Indian SaaS Startups’ Guide To Brand Marketing

There are more than 25,000 SaaS companies worldwide. Think of where you’d stand in this ultra-competitive and rapidly growing industry if you don’t have a unique brand identity. 

A SaaS brand marketing strategy is essential to create strong brand recognition and build a better rapport with your audience. This strategy will define how you communicate as a brand and reflect your personality. 

But building this marketing strategy is not easy. 

When you are pitted against so many companies, coming out on top requires extensive planning and a carefully designed strategy. This extensive article will walk you through the six most important elements to build your brand marketing strategy.

But Why Do You Need A Strong SaaS Brand?

For SaaS companies, branding is everything—from the first impression you make on a user to the reason they come back and buy your product. 

Take Unbxd as an example. The ecommerce builder platform positioned itself as an AI-driven tool that empowered ecommerce search functionality. This unique identity enabled Unbxd to compete and win against multiple brands in this domain. 

Besides building a positive impression for your product, SaaS branding can also help you with:

• Customer Engagement: Create a meaningful and memorable brand image that resonates with your target audience. Your branding dictates how you communicate and engage with your target audience. This engagement translates to more conversions. 
• Brand Positioning And Awareness: Actively building your brand affects how people view your product. A well-designed branding strategy can ensure that customers associate the desired traits with your company. It also helps expand reach to new audiences, boosting brand awareness and recognition. 
• Inbound Marketing: SaaS branding can maximise ROI through inbound leads. When you create a unique entity for your brand showing people how much you care about their pain points, interested buyers will land in your inbox. Inbound leads can mean shorter sales cycles and higher customer lifetime value. 

Put simply, SaaS brand marketing can be the key to unlocking your company’s maximum potential—from creating a competitive edge to building a community of users. 

How To Approach SaaS Brand Marketing 

When you’re competing in such a saturated market, your product isn’t enough to drive sales. You need a strong brand that understands audience pain points and shows users what you can do for them. 

Let’s look at the six most important elements to create a bulletproof SaaS brand. 

Understanding Dynamics Between Product, Audience, Market

A SaaS brand marketing strategy is founded on three main elements: audience, product, and market. Combining these elements into a single equation can prepare a solid groundwork for your strategy. 

• Define who you’re selling to and identify their primary challenges—why should they buy your product.
• Circle back to your product and establish the main selling points—how you’re providing value to your audience. 
• Review the market in which you’re operating and analyse how your competitors are marketing themselves. 

Your research on the dynamics between these three elements will provide the essence of your strategy. Clarifying these points will help shape your brand messaging. 

Define Your Purpose And Story

Buyers are 4 times more likely to trust brands driven by a strong purpose or champion a cause. This number should be enough to tell you how crucial it is to determine your company’s purpose. 

Every company exists to make money. But defining your brand’s purpose and the story behind goes beyond the monetary value to humanise your company. 

Start by answering two simple questions:

• Why does your product exist? 
• What values do you stand for? 

This self-reflection process will bring you to a purpose you’re pursuing—the answer to why you’re building this product. 

Keka is one such purpose-driven SaaS company. The HR management tool proudly mentions its purpose of building an employee-centric HR platform and revolutionising the industry. It also succeeded in pursuing its goal without any advertising expenditure! 

Create A Unique Brand Experience

Brand experience defines your relationship with a customer. It’s the sum of your interactions, customer service, and product quality. 

Contrary to common belief, brand experience is more than your website and visual appeal. It’s a carefully designed framework to deliver an exceptional experience and stand out from your competition—showing users they’ve made the right choice by choosing your product.

Here are a few handy tips for building a stellar brand experience:

• Wring Out All The Inconsistencies: Branding is not a one-time effort but a continuous process. It evolves as you learn more about your customers and how they interact with your product. The best SaaS companies use a consistent brand voice to communicate with their audience and create content. 
• Build Strong Customer Relationships: Another critical link in your SaaS marketing chain is strengthening client relationships through post-purchase efforts. Eliminate all roadblocks and offer additional support to help them get the best use out of your product. 
• Take Active Feedback: Understand what your customers needs. Actively seek feedback to iterate and improve your customer experience. SaaS brands can curate personalised offers and subscription models that match customer requirements by weighing interests and demands.
• Produce User-Generated Content (UGC): People trust other people’s reviews more than a brand’s own marketing efforts. So, host giveaways and contests on social media to produce UGC and spread positive word of mouth. 

Prepare A Brand Style Guide For Marketing 

When you have a brand style guide, it’s easier to maintain consistency across all marketing channels. A clear and uniform brand image builds trust and improves the brand recall value, compelling more people to buy your product. 

To create a brand style guide, you’ll need to pull together:

• Mission And Vision: Your voice is closely linked to your mission and vision as a brand. It defines the goal you’re working toward and shapes the language and tone of your marketing collateral. 
• Ideal Customer Profile: Defining your target persona impacts the subject of your marketing material. The demographics and identity of your buyer determine how you approach them and where. 
• Colour Palette: Think about the emotions you want people to associate with your brand. Colour psychology is essential to align your designs with your brand personality—like Asana’s gradient colour palette represents its lively and energetic identity. 
• Editorial Playbook: Your style guide should tell people how you want to present your brand—creating a uniform tonality. The editorial guide can tell content creators and marketers what position to assume when producing content for your company. 

Get some inspiration from Freshworks’ extensive brand style guide covering finer details, from tonality and grammar to best practices. This example shows how SaaS brands can maintain a consistent voice across multiple platforms through a simple style guide.

Let Your Content Do The Talking 

Publishing quality content can do wonders for your branding strategy. A targeted approach to content production can establish your credibility, drive substantial traffic, and maximise conversions simultaneously. 

But for many SaaS companies, this is easier said than done. Brands have a clear idea of what they want but remain unclear on how to get there and what it looks like.

These handy tips will help you create a solid content strategy: 

• Cater To A Niche Audience: Instead of pleasing everyone, focus on a niche market and tailor your content to a defined audience. 
• Solve User Pain Points: Define the problems your product resolves and create content around them.
• Cover Your Entire Funnel: Move potential buyers from the awareness stage to consideration to purchase through helpful content resources in every stage. 
• Measure And Iterate Your Strategy: Select a set of relevant metrics to monitor your performance and make necessary changes regularly. 

A SaaS content marketing plan is essential to generate more interest in your product and move the needle for your business. 

Build Social Proof To Garner Trust 

The benefits of social proof go far beyond simply showing your reputation. It’s equally important to establish trust among your target audience. Displaying social proof tells potential buyers how well your product works, giving them reasons to try it themselves. 

Social proof comes in many forms, including:

• Data-backed case studies 
• Multi-format testimonials
• Ratings and reviews on platforms like G2 and Product Hunt

Placing these reviews on your website and marketing material can establish credibility. Consider a platform like Chargebee. With over 500 reviews on G2 and an average rating of 4.6, the brand is driven by the trust of hundreds of users worldwide. 

This display of social proof gives Chargebee a significant edge, winning more sales than its competitors.

Supercharge Your SaaS Brand

The SaaS industry is becoming more crowded than ever. The only way to create a distinctive name for your product is through a dedicated brand marketing strategy. 

Remember to establish your brand voice and identity at the outset to eliminate the guesswork from your marketing campaign. Then you can focus your efforts on building a flawless brand experience and a solid content strategy while collecting social proof to win your users’ trust.

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