Mastering Your Tech Product Communication Strategy: A 10-Step OSP Guide
Create compelling brand messaging that resonates with your audience. Our guide covers 10 key components for a strategic communication plan—helping you align marketing, improve audience engagement, and establish your product as an industry leader.
Mastering the message: The OSP guide to product communication strategy for SaaS and tech
Putting your communication strategy on a solid foundation is an essential first step in creating compelling and effective brand messaging that resonates with your audience. Your marketing and communications efforts should always aim to connect with your target audience, help them resolve their challenges, and bring them value in the process. Keep reading to explore the ingredients you need as you prepare your product communications.
“How well we communicate is not determined by how well we say things, but how well we are understood.”
— Andrew Grove, Former CEO of Intel
Q: What is a communication strategy?
A: A detailed plan that outlines how your business intends to connect with your target audience. It should set clear objectives, identify your target audience, and choose the channels and tactics that reach them. Rather than shouting into the digital void, a strategic plan focuses your communications to ensure consistency in your messaging, enhance your brand visibility, and build stronger relationships with your audience through clear, engaging, and purpose-driven communication.
Here are the 10 components of a strong communications strategy. We go into more detail on all of them below:
- Communication goals
- Brand positioning and value proposition
- Brand values, voice, and tone
- Competitive analysis
- Audience segmentation and targeting
- Customer journey
- Multi-channel, multi-format communication
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
- Thought leadership
- Social Proof
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#1 Communication goals
What should your communication accomplish? Setting communication goals gives you alignment and focus, ensuring that all your messaging efforts are consistent with larger business objectives. This helps you strengthen your brand identity and effectively convey your value proposition to your target audiences.
“Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.”
— Tony Robbins
Define clear and achievable communication goals and the actions you will carry out to achieve them in alignment with your overall business strategy.
Example goals and actions:
- Establish your company as a brand authority and thought leader in your industry by publishing one insightful blog post per week, posting regularly on LinkedIn, and securing speaking engagements at key industry conferences.
- Boost brand awareness by 30% within the target market over the next six months through a comprehensive communication strategy that includes content marketing, social media campaigns, and media outreach.
- Communicate the value of your open source product and community by identifying at least five community members and external groups that may not yet be aware of you.
Each of these examples is clear and achievable: including defined measures of success (one blog post per week, 30%, at least five) helps you assess whether your goals are met and whether they’re in alignment with the measures you’re using for the overall business. You can draw those measures from your market research and marketing best practices.
#2 Brand positioning, Value Map, and value proposition
Creating a distinct and compelling brand positioning is crucial for a successful communications strategy: it guides the individual decisions you make about other components.
In the B2B context, positioning is defining how you want your brand to be perceived by your target audience in relation to your competitors and effectively communicating the unique value your brand offers.
“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.”
— Dr. Seuss
If done successfully, your brand positioning differentiates you in the market. Start by crafting a clear statement to highlight your unique benefits for target customers, and build a strategy around that value proposition. A strong approach is:
- Compelling and specific: What will capture your target audience’s attention and interest? What are your audience’s specific needs and challenges? How have you addressed those?
- Clear and accurate: How can your messaging be more straightforward and precise?
- Based on technical truth: Are you exaggerating? Have you supported your claims? Building credibility and trust means steering clear of hyperbole.
- Audience-specific and inclusive: Are you using appropriate language for your audience? Are you explaining technical jargon to be inclusive of different levels of knowledge and experience?
- Emotionally resonant: Where have you spoken to your audience’s emotions? Have you worked to connect with their experience and foster brand loyalty?
- Uniquely positioned: How have you highlighted your brand’s distinct advantages? What are your differentiators? How do you stand out in the market?
Use our OSP Value Map and Brand Positioning templates to build a comprehensive, organized inventory of information about your offerings and then focus it all into your strongest brand positioning.
These templates represent a structured approach to identifying, categorizing, and prioritizing data about your product's features, benefits, and the customer challenges you address. The resulting positioning aligns it all with your brand’s value proposition and larger objectives.
The OSP Value Map methodology ensures that all your communications are consistent, accurate, and resonate with your target audience, enhancing brand equity and providing strategic direction for marketing and sales efforts.
Check out our Value Proposition workshops for guidance and a helping hand assembling and processing your positioning.
#3 Brand values, voice, and tone
Establishing a strong, consistent identity is essential for building a lasting relationship with your audience. Your brand values, voice, and tone should underpin all your communications. Together, these elements help create a cohesive and engaging brand narrative that differentiates you from competitors.
