The Ultimate SaaS Startup Branding Guide
Tips on how you can brand your SaaS startup in the crowded marketplace
Throughout my journey in the startup ecosystem, I’ve helped startups build their brands from the ground up. My involvement also led me to build a wiki specifically for B2B startups (built during my time at Tin Men Capital, VC investing in B2B SaaS and marketplaces in SEA).
One big challenge is differentiating themselves in the crowded market. It’s especially difficult today as more startups emerge due to the entrance of GenAI technologies and the scale and speed it is growing.
Also, many founders believe branding is secondary in the early stages of building their startup. They would spend the majority of their time on hard building, hard raising, and hard selling because in their perceptions, these move the needle. While these are crucial, neglecting branding can be a mistake.
A strong brand from the start helps your startup appear credible, investable, and ready for users, and not just some gimmicks or fun projects.
If you’re a SaaS startup founder grappling with these challenges, you’ve come to the right place. I’ll be walking through how to build a startup brand, even if you have zero knowledge about what it is.
What is a brand?
I’ve seen many blogs going straight into what a brand is, but not what a brand is not. So here is once and for all, the definition of what a brand is not:
A brand is not a logo.
It’s not a product.
It’s not the sum of all the impressions it makes on an audience.
Instead, a brand is:
A brand is a promise of what to expect the next time someone engages with you.
It’s a person’s gut feeling about your product and service.
It’s in their heads and in their hearts.
It’s your reputation.
Now, what about branding?
If you think that branding or rebranding is logo-ing or re-logo-ing, you don’t understand it well enough.
Being named Sam is not a brand. Sam is your name, not a promise. If you’re a visionary, selfish hustler, that’s your brand.
Alternatively, you can’t say “We’re Nike” by pointing to your sneakers because, in a blind taste test, everything is the same.
It’s something else. It’s about doing the work we care about, work that people honor and share with others (the process).
If Nike were to open a hotel, we would probably correctly guess what it would be like.
Now that we understand what a brand is not, and what a brand and branding is, let’s move on to the essential part of this article — creating a brand identity.
What is a Brand Identity?
A brand identity is the visual and emotional representation of a brand.
A brand identity includes a number of key elements — logo, colors, messaging, typography, and brand work — all work together with the help of a brand style guide and design assets.
All elements of a well-built brand are carefully designed to evoke specific feelings and associations in the minds of customers.
Brand Identity Checklist
Just like building a SaaS startup, we need a checklist for building a brand. We call this the ‘Brand Identity Checklist.”
Here are 7 elements of a brand identity you need to note down:
- Brand Strategy
- Brand Personality
- Brand Messaging
- Visual Identity
- Brand Assets
- Brand Experience
- Brand Guidelines
1. Brand Strategy
We must make this clear: People have choices and they’re not going to choose something because you want them to.
We first need a clear brand strategy (sort of like a vision) to oversee the rest of the elements (top-down approach). This ensures that everything is aligned and consistently crafted, in order to differentiate ourselves from the crowded market.
Brand strategy is about positioning, game theory, and time — how will tomorrow be different than today to change the dynamic of the marketplace?
Positioning is about a clear map of who you are and who you are not. Essentially, if you’re not eagerly sending potential business to you’re ‘competitors’, then you don’t have a positioning. Basically you’re saying you’re for everyone.
In simpler terms, means, “We don’t have to compete with [brand], they do that, we do this.” It’s about defining your niche so distinctly that the competition becomes irrelevant/differentiated in your specific domain.
Start your branding process with a clear brand strategy
Let’s learn this from Ogilvy:
“Effective brand strategy begins with the consumer. Every successful brand today fosters a connection with the consumer, providing service and relevance. In order to achieve that relationship, we ensure that a brand’s strategy acts as a force that pulls every brand behavior, experience, and expression into a cohesive and intentional whole.
…Consumers want to connect with brands who stand for something, built on meaningful principles that aren’t ancillary to business concerns, but baked into the brand’s core. We ensure that every brand exists to make a material difference in consumers’ lives.
A brand is a living thing. It can only become an integral part of a consumer’s life if it’s able to adapt to changing circumstances, to fill the customer’s wants and needs over the short, medium, and long term.
