How to position and brand your SaaS product

You’ve already designed and developed your SaaS product, so now you’ll probably be thinking about how to get it out and in front of your customers. But first, you need to establish your branding.

Often overlooked when it comes to marketing, branding is a hugely important step when it comes to putting your product out to the public. Put bluntly, your brand is what your customers see and feel about you, and is what sets you apart from your competitors. It can be anything from your logo to your adverts, from your website design to your language style, right down to your customer service.

Below, we talk through 8 of the steps required to brand and position your SaaS product.

1. Evaluate your SaaS product

Before anything, you need to evaluate and define your product. Think about what exactly you offer in terms of your products capabilities, what problems your product solves and which space in the SaaS market you occupy. Don’t forget, this isn’t just about what your product can do – if you have a great customer support team, don’t forget about them! They’re equally as important as your products features when it comes to branding.

2. Think about your values

Your SaaS company values are what make up the foundation of your brand. Although recently removed from their Code of Conduct, Google famously used ‘don’t be evil’ for their motto. Its purpose was to remind employees that everything Google does should be measured against the highest possible standards of ethical business conduct, with this commitment helping them build great products and loyal users. Your values aren’t just for you and your employees however – a company which continually acts upon their values are drawing points for many customers.

3. Outline a mission statement

A mission statement outlines what you’re doing, and more importantly why you’re doing it. Essentially, it defines your purpose and why you exist. DataDog, a monitoring service for cloud-scale applications has a mission statement which states ‘The DataDog team is on a mission to bring sanity to IT Management’ – a quote which will resonate with IT managers globally. With this in mind, assess why your SaaS product exists, and what you want to achieve with it; Your mission statement should fall into place once you do this.

4. Get to know your customers

Next you need to understand your customers. Your branding will need to resonate with them and you should understand their problems and which features matter to them the most.

Learning to speak your customers language is also key. Your language and showcasing of your product should help your audience see how your SaaS product is going to help them solve their problems. And don’t forget – this understanding of your customers wants and needs isn’t just for the sales part, it encompasses your customer service, your social media, and all of your customer communications.

Through doing this, not only are you working out your branding, but this step will help you hugely when it comes to marketing your product. 

5. Suss out your competitors

When it comes to branding and marketing your product in a possibly saturated market, you don’t need to be totally unique – you just need to be different from your competitors.

Take a look at your competitors and write down what you like about their branding and their product, and also note what you don’t. Look at their reviews online and find out what they do and don’t do well. Your differences could be anything from your prices and available integrations, or even their bright and bold colour scheme on their website versus your slightly more subdued colour palette.

And – if you can’t see many differences between you and your competitors, look at communicating your product in a way that’s entirely different to theirs.

6. Decide where you’re going to target your brand

If you have worked out your customers, by now you should have a good idea about where they go, what they do, and when they’re likely to come across your product. The wonderful thing about SaaS is that generally, there’s no geographic boundaries on where you can target. Of course, targeting isn’t just about geography – it could be anything from different online marketing channels or conferences in your market.

7. Develop your brand voice and identity

As we said, branding isn’t just what your customer see’s – it’s also what they feel. Your voice and identity are just as big of a pull for customers than your all singing all dancing SaaS product. A new free demo lead could be coming to you from a competitor because they’re fed up of their poor customer support, or they simply didn’t like the way their product was explained on their website.

Your voice is highly dependent on what SaaS product you’re selling, but refer back to get to know your customers and you should begin to get an idea of how to speak to them.

8. Keep believing!

And finally, don’t forget to believe in your product. Going through a branding process is a great time to remember why your SaaS product was created and to assess where you want to be with it in the future. And remember, the person who is always going to be your SaaS products biggest advocate is you!

Are you ready to start branding your SaaS product? Let Xander Marketing help you

 We’ve been helping SaaS businesses all around the world since 2009 to brand their products. We work to support growth through new acquisition, increasing leads, generating more website traffic and raising industry awareness. If you lack the time, resource or know how to understand branding your SaaS product, then get in touch and book your free 30 minute consultation.