Building and Validating the Brand Association in B2B SaaS

This is followup article on how to work with the brand associations in your first brand campaing (but this can be leveraged even in performance marketing channels.)

Today you will learn how do you build and validate a list of brand associations (the right needs associated to the buying situation) to pick the right one for your first brand campaign.

Here’s my approach:

Data Gathering

It all starts with gathering data to make a list of all relevant buying situations and possible needs customers have.

1. Strategic Materials

Use any reserach done previously. Market assessment and the gap your competitors are missing and you can exploit. (The grid for mental availability mentioned in my previous article was inspired by the Blue Ocean Strategy canvas.). But many mid sized SaaS companies lack any solid research to back their business strategy.

2. Interviews

• Sales and Co-founders: Ask them to pitch you the product.
• Product Team: Ask them to explain the product like you were a friend outside the industry. Pay special attention to the first thing they say and how they describe the product in just three sentences. This can be especially insightful if you can ask them informally and unprepared.

3. Past Copy Experiments

Analyze the best-performing ad copies and identify common themes. Get learning from any A/B testing - what proposition worked and also didn't work on the landing pages.

4. Customer Reviews = ??

Identify customer problems and struggles that they mention in the reviews.

Determine where customers find the most value in your product and later do the same for your competiors reviews.

Save the exact wording customers use to describe their problems or the solutions your product provides. This will be crucial for future marketing efforts. Many of my best ad copies are paraphrased from customer reviews.

5. Competitors’ Ads

Review competitors’ display and search ads to pay attention to what proposition they stress the most.

After this, you’ll have a comprehensive list of customer problems and where your product can best address these needs.

Internal Workshop

Your product is built with a vision and strategy. Validate the findings from your data gathering exercise with key stakeholders. This will help you develop hypotheses for the main customer needs and potentially more buying , depending on your business.

These hypotheses need testing. The workshop should result in a detailed brief for:

• Customer Success: Extra questions to ask during each call with an existing clients. (Consider using a product pop-up questionnaire.)
• Sales: Extra questions your sales reps will ask each prospect even during discovery calls (Consider this even in field if your sales are about to attend conferences).

But discussing with customers or prospects will give you great insights but your customers or even people attracted by current messaging can (and at the beginning usualy are) deviated from the market standard.

Questionnaire

Quantitative method like questionnaire can help you to get unbiased insights. But to get the relevant audience is tought in B2B so I usually rely on Linkedin ads targeting and sometimes make the survey right in the lead form ad using the custom questions.

Why not run the questionnaire right from the start?

Sometimes the workshop reveil that the co-founders have a very specific need in mind, such as catering to people who require complex customization while also seeking ease of use, setup, and low maintenance. And I need to ask for this specific combination right in the survey.

Testing in Performance Channels

Immediately after the internal workshop, pick the three most promising propositions for your product. Run it in responsive search ads across your Google Ads ad sets. It is quick to setup and you can gather enought data on what resonates most with your audience before you collect the data from the questionnaire.

Final Results

Determine the following:

• What are the important needs in a particular situation (category entry point)? Is it cost, customization, ease of implementation and maintenance, scalability, etc.?
• How they associate them with the biggest players in the market?

The results might look something like this:

Focus on needs that are not yet fully occupied by competitors but are still important.

The next step is how to effectively communicate the selected need, which will be covered in a future article.

Let me know what is your approach :)

Disclaimer: This is a quick method to gain market insights and improve marketing communication. It’s not a substitute for comprehensive market research as taught by experts like Mark Ritson and Philip Kotler for defining your business strategy.