To develop a strategy, start with these:
Brand Discovery
A strong brand is built on a solid foundation, and we make sure that our clients’ brands are constructed properly and for long-term success. A brand that isn’t well-positioned simply won’t resonate with consumers. We ensure that our brand positionings are unique, credible, relevant, inspiring and future-proof. Our experts assess market factors, competitor threats and opportunities, and determine how to activate the brand across every audience and that it creates value for the consumer.
Brand Creation
To make a brand matter to today’s consumer, it has to stand for something beyond the bottom line. A meaningful and legitimate brand purpose is not a CSR-fueled add-on, but is determined as part of the brand’s DNA. Along with determining purpose, this is the stage where we help the brand define its core values and behaviors. Only then can the overtly front-facing aspects be created — naming, visual identity, innovation opportunities and future investment strategies.
Brand Definition
How does a modern brand manifest itself? In today’s digital environment, the customer is as much a part of the brand as the brand itself. So defining then brand starts with definition of the market, the target audience, the go-to-market strategy and experiences and actions that will bring the brand to life. And as today’s brand-customer relationships is ongoing, a successful brand must employ effective governance systems along with measurement and tracking that allows for effective optimization.
If you’re looking for help to position your brand better, consider engaging Designlabb. You may book a call with us here.
2. Brand Personality
As Ogilvy mentioned, “A brand is a living thing.”
We need to determine our brand personality. Brand personality gives your brand human-like traits, helping people relate to it.
It’s about how your brand sounds, acts, and feels. Are you serious or playful? Bold or friendly?
Your personality helps create a deeper connection with your audience.
This includes your tone of voice (ToV), archetype, and attributes.
Consider this article from Semrush to define your brand’s TOV.
3. Brand Messaging
Brand messaging is how you communicate your values to customers. It’s about expressing who you are and what you offer in a way that resonates with your audience.
Donald Miller, author of Building a StoryBrand, said:
“All great stories are about survival — either physical, emotional, relational, or spiritual. A story about anything else won’t work to captivate an audience. Nobody’s interested. This means that if we position our products and services as anything but an aid in helping people survive, thrive, be accepted, find love, achieve an aspirational identity, or bond with a tribe that will defend them physically and socially, good luck selling anything to anybody.”
Most brands fail to focus on the aspects of their offer that will help people survive or thrive.
You can sell features all day but you can sell benefits through a story. We try to change how they think to change the things they do.
Think of your startup as a movie, your customers have all the burning questions inside of them, and if we aren’t answering them at the get-go, they’ll move on to other companies.
As mentioned in the book, “If we haven’t identified what our customer wants, what problem we are helping them solve, and what life will look like after they engage our products and services, for example, we can forget about thriving in the marketplace. Whether we’re writing a story or attempting to sell products, our message must be clear. Always.”
Literally, if you confuse, you lose.
Not just one customer, but all of them.
So start closing those gaps, make sure your funnel doesn’t have leakages (at small of a hole as possible), make the journey predictable, and you’re clear on your messaging (i.e. who’s the hero, what you want to solve, what the hero has to overcome, what’s the outcome, WHAT HAPPEN IF HE DOESN’T USE OUR PRODUCT, etc.).
4. Visual Identity
Visual identity is how your brand looks. It includes your logo, colors, fonts, and any visuals that represent your brand.
These elements need to be consistent and recognisable to create a lasting impression on your audience. Without the first 3 points above, the visual elements are hard to bring to life.
However, like what Donald Miller say:
“The fact is, pretty websites don’t sell things. Words sell things. And if we haven’t clarified our message, our customers won’t listen. If we pay a lot of money to a design agency without clarifying our message, we might as well be holding a bullhorn up to a monkey. The only thing a potential customer will hear is noise.”
Just because a tagline sounds great or a picture on a website grabs the eye, that doesn’t mean it helps us enter into our customers’ stories. It’s music to the ears or noise to the ears. Either one.
The brain remembers music and forgets noise.
Internal noise has killed more business than other things like taxes, recessions, and technology advancement — in fact, that’s exactly why your message must be clear.
As tech advances, more new words float everywhere, the internet is fragmented, and you get pieces of information everywhere, so you need to gather your audiences’ minds in one place, with a clear and consistent story/messaging.
Take a step back and engage your own business like you’re the customer.
Remove all the noise internally so that on the outside, you’re well-perceived. They think you’re clear, you solve their problem, and THEY WANT YOU!
