Dubsat is a 10-15 year old company (I don’t actually know when it began) with 110 staff in 9 offices across the world.

Despite their size and history, I’m finding more and more each day that the task ahead of me is akin to the task of marketing a B2B startup. In the past few years, the company has transiitioned from a very traditional services-based business (with the marketing plan to match) to a more SaaS model, yet their marketing hasn’t been updated to reflect this.

Hence, I now find myself in a position where I need to build their marketing from the ground up, similar to the situation in a startup.

Fortunately, this isn’t my first rodeo. Yet one of the things I haven’t focused on so much in the past is branding and I wanted to write this post to express my thoughts and learnings from the past few weeks.

Why is branding so important?

Being part of the B2B startup world for most of my life, I never really believed that much in branding. Firstly, because I believed branding in B2B mattered much less than in consumer goods (I certainly got it for consumer goods), but also because in startup world you tend to focus on activities that will directly drive you revenue (like SEO, blogging, etc) as opposed to the more intangibles like building the brand.

In the past few weeks though, I’ve come to see branding in a new light: as a differentiator and as a way to increase likeability (which is important considering 3 key pillars of B2B customer acquisition are know, like, trust). I think if you can spend some time getting your branding right, it becomes a foundation which filters through all your customer-facing marketing & sales activities (like videos, website design, language, content marketing, etc.) and presents a cohesive image to the market that aligns market perception (often called brand image) with your desired identity (often called brand identity).

If you look at the likes of HubSpot and their culture code, you can really see what their brand is about. If you then go and look at their website (in particular their videos and their content), you will see how that brand manifests into their marketing activities. Personally, I particularly love how every video starts by talking about the problems their customers have, and how they’re designing their product to solve these problems, but more on that later.

Building the foundation

Through my research, I’ve found that there are a number of things that make up the foundation of a brand, and these extend far beyond the basics of your logo and colour palette (so much so that i’m not even going to talk about them here). Brand experts commonly refer to this as your brand identity or brand platform, and it includes:

Vision

What is that you that want to achieve for the world? This isn’t the part where you write I want to achieve an exit for $100 million, but the part where you talk about what you want to do for your customers. At Dubsat, our vision is to ‘simplify the way media companies manage and distribute media’. At HubSpot, their vision is to help businesses create marketing people love (or something of the sort, i’m just guessing by the way they communicate). Whats your vision?

Mission

Every value needs a mission. The mission statement defines how you will realise the vision through action. At Dubsat, our mission statement is ‘to be the leading end to end digital solution aggregating management and distribution for all media content across the global advertising and entertainment industries’.

Values

Values are a set of written beliefs that when used properly, define the way you act. Whilst this might seem a bit fluffy at first, the more I read about culture (its something I’ve been really interested in lately), the more I see the importance of values and how they (albeit indirectly) lead to success. If you don’t believe me, read the story of Zappos and how their values (Wow the customer at every opportunity being the main one) was one of the largest contributors to their $1 billion sale to Amazon.

Using Hubspot again as an example, you’ll see their values are as follows (admittedly these are their cultural values, not specifically their brand values, but they serve my point):

• Be manical about metrics
• Solve for the customer
• Be radically and uncomfortably transparent
• There’s more, but this will do.

By recording these and making them central to the company, they act as guides to the way employees and the company in general act. For instance, Solve for the customer drives a lot of the way HubSpot acts, from their marketing activities (producing educational blog posts and eBooks that solve customers problems through education) to research and development decisions (I.e. prioritising features based on how much they will help the customer).

Brand Essence

In my dictionary, I define brand essence as the ‘emotional trait you want customers to associate with your brand’. Again, this is best illustrated by example:

• Volvo = safe
• Red Bull = Energy

A brand essence is in essence (pun intended) a one-word summary of the way you want people to feel about your brand, and can become a very helpful filter when making marketing decisions. Always be asking, will this activity help establish my brand essence?

Brand Architecture

Not usually an important consideration for startups, but potentially something to keep in the back of your mind. Most startups typically name their company and their product the same and that makes perfect sense.

For Dubsat though, we have 4 main products or services which have been acquired over the years, and as a result our brand architecture got confusing.

