster lacked a narrative. Copywrites and creatives not fully relevant to the product were presented on the homepage and in its posts. There was no value proposition; it couldn't motivate potential users or create a FOMO (Fear of Missing Out).
To craft heybooster’s story, we conducted one-on-one interviews centered around growth, sales, and product. We gathered these notes and noticed something crucial. The marketing and sales departments were not telling the same story. Their ways of explaining the product differed significantly.
If a product's sales and marketing teams aren't telling the same story, the contribution of marketing to sales becomes limited. Users who come in as marketing qualified but don't fully understand the product can significantly alter its direction. While crafting our story, we had a great starting point: The churn rate was almost zero for sales-qualified leads, and we were able to demand high fees. What was a great starting point!
After discovering these, we stopped bringing in new users from outside. To ensure maximum efficiency, we request a discovery call from our customers. After confirming that we can provide them with the highest efficiency, we let them in.
Building the narrative
“Positioning is like context-setting for products.” 1
It enables you to state in which market and for which player you present your product as the best. We used specific methods to construct this narrative.
The worst part of repositioning a company that already has ongoing operations and customers is trying to discover, rather than build, a unique value proposition. And we managed to do that very successfully.
Uncovering the value we offer?
We started with the Value Proposition Canvas2. We needed to find an ideal customer profile (ICP) for this, which wasn't too challenging for us. Although heybooster was initially positioned to serve even SaaS companies, all of our satisfied customers were companies advancing in the eCommerce vertical. Their marketing managers or eCommerce managers were able to benefit from heybooster and they had marketing budgets of over $10K monthly. This is exactly what I meant by "discovering" at the beginning of this section.
When we looked at our current customers and took the product into account, the ICP was already clear. To make this profile more concrete, we created a Persona. We gave it a name, added an age, listed the background. Once everything started to be explained as a "potential customer", communication became less clear due to its abstract nature. By creating a Persona, we were able to progress much more concretely.
We listed this Persona’s tasks, the pains they experience while performing these tasks, how these pains can be solved, which of these solutions could be a gain creator along with our features, and how this would convert into a gain.
Customer Jobs
Pains
Pain Relievers
Gains
Gain Creators
After this arrangement, we not only found out what benefits and features could be good for which problem but also started to form ideas about which phrases we could use to get better conversion rates. We also tested these messages. That's how the most successful LinkedIn campaigns with the highest CTRs for heybooster emerged.
As I said at the beginning, we weren't launching a new product; we were adding a new context to an existing one. Therefore, the 'gain creators' area was easily filled for us, and we also discovered a few of our shortcomings.
After these operations, we had a new frame. We now knew which problems our product solved for which role in a customer of what size. We set our focus on improving ROI. We would advance the product's story based on ROI.
So far, this process has given us this: we had moved from a position targeting all companies using Google Analytics, Google Ads, Search Console, and Meta Ads to one specifically targeting eCommerce brands with a monthly budget of over $10K.
What about the other players in the market?
That's where we encounter the Unique Value Proposition3 concept. This means we'll be marching forward with the feature that makes us unique in the market. You can see many methods related to positioning, such as the "Big Fish, Small Pond", "New Game" and others. Considering our constraints, we were fitting both the "New Game" and "Big Fish, Small Pond" concepts. So we decided not to choose one but to follow our unique path.
We knew our competitors intimately. First, we listed their features and looked at points of similarity and differentiation with us. Among these points, there was no other tool in the eCommerce market we wanted to play in that provided insights as simple as ours, catering also to non-technical marketers. That was crystal clear.
We even garnered additional material for our ICP from this: eCommerce companies without a data analyst on their team, with a monthly $10K digital marketing budget...
Although we had constructed the above statements, there was one more problem. The story seemed to be entirely written from the heybooster's perspective, meaning that the main character in this story wasn't the customer, but the product. People prefer products that support their own stories, align with their own narratives, or they want to align with when making purchasing decisions. Therefore, we needed to change the structure we are telling here.
We first started with a subheading here.
The statement "AI-powered analytics platform for eCommerce identifies revenue growth opportunities through personalized analysis." is very long and confusing. We already mention what will happen above, so it doesn't make much sense to say it here. Our promise is to be a backup with the statement "You focus on creative tasks, we handle the data". The statement changed to "AI-powered analytics platform for non-technical marketers. No data analyst or code required."
Even though our main statement includes "helps you", it tells our story. Therefore, considering that the greatest value we offer is "personalized analysis" and the greatest benefit for those who use our product is higher ROI, we made a minimal change here too. The new statement became: "How personalized analysis helps you to improve your ROI.”
ROI?
Then, after researching and reviewing customer discovery calls, we made adjustments. We found that our customers are primarily looking to improve their digital marketing revenue. Let’s add the point to the main message.
heybooster is an AI-powered analytics platform for non-technical marketers and it doesn't require to be a tech guy or a tech teammate to get insights. It provides personalized analysis to eCommerce businesses to maximize their marketing revenue.
Here is the final result:
Thus, we repositioned heybooster, but we had to balance this with marketing efforts. We took actions like introducing a new landing page, altering the style of our content, restructuring our events, and more. Repositioning was done, now it's about telling different stories in the same context to attract people. Yet, here lies a challenge.
Positioning is actually quite a contradictory field. No matter how much work you do, until you grow enough or claim certain areas adequately, you can't say "positioning is done". It's a slippery slope, and one always has to adapt to it.
For instance, at heybooster, we knew the problem in the market, and we knew who was facing this problem, but we saw that our ICP preferred to put forward their own team or the agency they work with, rather than looking for a tool to solve the problem.
In other words, there was no demand for us, and there still isn't. We impress every customer in every sales meeting, but before meeting us, they were seeking manpower, not tools, for their existing solutions. That's our challenge.
We started bridging this gap with marketing, but that's a topic for another piece of content. If you want to see that content, don't forget to like and comment on this post.
April Dunford’s lessons on Section School and her book helped us to discover more.