Creating Platform Service Descriptions

What You're Really Selling

Creating platform descriptions for your software sounds easy, but it's a bit more complicated than you think if you want to connect, engage, and have potential buyers understand what you're offering and then subscribe to your platform.

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Offers vs Results Marketing

Most companies, when you ask what they're selling and have to offer, tend to focus on the platform they created instead of the results they are assisting their customers in receiving.

This makes sense because as the owner, most likely the developer, you designed a great platform, so of course, your focus would be on it.

Feature Sets For Days

You see this plain as day when you visit a website and all you see are numerous pages explaining all of the features and solution sets a prospect can use if they become a customer.

When you take this approach to sell your business, there is only one outcome that will play out once you start competing with other software companies in the market, a race to the who's willing to be the cheapest.

Features vs Functionality

When you list the features of your platform, all you're doing is an apples-to-apples comparison to everyone else who exists in the world.

Now, you might have a competitive edge, but you know as well as I do, unless it's credible enough to be patented, it's only a matter of time before your competition adapts the same edge.

I am not saying to get rid of those feature pages altogether. What you need to do is build upon them and focus more on the functionality and the actual problems are solving.

Instead of beating around the bush explaining the feature, get right to the point and say you'll be able to gain this outcome. People don't care about features and solutions, they care about results and whether they will be able to gain them with your software.

Do you find it coincidental that the top blogs on your website are most likely how-to blogs? It's because that's how people think.

Our Minds Are Action Oriented

When we think about solving problems, we don't think about features, we think about results.

Classic Results Example

A classic example is building a home where you need to fasten two boards together. There are a million ways you could do this but most people usually use nails. When it comes to nails, that are even different categories within that.

Do you want to use nails fast and efficiently, go with a nail gun. Maybe you want to do it cheaply, buy a hammer.

Worst-case scenario if a hammer isn't cheap enough, someone could sell them rocks that they could strike the nail with.

And while most people would focus on the tool, the true outcome that the customer is looking to achieve is getting a nail into two or more boards.

So if you simply came in and shared how efficiently someone could get that result, it won't matter the tool they are selling as long as the customer gets the result they are going after.

It's all about understanding the buyer and the true problem they are trying to solve, if they have solutions in mind already, their buying criteria, and motivations.

Once you know all these factors, you'll know exactly, if you have the potential of acquiring them as a customer, if they need more persuasion, or if you'd be better off just letting them be because even if they did become a buyer, they'd probably be more hassle then the revenue is worth.

Writing Platform Service Descriptions

When writing descriptions, especially online, you're writing for two results: human engagement and search engine optimization.

Writing For Human Engagement

When writing for humans, the main idea is to be problem-focused and bold about the capabilities and claims of your software, focusing on four areas: outcome, degree of achievement, time, and effort.

What Is Your Customers Real Outcome(s)

When you developed the software platform, you most likely had outcomes you were designing for that would allow customers to achieve specific goals.

Be bold about these claims.

Don't make people guess about the problems you are focused on solving. This is the same problem when you list a bunch of software features.

There isn't any clarity around the actual problem you are solving, and you leave it up to the imagination of the buyer to come to conclusions on how they'll use it and people don't want to think.

Beyond Platform Service Descriptions

Thinking even further, use these outcomes as the headlines on your homepage. Most people have the most generic headlines and then wonder why people end up going right back to Google.

People don't want to think, they want results and they want them fast.

Now, being outcome focused isn't enough. Most companies get this far and think they have something that is going to stand out in the marketplace and call it quits.

The reality, is even your worst competitor is saying we built software so our customers can achieve the same results.

Degree Of Achievement

If we take things one step further, we then get to the place of making bold claims backed with proof.

Anyone can offer a software platform that claims to provide a solution but then, most, see their churn rates go through the roof.

Why this happens, is they may be good at marketing, selling, and making bold claims but their platform and the degree of achievement for their customers, to put it plainly, isn't great.

Now, this has nothing to do with marketing more than it has to do with your product development, but this is a good problem to have.

This means you need to match the outcomes your customers receive to the expectations your marketing and sales team are selling or change the way your teams share the platform if you're not able to develop the platform.

Ideally, once you've proven your platform, this is where you can introduce guarantees and share them in your bold claims.

Examples would be, try our product for 60 days and if you don't start seeing results, you get your money back.

Once you put your reputation on the line like that, there isn't anything a customer has to lose besides time.

This takes us to the last two steps of platform descriptions, time, and effort. Done properly, this can give you an offer that will put you, leagues, beyond your nearest competitor.

How Long Does This Take

Have you ever noticed that the faster the service, especially if it's quality service, you end up getting charged a premium? In the fast-paced lives we live, if we can get results fast, we're willing to pay.

If a software claims they can get new customers in 7 days, versus months, who do you think I am going with?

Being able to correlate your platform with saved time or achieving something faster than they usually would and provide proof, will allow you to stand out from your competition like no other.

Classic examples in today's market with all these AI platforms like Jasper, ChatGPT, and copy.ai all come to mind. What used to take you hours, if not weeks, to write a 2,000-word blog, can now be turned around in hours.

Talk about time savings.

Another example is how an account or financial software shares how you could save time on your tax returns by automating most of the process with software.

Marketing automation platforms do this well too. Instead of manually sending out emails, automate the process.

How Much Work Do I Need To Do

Lastly, is effort. How hard is this going to be for me to learn and use?

Most people have their ways of working already mapped out, they know they need to do things better and more efficiently, but onboarding a new software platform, will that make my job easier, or will the effort end up being the same?

We've seen a huge influx in this area for SaaS platforms. Entire customer success teams have been built to ensure that customers are not only onboarded but also that they find value and fast, otherwise, churn is most likely right around the corner.

When explaining your platform to a prospect, point out these additional services. You could also install support chat bots or create a knowledge base that services your customer base as well which ensures that your platform is easy to use.

Gone are the days of having a prospect become a customer and then throw them on the platform to figure things out on their own. You need to make the effort of onboarding as simple as possible and get them the results you promised throughout the marketing and sales stages.

Writing For Search Engines

Search engine optimization still holds weight when building a business that operates online, but the weight of the different parts has changed a lot these days.

Writing good content is taking a stronger humanistic approach. It used to be all about backlinks, keywords, and how you structured the page.

Those strategies still need to be done, but focusing on creating content that is relevant to the buyer is going to carry more weight than anything else, and writing descriptions and offers using the rules above is going to do just that.

If you do want to focus on the technical quantitative side of search optimization, a great tool to use is SEMRush. This tool allows you to understand what keywords people are searching on search engines such as Google and how many of your competitors use those same words.

Hopefully, you can find a way to describe your product that people search for but there isn't a lot of competition, this is called a blue ocean. But don't get too hung up on this, as it could lead to descriptions that sound weird or awkward.

Concluding Thoughts

When writing platform descriptions, don't stop at just writing out the features and solutions your platform is capable of.

Instead, continue down the path and focus on making big bold claims that provide clarity around the actual problems you are solving for. If you want to stand out, put a guarantee on those claims.

To make the best platform offer ever, share proof that your platform will allow your prospects to achieve this outcome quickly and that it won't take much effort, think magic diet pills.

BUT!!! Make sure you can back up these claims, otherwise, you'll find yourself in some legal trouble.

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