# How To Position Your SaaS Brand for Massive Growth in 2023 📈

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOw21L6HqCg
Duration: 14 min
Language: English
Words: 2802
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/OOw21L6HqCg

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[0:00] in this video I'm going to talk about how to position your SAS brand for massive growth in 2023. if you stick around till the end I'll give you an idea of what is likely the best way to position your product I'm Rob Walling a Serial entrepreneur who's written four books on building startups and I've invested in more than 125 companies so in the title of this video you heard two terms that I should probably Define positioning and brand because these are two terms that I think are very commonly misunderstood and the distinction of them in the details are important so first let's start with positioning positioning is like setting context for

[0:36] your company in this case it allows customers and potential customers to see you relative to your competition to see the pros and the cons or to see the corner of the market that you are perhaps best at serving positioning allows you to distinguish yourself from competitors so let's take a quick example in the e-commerce space specifically with shopping cart software I want to look at three different shopping cart platforms and we can look at how they position themselves Shopify calls themselves the global e-commerce platform Shopify is massive with huge market share and they are literally aiming at every company on the globe who wants to sell online their positioning

[1:16] is we want the whole Market big Commerce has traditionally been positioned as Ecom but for large companies and as part of that position they've leaned into flexibility in being open I'm actually not aware if they're open source but they use this term open all over the place and in doing so they're taking a dig at Shopify Shopify is classically known to be a closed platform and actually to be a little aggressive towards developers who do build on their platform and so big Commerce is lean into flexibility and being open is a way they're positioning themselves different than Shopify and the third example I want to look at is

[1:52] woocommerce they call themselves The Open Source e-commerce platform and they lean into flexibility by saying build exactly the e-commerce site you want so again differentiating themselves from Shopify which anyone can use woocommerce is saying we are open source and you can build exactly what you want because Shopify is such a dominant player and they have such reach and they are positioned so broadly every other player is almost positioned themselves against Shopify and the way to do that is to point out the biggest flaws that a company has in this case Shopify is a closed ecosystem Shopify is not as customizable as one might want there's a

[2:32] lot of elements that these other two competitors are picking up on in order to position themselves against Shopify so that was positioning now let's talk about brand brand is what people say about your company when you're not around some people think a brand as your logo your colors your fonts but really that's the visual identity of your brand brand might also be words associated with your company so for example when you think of microconf you might think of these words that we have heard people use in surveys and interviews when we've asked people use a few words to describe microconf words like trustworthy smart helpful welcoming since we are a

[3:11] community it's nice that people feel welcomed similarly when you think of another YouTuber with a much larger following Mr Beast who I believe is the most popular other YouTuber on YouTube these days you might think of words like irreverent energetic even generous because it gives a lot of money away so Mr Beast brand is very different than microcomp's brand and brand is not just brand identity like visual elements I talked about earlier and it's not just a list of words it's a combination of many elements so you can imagine it being visual like seeing a certain color or seeing the Nike Swoosh and realizing that reminds me of Nike or it can be

[3:45] auditory like when you hear the at the start of a Netflix show it's really any way that you or your Market relates to a company be it visual auditory even I suppose a smell could be part of your brand if you're a Krispy Kreme donuts and every time you walk in smell of amazing glazed donuts that I really want to have now that I'm talking about them that could be part of your brand as well I'm going to talk about a way to position your brand for massive growth in 2023 before I do that I do want to talk about the fact that you can build products that rely solely on

[4:16] marketing tactics in a very transactional I had many many of these that had no brand and the positioning was we solve your problem and that's it so it really wasn't much of a market positioning but if you're Reliant solely on ads or solely on SEO I didn't need branding to sell beach towels because I had an e-commerce site that ranked I think it was number five in Google for the term beach towels and I had an e-book that taught people how to take care of bonsai trees these things made money and some of them made thousands of dollars a month and they didn't have a logo they didn't differentiate from

[4:48] other competitors but it was just direct traffic that solved a pain point and so when people hit the website enough of them bought to make it into a business and I had software products like that as well but they were all very transactional right there was no loyalty and they were not based on repeat buyers or referrals that build an incredible business build a multi-million dollar business you need to start thinking about brand in fact I would argue if you're going to build a business that's going to grow into the six figures well into six figures you do need to start thinking about how you're going to build

[5:19] your brand so that people respect it and when they hear the term they realize oh that's a brand name it's not just a commodity that I can find anytime via Google and also think about your positioning and how you can differentiate yourself from your competition and carve out a corner of the market that you own that when people think of that corner of the market you are the first tool they think of and this is important because positioning sets the context in the mind of your ideal customer and so I think around the time you had maybe a hundred thousand in an annual recurring Revenue maybe before

[5:50] maybe the laughter you're going to start noticing patterns in your best customers maybe it's the industry they're in maybe it's the size of the company the number of employees or the number of Revenue how they found you how they use your product even if it doesn't narrow down to a single customer type if you are able to position your brand for say your top three customer types as opposed to not positioning at all you can absolutely gain market share against the rest of the market if they're sitting on their Laurels and not thinking about how to own the minds of the customers in that segment and the problem with not

[6:22] positioning is you can become a commodity even if you have unique features talk all the time on this channel about not becoming commoditized because then it's just a low price solution that wins and you don't want to be competing solely on price but if you have unique features and you can't communicate those you will become a commodity and positioning is perhaps the best way to instantly to quickly show a new website visitor or a New Prospect what you can do when without trying to explain well we have this feature and it's different and we have these six features it's just too much but if you can position yourself with an H1 a