Values are like fingerprints. Nobody's are the same, but you leave 'em all over everything you do.
– Elvis Presley
Brand values: What your company stands for
Values serve as guiding principles that influence attitudes, behaviors, and decision-making. They represent an individual’s or organization's highest priorities and deeply rooted drivers of behavior.
Voice: How you show who you are
Voice, is how you express your character in communication—your distinctive, authentic style or perspective.
Your voice helps define your company culture and character: Your attributes, beliefs, and motivations as grounded in your brand values. It shapes your attitudes and guides your actions.
Tone: Context-specific expression
Tone is a context-dependent variation of your brand’s baseline voice. It reflects your brand’s attitude at that moment and can vary depending on the situation. While voice remains consistent, tone and register (the range from formal to informal) change based on the marketing goal: marketing, customer support, sales, or thought leadership.
Identifying and implementing your values and voice across materials can be challenging. Our Values, Voice, and Tone Workshop can help you gain perspective and create a valuable everyday resource for your whole team.
#4 Competitive analysis
Conducting a competitive analysis helps you understand your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, enabling you to differentiate your brand effectively. Analyzing their messaging and tactics can identify gaps and opportunities in the market, ensuring your communications are more targeted and impactful—and that your brand is offering your customers better value.
It is nice to have valid competition; it pushes you to do better.
– Gianni Versace
At OSP, we offer four different types of competitive analyses:
- Competitor Landscape: We research the market to determine the main players in your market and map them to the most important features of the industry.
- Competitor Feature Comparison: We build a matrix demonstrating which competitors offer what to customers. This is what most people picture when they think of a competitor analysis.
- Competitor Communication and Positioning: We collect and analyze the main communications of all competitors to find the focus of their positioning and messaging.
- Competitor Semantic Analysis: We plot you and your competitors on matrices of meaningful terms and demonstrate to what degree you and your competitors communicate about those terms.
Our OSP tools help ensure you’re well-positioned to benefit from your product communications. Get in touch for a demo :-)
#5 Audience segmentation and targeting
Identify and understand different buyer personas, including decision-makers, technical users, and end-users.
Tailor messages to address their specific needs and concerns across the customer journey, differentiating your communications to reach each individual target segment rather than attempting a blanket general-interest approach.
“Always remember, your focus determines your reality. Know your audience.”
— George Lucas
Target audience
Your target audiences are the general groups of people on whom you focus your communication, marketing, and sales efforts.
Our target audience strategy workshops identify relevant attributes of your target audience, like:
- Industry verticals
- Technology communities
- Organization types
- Organizational attributes
- Professions
- Geography
We then formulate these into target segments and prioritize with you where efforts should begin.
Personas
Personas are more detailed characterizations of specific example people within your target audience (i.e., PHP framework developers within the larger segment of technical users).
“Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
— Steven R. Covey
We use Persona Empathy Maps to help you (as the name suggests) understand your target audience. Learning to identify with them drives connection and helps ensure that you address their communication needs.
Our workshops help identify:
- Target sales personas (whom you sell to)
- Target user personas (who uses your product)
- Challenges/pain points they face
- Jobs to be done
- Benefits sought
- Whom they trust
- Decision-Making and Buying Mindsets
- Sources of decision-making content
Tailoring your messaging and marketing efforts to the specifics of each audience segment helps you allocate resources efficiently (and maximize your ROI!) as you focus on the most promising personas. As an added bonus, making your audience feel seen and heard improves customer satisfaction, which supports stronger brand loyalty and drives long-term business success.
#6 Customer journey
The customer journey is a structured way to represent how typical customers think about purchasing a product or service. The typical model starts at the “Awareness” stage and moves through “Engagement” to “Consideration” to “Decision.”
At OSP, we further map that process by assessing each stage as it relates to encountering your specific product or service.
