5 Essential Branding Elements in the Crowded SaaS Space

The SaaS industry has seen incredible growth in the last few years. Gartner claims that around 66% of spending on software is expected to go to SaaS technologies by 2025. BetterCloud statistics indicate that 80% of businesses plan to switch all their systems to SaaS by 2025. Workday reports that 75% of business leaders have moved to SaaS.

While Covid played a role in accelerating the digital transformation journey, it doesn't take away from the fact that SaaS provides several advantages over traditional software, including lower costs, easier deployment, and increased flexibility. These innate capabilities will continue to drive demand for SaaS products. However, this growth has also made the SaaS market very crowded, with new vendors constantly popping up.

The top 5 regions for SaaS companies itself have close to 30K companies within them. It makes it difficult for customers to find the right solution for their needs and for SaaS players to sell their products to a large audience. With so many SaaS products coming up in the last few years, you'd think the latest ones will take away the major revenue pie. But it's different from what happened.

Shopify claims that 2021 was its "biggest year ever," as its revenue increased by 225% in less than 20 months. The number of employees for Salesforce, the largest SaaS provider in the world, increased from 767 in 2007 to 73,541 in 2022. Adobe achieved a record revenue of $17.61 billion for the fiscal Year 2022, with 15% YoY growth.

How Strong Brands Stand Out

So what’s common in some of these SaaS companies? All of them represent strong brands among customers and continue to strengthen their position even as the SaaS industry gets crowded. Let’s first define brand equity; it is how people see your brand.

How do they recognize you? What makes you different from the others? But coming back to our topic, why branding is important?

Crowded markets need companies to create differentiation. With technological advancements happening every week, with every company, it makes it all the more important to create a strong brand that is differentiated among peers.

After all, branding is a 360-degree experience that the customer or user has with the brand. There are 5 key aspects that have allowed the world’s top SaaS companies to create a strong brand for themselves.

1) Great designs, consistently!

Great designs not only create a strong differentiation visually but also create a recall value. It’s all about how your users, prospects, or even non-customers think about you when they listen to your name. Think brand colors, think brand design, typography, or even nomenclature and articulation. Adobe’s red theme has been consistent for more than 30 years now. Updated for the first time in 1993, it has consistently evolved but stayed true to its red logo color and design which stands for modern, minimalist, and attractive.

Another key design very relevant in today’s digital world is your product pages. Prospects and users can make up their minds within 3 secs of looking at the product pages. An example is how Adobe revamped the Adobe Creative Cloud Express webpage, which had 30+ features .

So when Adobe first built its product page, a lot of information was stuffed onto a single page. Not only did this make the page busy and difficult to read, but it also led to a poor user experience (UX).

Plus, the page only ranked for brand keywords due to which they were missing out on some serious traffic. To capitalize on this goldmine of keywords, the Adobe team built a network of feature pages. They broke down every feature into digestible terms and created a page around it. This ensured Creative Cloud Express ranks for seriously competitive keywords, boosting organic traffic and overall user experience.

The product pages for CC Express have:

• An above-the-line CTA.
• Tips on how to use the feature.
• Details on the specific use cases.
• A final CTA to the product.

Definitely, a good page design that has led to better awareness for Adobe Creative Cloud Express.

2) Great Experience, every time!

A large part of having a great brand is how SaaS users experience the brand, be it a sales pitch, a booth visit, a website demo, or an in-person visit to the experience center. Business presentations often overload the audience with one-sided information dumps. Rather than droning on at listeners, it’s much more powerful to share intimate conversations with them.

A great example is how ServiceNow does it.

InnovationPark program is a series of modular experiences that reflect real-life work scenarios, such as replacing a laptop, refilling a prescription, or preparing a store or event. Over here they lead customers through immersive, tailored sessions to demonstrate what’s possible with ServiceNow technology.

Rather than focusing on a particular product, each experience resolves a specific scenario to showcase how versatile tech can be when used across industries and business functions. Just one example is when they put tablets in the hands of attendees.

By leading the audience through stories, the presenters make experiences such as chatting with a chatbot, approving a hotel desk for an employee, or communicating with a supplier about a supply chain disruption come alive in the (literal) hands of customers. Instead of sitting back and watching a demo, the audience gets to engage with technology, putting themselves in the shoes of people in various functions, such as a sourcing manager at a logistics company, a patient checking in for surgery, or an expecting parent requesting time off. This empowers them to empathize and see their businesses from different vantage points, eventually building a positive mindset about the product.