To illustrate, our company name was Dubsat and our original product was also called Dubsat, and this worked really well until we started acquiring other companies and bringing their products under our company umbrella. Ultimately, we ended up in a position where we had sales team who was working for a company called Dubsat (known in the market for it’s TV advertising delivery service) but trying to sell workflow optimisation products to printing companies (through our Adsend product that was acquired a few years back). Not surprisingly, we ended up with a lot of confusion in the market as to what it is we actually did and we weren’t able to own any specific ‘positioning’ in our customers minds.

Again, I stress that this isn’t a problem worth spending much time on for startups, but potentially something to keep in mind (especially if you have a vision of releasing multiple, complimentary products).

Core Value Proposition

What is the core value using your product or serivce(s) delivers me as the customer. I cant even begin to tell you how many companies I see get this wrong, or at least don’t communicate it effectively. There’s been a lot of work done on core value propositions (check out MarketingExperiments work on the subject), but the easiest way to understand it is through examples:

• Hubspot: Create marketing people love
• Desk: Delight your customers with awesome customer support
• Adsend (A Dubsat product): Simplify the way you deliver print advertisements to publishers

Notice the common thread. There’s no mention of the product, no jargon, no big-noting. It simply says what value you, as the customer, are going to get out of using the product or service. What value will your customers get?

Features

While this sounds simple, it’s important to understand this from a customer perspective, not a development one.

I recommend writing your feature set internally but using customer interviews (or analytics if available) to understand and rank the features your users actually care about.

If you understand what features matter to your customers, you can build a message hierarchy that presents the most alluring features first, helping get your message across in our lack-of-attention economy.

I’ve also found it effective to categorise features in a logical order, often by workflow. Campaign Monitor do a great job of this on their website (notice how their features are put into categories based on how people work with their product, i.e. create beautiful emails, send campaigns, track your results, etc.) and it really helps people understand what the product does at a high-level as well as presenting the features available to people at each stage of usage.

Benefits

Again, this is something that needs to be developed not internally, but externally through customer interviews.

I’ve recently been spending a lot of time interviewing customers to understand what problems our product solves and what benefits it brings, and I’ve found customers are telling me benefits of using our product that I never heard from internal interviews with sales staff, management, etc.

Interview your customers and ask them what benefits they get, and then create a hierarchy of these benefits based on how many times you hear them from customers (or better yet, create multiple hierarchies for different customer segments).

Activating the brand

All of this is a waste of time if it’s simply words on paper in an unread folder or intranet. You absolutely must use this research as a foundation for your marketing efforts.

One of the companies who does this best is Red Bull. It’s pretty easy to take a guess at what Red Bull’s brand platform may look like, but whats more interesting to study is their activation.

Instead of investing in traditional advertising telling everybody about their drinks, they spend their marketing dollars ‘activating their brand’ by sponsoring every known extreme sports athlete or team on the planet and producing epic content around them, using the brand values each of these people or teams have to bridge them over to their own brand. Not only are Red Bull a case study in content marketing, they are a brilliant case study in branding as well.

The idea of activating the brand in B2B world is similar. Instead of spending money on doing brand building activities or campaigns, what you need to do is filter your brand through everything you do.

To illustrate through example, lets look at Hubspot again. If you consider that one of their main brand values is ‘Solve for the customer’, you will see this core value coming through in a lot of their marketing activities. For instance, the main video on their homepage starts with the sentence ‘It’s tough being a marketer today’. Too me, this instantly says they understand their customers problems, and are actively focusing on ‘solving for the customer’.

Similarly, their marketing approach is almost entirely Inbound and focusing on providing valuable, educational content to the reader. Not only does this net them a bucketload of leads at a ridiculously low cost per lead, but it’s yet another example of how they’re bring the core value of ‘solve for the customer’ to life through their marketing.

I wish I could tell you how to do this within your own organisation, but you have your own values, your own brand essences and your own marketing channels so it would be impossible.

The key takeaway here is that you don’t need to spend money or run campaigns to build your brand, you just need to constantly refer back to your brand platform and foundation and filter those points through every marketing channel and customer touchpoint. It is only through doing this, that you will have a brand image in your customers mind that is completely aligned with the brand identity you are seeking.