Here is a high-level example of the customer journey for a secrets-management security product. The customer moves through each cycle as they step from the awareness that online information puts their business at risk, through evaluating how available products solve that issue, to convincing their team to use yours. Here’s what that might look like:
| Awareness | Engagement | Consideration | Decision | |
| Customer headspace | I have a business problem, but I don’t know how to solve it. | I know what is wrong, and I need to find a solution. | I am comparing solutions and need the best advice. | I am convincing my team of my decision. |
| "Content helps me …" | Diagnose the problem. | Understand the underlying problem and learn more about the problem space. | Understand the solutions available. | Communicate the value of the solution to my colleagues. |
| Needs and challenges | I've experienced a breach in security and my secrets (access keys, API tokens, certificates, or passwords) were compromised. | I don't have a secrets management solution and I know I need one. | I know I need a secrets management tool and I want to learn about my options. | I want to test, get a demo, or free trial from my top three choices. |
| Keywords | What is secrets management/secrets manager? | Security best practices for Drupal | Secrets management tool(s) | Secrets manager/management pricing |
| Content ideas | Blog: What is Secrets Management? | Guide: Best practices in Secrets Management for Drupal | Product landing pages | Free trial page, pricing page |
| Call to action (CTA) | Learn more about secrets management | Read about best practices in secrets management. | Read more about our product. | Start your 14-day free trial or get a demo. |
Mapping out your customer journey provides you with a clear understanding of the steps and interactions a prospect goes through to become your customer. You can identify and address pain points to enhance their overall experience (and your chance of convincing them to choose you). As you increase prospect and customer satisfaction by demonstrating empathy and understanding, you can optimize further communications for engagement, conversion, and brand loyalty.
You can improve conversion, satisfaction, and loyalty. Learn which stages are especially critical and which interactions most influence customer decisions by documenting how people interact with the different touchpoints along their pre- and post-buying journeys. Then, you can prioritize the most valuable moments, ensure that each stage of the journey is optimized for engagement and conversion, and allocate appropriate resources.
A comprehensive view of the customer experience ultimately drives better business outcomes and long-term success.
#7 Multi-channel, multi-format communication
Reach out to your audience in their existing watering holes. Use appropriate communication channels like organic search, social media, email, and in-app messages to reach your audience.
For example, if you’re targeting developers, you’ll want to be in their community Slack channel, at the developer conferences, tagging their influencers in social media, etc. Each channel allows you to connect with your audience in different contexts and moments, enhancing your ability to engage them where they are most active and receptive.
You’ll also want to develop various content types—including blogs, white papers, case studies, and videos—to engage and educate your audience at different stages of the buyer’s journey. This diversified content approach ensures that you provide valuable information tailored to your audience’s needs and preferences, fostering deeper connections and guiding them smoothly through the decision-making process.
“Effective communication is about delivering the right message, on the right platform, at the right time.”
— Ann Handley
#8 SEO and GEO
Search Engine Optimization (EO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): All this planning doesn’t do you much good if your customers can’t find you. Organic search results—when you show up in a search engine in response to their query—are one of your most important engagement channels. Expertise in this field is vast; here’s how OSP approaches it.
Topic cluster model and content architecture
A topic cluster model is an SEO-oriented content strategy that organizes content around a central topic, using a central, comprehensive page to anchor the collection. This model consists of three main components:
- Pillar Page: A comprehensive resource page covering a broad topic comprehensively.
- Cluster Content: Various sub-topic articles that go into specific aspects of the pillar topic.
- Internal Linking: Hyperlinks that connect cluster content back to the pillar page and vice versa.
Implementing a topic cluster model and internal linking signals the authority of your content to search engines. This not only boosts your search engine ranking but also provides a seamless and informative user experience, guiding visitors through a well-structured content journey that addresses their needs comprehensively.
#8 SEO and GEO
Search Engine Optimization (EO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): All this planning doesn’t do you much good if your customers can’t find you. Organic search results—when you show up in a search engine in response to their query—are one of your most important engagement channels. Expertise in this field is vast; here’s how OSP approaches it.
Topic cluster model and content architecture
A topic cluster model is an SEO-oriented content strategy that organizes content around a central topic, using a central, comprehensive page to anchor the collection. This model consists of three main components:
- Pillar Page: A comprehensive resource page covering a broad topic comprehensively.
- Cluster Content: Various sub-topic articles that go into specific aspects of the pillar topic.
- Internal Linking: Hyperlinks that connect cluster content back to the pillar page and vice versa.
Implementing a topic cluster model and internal linking signals the authority of your content to search engines. This not only boosts your search engine ranking but also provides a seamless and informative user experience, guiding visitors through a well-structured content journey that addresses their needs comprehensively.
Content plan
Creating these plans with our clients, we use a combination of SEO research, internal tools (especially the Value Map), your specific topic cluster model, and our combined knowledge and experience to brainstorm content ideas.
Keywords and internal linking
Strategic keyword placement enhances SEO while retaining readability and relevance for your human audience. The keyword strategy within a topic cluster model and content plan involves organizing keywords into primary and secondary categories to enhance SEO effectiveness.