[6:55] single sentence on a website that is the way to win this war and to not be commoditized so for example if you're competing against MailChimp which is the largest email marketing provider in the world you might say that your email automation that meets the challenges of B2B SAS and that's exactly what user list has done is there overlapping features and functionality between user list and MailChimp of course there is is user list trying to attack MailChimp which has more than a billion dollars a year in Revenue head on of course they're not they're positioning themselves to own a corner of the market so with a position like that you don't

[7:32] have to list 20 unique features you have you've shown the visitor in three seconds why they should or should not consider you whether you might be a fit for them or not and given that positioning shows your uniqueness it's a fundamental part of building your marketing flywheel if you Market without solid positioning it very well can be an uphill battle if you're getting compared against all the other players in your space so how do you find your position how do you position your brand for success in 2023 there are a handful of positioning strategies and if you type into Google or chat GPT what are the

[8:04] best ways to position a product you can get some examples the issue is a lot of the examples are for b2c Brands like toothpaste or competing you know on store shelves or being a direct to Consumer e-commerce company and while there are a lot of different positioning strategies there are four that I think can get you started in thinking about how you might want to position your company first is to Niche down this might be the most common approach that I see people use for positioning and it works pretty well if you find a space in the market a little vertical where people have unique needs like for

[8:39] example with user list email automation for SAS versus email automation for the entire world or if you want to Niche down only to people who want open source eCommerce versus everyone that's another example you often hear the I'm going to build a project management software but for dentists or for people who publish books or you know that's niching down right and so this is a very common approach to positioning and it's one that can work for you another way to position yourself is as essentially the low-cost leader and this is when I don't typically recommend for SAS companies because it can be erased to the bottom but you might think of

[9:13] Walmart and Amazon as having a huge part of their brand being that they are cheaper than the competition and while I think being cheaper than big overpriced incumbents can be an awesome Advantage I don't think you want to get in a race with other startups where you're going you're charging 49 a month and then it's 39 and you drop to 29 and you know that's how you're getting customers is just by being cheaper it's just not a sustainable way to grow an incredible SAS company the third positioning strategy is to emphasize a single benefit so if we look at fathom analytics who's positioning themselves against Google analytics fathom is super

[9:49] focused on privacy their gdpr compliant and privacy is all over their website all over their positioning and that's a stark contrast to how we probably think about Google analytics Zappos for example the famous retailer That Grew at an incredible speed and got required by Amazon they made amazing customer service their benefit that's the benefit they leaned into a huge part of their brand and their positioning is that their customer service was off the charts they didn't go after low prices they're not the lowest cost provider and yet I've bought a ton of shoes and clothes through Zappos because I value customer service over price so focusing

[10:24] on a single benefit can be a strategy for positioning your company and the fourth strategy that I'm going to lay out for positioning is making something that is powerful but scary making it more approachable so the example here is the last SAS company I started was drip it started off as an email service provider it became a marketing automation provider now marketing automation is a scary term right it's powerful but most people don't want to learn marketing on a mission it just doesn't sound like fun and back in 2014 we launched drip 2.0 it was a kind of a second version and a minor pivot and I

[11:02] put this phrase on the homepage it was is actually the H1 at the top of the homepage lightweight marketing automation that doesn't suck and that communicates a lot so let's break that down lightweight implies it's less scary it's easy to use marketing automation so now as a visitor you know what category of software it's in before we had this headline I was trying to invent a new category or describe what drip did and frankly that confused a lot of visitors I would talk about email automation or send the right email at the right time to the right customer but people would ask are you an email service provider

[11:32] are you marketing automation like what exactly do you do and frankly from the beginning we should have leaned into an email marketing provider or a marketing automation provider the phrase that doesn't suck that's at the end of that sentence implies most or all of our competitors do and frankly this was true and people would chuckle they knew that it was true in this space that most of the marketing automation providers were awful software wasn't good sales process wasn't good they were too expensive so I was essentially making a promise in this headline that our software had to live up to and I'll be honest I think this

[12:04] headline and this positioning absolutely helped us carve out our corner of the market which was lightweight easy to use marketing automation as opposed to the big clunky expensive tools people were using in the space and without that positioning I think we would have grown much much slower there are many strategies and approaches you can use to think about positioning I hope these four that I've offered has been helpful if you want to dig further into positioning there is a video on this channel called SAS product positioning should have a point of view with April Dunford and we will link that up in the description in addition probably the

[12:39] best book I've seen on Startup and SAS positioning is called obviously awesome also by April Dunford and you can check that out wherever greater books are sold in a minute I'm going to tell you what I believe is perhaps the best way to position your product but before I do that microcomp connect is our online community of bootstrapped and mostly bootstrap startup founders with an emphasis on SAS we have more than 5 5 000 Founders in this group it's heavily moderated there's a lot of great conversation going on and if you want to be part of a community like this it's free head over to microcomfort

[13:13] connect.com in terms of what I think could be an optimal way to position your company I think it's pretty amazing to combine two or more of the positioning strategies I named above so I talked about doing it on price focusing on a single benefit I talked about beating bigger incumbents but imagine if you're cheaper than your expensive hated incumbents and you have most of their functionality and you're also much easier to learn and to use and your customer service is better it's a great combination and it's totally possible and if you can carve out positioning like that with not just one facet you're going to put yourself in an amazing

[13:47] place for fast growth in 2023 hope you enjoyed this video if you did I'd appreciate a like and of course subscribe to the channel we're kicking out videos like this every week on all things SAS building launching growing marketing brand positioning everything that you need to be thinking about to build an incredible SAS business thanks for joining me this week I'll see you next time [Music]

[14:19] [Music]

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