A horizontal product is a product used by many personas and/or industries.
Marketing a horizontal product presents specific challenges, especially in making messaging relevant to such a diverse audience.
Examples of affected assets are:
- Sales assets: outreach templates, slide decks, demos;
- Marketing assets: website, whitepapers, blog articles.
The problem lies in putting relevant (converting) content in front of the person:
- A very specific message is hit-and-miss depending on whether it reaches the target it’s been crafted for (”This solves for someone else, I will bounce off”)
- A very broad message risks being ambiguous and uncompelling (”I don’t understand what this solves for, I will bounce off”)
The problem is especially challenging for top-of-funnel content, since you have little-to-no information about your audience and control over the conversation.
- A first-time visitor to your website can be literally anyone. What they see risks being either irrelevant, or too broad.
- After you had a first discovery call with a prospect, you can easily put together a tailored, relevant pitch for them
The further prospects move into the buying process, the more information you gather on them, and the more you can present relevant content.
Top-of-funnel content
Mistakes to avoid for top-of-funnel content
These solutions cause the audience to disengage and bounce.
- Staying too broad and ambiguous. This results in uncompelling content.
- Cramping together content for every persona/industry in the same place. This results in mental strain and confusion.
- Using rotating content for every persona/industry and force the audience to wait for their turn. This results in boredom and disengagement.
How to craft top-of-funnel content
You should optimize for both clarity and relevance.
Your website is the best possible example of how to put this in practice.
- The first content that hits the visitor (your homepage), should be agnostic of persona and industry
- Provide a very high-level overview of what your product does, how it works, the benefits it brings
- Avoid mentioning personas or industry altogether
- The visitor should understand you in a 10-second scan
- Very important: you should build enough intrigue for the visitor to click on a subpage
- Specialized subpages for personas and industries provide highly relevant content
- You can link to your subpages in the body of the homepage, but only after you established initial value (not right in the hero)
- You can name these pages “Use cases”, or “Solutions”
- You should refrain from using your very valuable, but irrelevant content here. If a product functionality or benefit does not solve for that specific audience, leave it out.
- They remove all cognitive load and explain that audience how the product helps THEM
Loom’s website is a good example of this.
How horizontal is your product?
You should consider whether you really want your top-of-funnel content to be fully horizontal.
- Although your product may be used by multiple industries and personas, you may have a very specific vertical that you target with priority
- If this is true, your homepage should be tailored to your priority vertical and optimally convert them
- You may still have subpages for other verticals. Even though the homepage may not convert well for those verticals, you can still promote your subpages directly
Figma’s website is a good example of this. Although a number of teams work with them and they even have a product (FigJam) dedicated to a broader audience, their homepage is clearly optimized for their main audience: designers.