- Primary Keyword: Select a broad, high-volume keyword for the pillar page that encompasses the main topic.
- Secondary Keywords: Identify related, long-tail keywords for cluster content. These keywords are specific sub-topics that support the primary keyword.
- Internal Linking: Link all cluster content back to the pillar page on your site and vice versa, making relevant keywords the active links to create a strong internal linking structure.
Tips for effective keyword use
Integrating your keywords naturally in your writing helps to signal their relevance to search engines, but watch out: Using a keyword too often alerts the algorithm that this inclusion is artificial. Your secondary goal should be to enhance the article’s SEO, while your first should always be readability and relevance for your audience.
All of that being said, here are some keyword usage patterns that can help your SEO:
- Title and Headings: Include your primary keyword in the title and in at least one subheading.
- First Paragraph: Use the primary keyword within the first 100 words of your article to signal relevance to search engines.
- Natural Integration: Integrate secondary keywords naturally throughout the content, avoiding overuse, so-called “keyword stuffing.”
- Alt Text for Images: Use keywords in the alt text of images to improve SEO.
- Meta Description: Write a compelling meta description that includes the primary keyword.
- Internal Links: Use keywords as anchor text when linking to other relevant articles or pages within your site.
- Conclusion: Reiterate the primary keyword in the conclusion to reinforce the topic.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
GEO—which we could call AI-driven search results—emphasizes content quality and relevance to give itself the ability to answer queries conversationally. AI search engines combine and optimize content, generating their answers by synthesizing multiple sources. This is unlike the traditional SEO paradigm, which focuses on factors like keyword density, backlinks, and meta information.
Key content strategies for GEO include adding:
- authoritative claims
- relevant statistics
- quotations from credible sources
- and ensuring content is easy to understand and fluently written.
These techniques have been shown to significantly enhance visibility in generative engine responses by making the content more engaging and informative.
#9 Thought leadership
Positioning yourself as a forward-thinking thought leader differentiates your brand from others in the market.
Start with these strategies:
- Become a go-to expert in your niche: Focus on specific areas where your knowledge and experience are strongest.
- Showcase your expertise and provide valuable information: Regularly publish insightful and well-researched articles, white papers, e-books, and case studies.
- Position yourself as a forward-thinking leader: Invest in and share original research and surveys to provide new insights into industry trends and challenges.
- Build your reputation as a thought leader: Speak at industry conferences, webinars, and panels.
- Increase your visibility and credibility: Use social media platforms to share insights, engage with your audience, and participate in industry discussions.
- Expand your reach and help others grow theirs: Partner with others—not only established thought leaders and influencers. Help shine a light on worthy people and organizations in your industry with great ideas.
- Position yourself as a valuable resource and industry expert: Create and share educational content such as tutorials, how-to guides, and training courses.
- Communicate consistently and authentically across all channels to build trust and authority.
Thought leadership establishes credibility, builds trust, and differentiates your brand in the competitive market to position you as an industry authority and drive customer engagement and loyalty.
#10 Social Proof
Credibility also comes from leveraging testimonials, case studies, and user reviews. These elements provide social proof to convince potential customers of your product's value and reliability. Showcasing positive feedback and real-world success stories alleviates doubts, builds confidence in your offerings, and makes it easier for new customers to commit.
Highlight success stories and real-world applications to show tangible results and practical benefits. Case studies, in particular, provide detailed insight into how your product has helped other customers achieve their goals, making your claims more credible. User reviews and testimonials add authenticity. They come from people who have experienced your product firsthand. Together, these tools create a compelling narrative that can significantly enhance your brand’s reputation and appeal.
The result: clear and compelling messaging
Your communication strategy should connect (you and the value you have to offer) with your audience. With clear and compelling messaging grounded in careful analysis and planning, you’ll show your customers you can help them address their challenges and paint a vision of their better future with your solution :-)
“Your tech is complex. Your message shouldn’t be.”
— Open Strategy Partners
Balancing detail with broader goals, and clarity with purpose is the tightrope walk you need to perform to bring out your best B2B copywriting. Tools like original research, SEO/GEO literacy, and the OSP Value Map can help keep you on track. Remember that communicating complex technical information with empathy and clarity builds trust. Show your audience you understand their needs and values. Offer them an honest solution they can choose. Practical choices in style and tone, and attention to reader needs, like narrative structure and flow, help set you apart from competitors with compelling and trustworthy B2B marketing content.
OSP can help you with your communication strategy. Check out our other blog posts for more tips and strategies or get in touch!