Read Mailchimp’s article here on How to Build a Visual Brand Identity.
5. Brand Assets
Brand assets are kind of like your visual identity. Except, when you’re creating your visual identity, you focus on the look and feel itself.
When we talk about brand assets, we’re talking about resources like collaterals, social media templates, email signatures, favicons, banners, etc.
Brand assets are the physical and digital tools that represent your brand. These are the things you’ll use to maintain a consistent look and feel in all of your branding materials.
6. Brand Experience
Seth Goldin said, “I don’t care about your logo, really. Few of us do. If you don’t believe me, look hard at the logos for Starbucks, Neutrogena, and Hermes. It really doesn’t matter.”
Making a name sound good or a logo look good doesn’t really matter.
Ultimately, it’s about bringing life to it. And naturally, people will associate the name with the brand.
That’s what crafting the brand experience is about. It’s about bringing users through a whole experience.
It’s about how people interact with your brand, from visiting your website to unboxing your products. It’s the overall feeling and impression they get. A positive, consistent experience builds trust and loyalty.
In HubSpot’s Everything You Need to Know About Brand Experience, they talk about the difference between Brand Experience and Customer Experience:
Perception
Perception forms a key part of the experience. This includes audio, visual, and tactical interactions that allow customers to connect a specific sense to advertising campaigns. In much the same way that particular smells can bring back memories of childhood experiences, brands that successfully merge senses with marketing can create connections that drive sales.Participation
It’s also more likely that customers will walk away with a positive brand experience if they’re able to participate in some way rather than simply watch. This might include the ability to submit suggestions online or interact in real-time online question forums, or it could feature the use of physical installations that allow consumers to touch your product or provide direct feedback.Personalization
Generic marketing campaigns can produce steady returns, but personalization can help encourage connection across different customer segments. By leveraging both user-provided data (with their consent) along with social media interactions and other engagement data, it’s possible to create more personalized efforts that help create connections between consumer needs and current product offerings.Prioritization
Brand experience can’t be all things to all people. Attempts to capture every consumer in every circumstance actually undermine experience-driven efforts — as a result, it’s worth selecting specific brand metrics such as positive social mentions or repeat purchases to prioritize.
“Story [formulas] reveal a well-worn path in the human brain, and if we want to stay in business, we need to position our products along this path.”
Your brand should be predictable. You should know how to keep your audience’s attention for hours. You should keep your audience coming back for more.
7. Brand Guidelines
Ever heard of someone saying, “this is not on-brand?”
Most of the brands I work with rarely have a brand guideline document in their repository.
This is one of the most important things you should have. This helps future designers and users know the rules to keep your identity consistent across all platforms.
They cover things like how to use your logo, colors, fonts, tone of voice, and digital and offline applications. All in one.
These guidelines help ensure your brand looks and feels the same no matter where people see it.
You don’t want people to see you operating like Apple on LinkedIn, but Wendy’s on Instagram.
Imagine if Apple suddenly started posting memes and roasting competitors on LinkedIn, or if Wendy’s began using highly technical jargon and minimalist designs on Instagram. It would confuse their audience and dilute their brand identity.
In the fast-paced world of startups, especially in the B2B SaaS space, building a strong brand is a necessity. As we’ve explored throughout this guide, branding goes far beyond creating a logo or choosing colors. It’s also about crafting a comprehensive identity that resonates with your audience and sets you apart in a crowded market.
Let’s recap the key elements of building a SaaS startup brand:
- Brand Strategy: your north star that guides all other branding decisions
- Brand Personality: the human-like traits that make your brand relatable
- Brand Messaging: how you communicate your value proposition clearly and compellingly
- Visual Identity: the cohesive look that makes your brand instantly recognisable
- Brand Assets: tools and resources that help maintain consistency across all touchpoints
- Brand Experience: the overall feeling customers get when interacting with your brand
- Brand Guidelines: the rulebook that ensures consistency and coherence in all brand expressions
New startups are emerging at an unprecedented rate, and a distinctive brand can be your secret weapon. It’s what makes you memorable in a sea of similar offerings. It’s what turns first-time users into loyal advocates.
Remember, in the words of Jeff Bezos, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
So what do you want them to say about your startup?
Start building and investing in your brand today. Your startup’s success may very well depend on it.
Did I miss anything out? Leave us a comment below or shoot me an email at alvis@designlabb.cc.
