Elena Madrigal on great website messaging, value pricing, and user research

Product State Q&A

Elena Madrigal is the EVP of Product and Product Marketing at Amaze. She’s an Expert in Residence & Public Speaker at Product Marketing Alliance. She was formerly a leader at GoDaddy, TrueMotion, Canva, Moo, Microsoft and Nokia.
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EC: What's the key to effective website messaging?

EM: I'll begin with the basics: Positioning. Positioning is different from messaging. It's neither copy nor a tagline. Nor is positioning your brand story, vision, or mission. As April Dunford puts it: Positioning defines how your product is a leader at delivering something that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about. Therefore, positioning lays the groundwork upon which messaging is built. Messaging then guides the creation of copy for various channels, one of which is always a website.

However, from my experience, even the strongest positioning and messaging can fail when it comes to effectively communicating on our website what we do, for whom, and why visitors should care instead of leaving. Often, the setback is the use of language that doesn't resonate, and a tendency to focus too much on ourselves and not enough on the user, the customer.

So, to address your question, the key begins with solid positioning and messaging, followed by the sequence in which we apply this messaging to our website. This sequence must be precise:

First, ensure clarity. What is it that we are selling? It's crucial that anyone visiting your site can immediately grasp what you offer. No fancy jargon —just plain, straightforward language that gets the point across.

Next, focus on relevance. Understanding your audience is key. Your messaging should directly answer, ‘Why should this matter to me?’ Consider who you’re talking to and what they care about. Your website should speak to their needs, desires, or the problems they’re trying to solve. Differentiation doesn’t matter much if the visitor doesn’t understand the product or if it is for them..

Then, highlight the value. How will the product improve the user's life? Here, the use of images that give a glimpse of the ‘promised land’ can be helpful. We should aim not just for visually appealing images; these images serve as visual messaging that's as important as the words we use.

Lastly, focus on differentiation. What sets your solution apart from the alternatives? Showcasing these differences in your messaging helps visitors see why your offering is the right choice. This is also an excellent opportunity to feature testimonials from people like them.

EC: What are the dimensions of value pricing and why is it important to get them right?

EM: Value pricing isn't just about offering the right features for the price customers are willing to pay. It's about understanding what customers really consider when they think about cost.

This includes 3 key dimensions:

● Money: What's the price tag?

● Effort: How much thought and mental energy does it require?

● Time: How long does it take to learn, use, or set up?

The appeal of Free products is strong because it removes the Money factor and reduces Effort. No need for credit cards, data entry, or checkout process; it's all about how quickly the product can start working for you. That’s why Fast and Easy often go hand-in-hand.

Playing with these dimensions depends on the maturity of the market and the priorities of your customers.

A product in a commoditized mature market can’t be very high on any dimension. Take dishwasher tablets, they have made dishwashing easy and more efficient, so consumers are not going to choose a costly, complicated, or time-consuming option. A disruptive innovation would be needed before they even consider increasing the cost on any dimension.

On the opposite spectrum, new technology looking to gain their first adopters can be high on all three dimensions. Think about the first-generation MP3 players. They were expensive, required software for CD conversion, and additional software for music transfer. I was one of those early adopters paying a little fortune for the Rio mp3 player that could only play 30 minutes of music and was not very user friendly.

Early adopters like me were okay with the extra Money, Effort, and Time. However, this doesn't work for everyone, leading to failure to reach wider adoption when the dimensions don’t get balanced.

If your target audience is cash-poor but time-rich — like, for example, college students — focus on making your product free or cheap rather than fast or easy.

For a time poor but cash rich audience, don't stress about high prices. Instead, focus on making the purchase effortless. Improve your documentation, streamline the checkout process, and ensure fast and easy deployment.

This value dimension concept applies to B2B as well. Just replace Effort and Time with Service and Process. Sales can be lost if conversations focus too much on Money, and this is because customers drive this focus.

But what if you shift the conversation to Service or Process? Most sales discussions start with Product and Money. Customers want to know how their problems can be solved within their budget. However, the hidden costs of a poor Service or Process are often overlooked. Ask questions. You might discover that the real issue lies in a different value dimension than you or your customer initially thought.

EC: What advice do you give to someone who wants to get good at user research and continuous discovery?

EM: My perspective is a bit like the famous ‘faster horse’ analogy. People often don't know precisely what they want, but founders must understand the pains they're going through, like the need to get from point A to point B faster. This is where research plays its role, by revealing those pains.

Yet, sometimes, those conducting research tend to jump to conclusions, thinking the solution is glaringly obvious. But, in reality, research's outcome isn't about finding a solution — it's about defining the problem.

For instance, research may reveal that people are upset about getting wet due to frequent rain, and that there’s a significant opportunity because meteorologists are predicting even more rain. At this point, one might assume the solution is a raincoat and ask the product team to create yet another raincoat in a sea of raincoats.

Or, we could dive deeper into why people dislike getting wet and what is the Job to be Done that rain is getting in the way of completing.

Imagine if this richer data uncovered that two primary problems affect a significant market size: Runners who can't comfortably run in the rain and people struggling to keep their belongings dry while walking.

Now, we've got something valuable — problem definitions. We present this narrative to the product, design and engineering teams and let them come up with solutions for this opportunity that have a clear outcome, so they can prioritize the best one. They'll be way more excited than if you handed them a specific solution or output.

Starting with a deeper problem story based on ‘Jobs to be Done’ has a better chance of leading to innovative solutions.

“Research's outcome isn't about finding a solution — it's about defining the problem.”
- Elena Madrigal, Amaze