3) Community-driven advocacy

The growth of SaaS companies is now being driven by how connected and engaged their community of ecosystems is. This allows the community members to help the other community members to drive maximum benefit out of these interactions, which ensures positive word of mouth and greater ecosystem satisfaction. This community could be developers or even product users or partners. A great example here is Salesforce.

Salesforce customers need help using Salesforce. It takes self-trained, motivated admins, developers, and consultants to plug the Salesforce platform into a company's operations. If it's a successful implementation, it takes even more talent to scale up as the Salesforce customer's business grows. To help develop this self-driven talent pool, Salesforce launched Trailhead, a free training site with an outdoorsy theme that includes a gamification element to mark learners' progress.

A Salesforce Trailblazer, or trainee, will then earn credentials called "badges" and gain skills following guided training paths. This is part of the brilliance of Salesforce, building and continuing to curate this massive community of people -- most of whom are not, and have never been -- employed by Salesforce but are activists and fanatical fans out there. They not only help the community with implementation-related queries but also strengthen the Salesforce brand greatly.

Not just Salesforce, you’d notice that most of the top SaaS brands such as Atlassian, and Hubspot have built a strong community of developers, users, admins, partners, or customers to drive higher share-of-voice (SOV).

4) Content is still king!

Content plays a great role in building a strong brand value for a SaaS company. For example, it helps improve SEO, reach the right audience, tell a compelling brand story, attract the attention of the right people, position the SaaS company as a thought leader, and so on. Done rightly, content can help drive word-of-mouth marketing by aligning customers with company strategy and encouraging them to tell the same story.

While SaaS companies keep building top-of-the-funnel content that is educational, there is none better than Hubspot. You run a quick Google search on anything content creation and marketing, and there is at least one HubSpot article among the top 10 results. This SaaS marketing company has become one of the most trusted sources of information and a well-known name for content marketers the world over.

From in-depth B2B content marketing guides to their state of marketing reports, HubSpot has gradually grown into a go-to knowledge hub for both new and seasoned content marketing professionals. Taking inbound marketing to a whole new level Hubspot has created a winning strategy that reflects positively on its brand and helps it differentiate itself from its peers.

Another example is Adobe. Adobe’s blog doesn’t just have all the educational articles you’d expect. In addition to the usual how-to posts, Adobe’s blog covers news stories, goings-on in the design and digital worlds, and event coverage. There are plenty of posts packed full of inspiration. And there’s a ton of user-generated content.

After exploring the blog, we figured all Adobe’s content meets at least one of three goals:

• Inspire
• Educate
• Engage

By focusing on these high-level (and more abstract) goals, as well as metrics and performance-driven goals, Adobe raises the bar. This in turn makes its content more shareable, more useful, and more likely to turn prospects into customers, and users into advocates.

5) Innovation, always

If there was ever one thing that a SaaS company would really love to be known for - then it’s innovation. No tech company has survived the test of time without innovating itself. Innovation refers to keep evolving SaaS solutions to evolving customer needs and remaining relevant to the audience.

One such example is ServiceNow. On May 29, 2018, Forbes magazine placed ServiceNow first on its annual list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies. ServiceNow has systemized customer-led innovation by designing partner programs, a customer advisory board, and many other programs that enable employees to listen to customers and build in tandem, responding to their challenges and opportunities with creativity and an innovative mindset. This philosophy placed ServiceNow in a unique position to help during the COVID-19 pandemic where Washington state created an emergency app to help build safer workplaces. Servicenow partnered with the state to offer this app as a product, in conjunction with other products it developed, to form Safe Workplace Suite.

Another key example here is Intuit. Intuit's growth strategy has been driven by a combination of in-house innovation and strategic acquisitions. This has led to Intuit being known for its innovative solutions. As an example, Intuit has plans to continually improve the AI-Driven expert platform. This includes the use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) to offer personalized and predictive offers and experiences. In addition, to connecting customers directly with experts such as Accountants to help them file their tax returns.

As the SaaS industry grows exponentially, the need for a strong brand will only increase. The above branding aspects and some prominent players mentioned above have been the guiding light for new-age SaaS brands as they learn and create a space for themselves.

#branding and #logodesigndotnet

The lead image for this article was generated by HackerNoon's AI Image Generator via the prompt "times square new york with lots of billboards".