Conclusion: Cohesion, differentiation and resonance

Above I have tried to outline a very high-level process of how to go about researching, establishing and building a B2B SaaS brand. Through all of this, I think there are 3 key concepts that you need to keep in the back of your mind: Cohesion, differentiation and resonance.

Cohesion

Throughout each stage you need to have cohesion across all elements, otherwise you will end up with an extremely fragmented brand that will struggle to cement itself in your customers mind. For instance, take a look at three of the elements of HubSpot’s brand platform:

• Value: Solve for the customer
• Core Value Proposition: Create marketing people love
• Marketing Activity: Producing educational content that helps marketers do their job better

See the cohesion here? Their core brand value is solve for the customer, and then the core value proposition they offer to their customers is ‘create marketing people love’ (a problem all marketers want to solve). In order to bring this to life, they produce a bunch of epic, educational eBooks and blog posts that solve problems marketers have (such as how to use social media for marketing) through education.

Differentiation

There’s no point establishing a particular brand essence and brand values if they are exactly the same as someone else in your market, otherwise how are people going to fall in love with you over your competitors.

In Dubsat’s case, we have a significant opportunity to present to our market a much personable, humanised brand. Our competitors present themselves as cold, corporate behemoths and their marketing is extremely product-centric, focused solely on the technical capabilities and specifications of their product rather than the problems it solves for customers.

If we can present a highly personable and humanised brand that focuses not on the products and their technical specifications but on how they solve customer problems, we have a huge chance to stand out in our market.

When establish your brand platform or brand identity, make sure you look at what your competitors are doing and differentiate yourself from (or ‘Find the empty creneau’ as Al Ries and Eric Trout would say).

Resonance

Similarly, there’s no point establishing brand positioning, essence or values if they don’t resonate with your brand. Red Bull are a branding case for the ages, but just because it’s worked for them doesn’t mean it’ll work for Dubsat (in fact, it 100% wouldn’t).

You need to make sure that the brand platform you create will resonate with your target market, and more specifically will meet their needs or address their choice criteria. If you provide million-dollar, business critical IT infrastructure for Fortune 500 companies, you will be cut from the RFP very quickly if you brand yourself like Mailchimp (with it’s cartoon monkey who keeps suggesting ridiculous YouTube videos I should watch). Yeah you might have cohesion and you might be different, but that wont matter in the slightest.

Make sure you understand what the choice drivers are for your customers. If your customers are storing important data with you and value security, then you need to have a more corporate, secure identity. If on the contrary your providing design software to graphic designers, you can afford to have a more fun, visually beautiful brand identity. Conducting customer interviews should help you understand and/or validate this.

The post Building your brand: A guide for B2B SaaS Companies appeared first on Aaron Beashel.

Who you think the top 3 are? Red Bull? Coca Cola? Ford? Whilst you’d be right about 2 of them (Red Bull and Coca Cola), a B2B software company called Hubspot actually came in at number two, beating out marketing stalwart Coca Cola.

So how does a B2B software company beat out the company whose marketing is credited for creating the modern day image of Santa Clause? By using an approach dubbed ‘inbound marketing’, and I’m shocked that more agencies aren’t using this to showcase their knowledge and attract clients.

Lets take a high-level look at how they do it:

HubSpot run a great marketing blog (their product helps businesses do marketing) at blog.hubspot.com and a lot of their content is highly ranked in search engines. When people search for marketing related terms like say, ‘how to use twitter for business’ (try searching it in Google, odds are its post will come up), its educational blog posts appear and people click through to their blog.

After reading their insightful post, I’m served a big call to action about an eBook called ‘How to attract customers using Twitter and Vine’ (notice the correlation between the post and the eBook). I click on it, enter in my name and email and get the eBook.

Suddenly, HubSpot have my details and can market to me via my inbox, and this is where it gets really interesting.

Once they have my details, I’m placed in one of many automated workflows. As I’m a new lead in the early stages of ‘buying’, I’m sent relatively sales-free content on a recurring basis based on the theme of the eBook I originally downloaded. eBooks like ‘How to use Pinterest for business’ and ‘How to engage users on Facebook’ arrive in my inbox on a regular basis.

These eBooks subtly mention the different features of Hubsot’s software in context of the book, and slowly but steadily educate me on HubSpot’s offering.

Once I show some more positive buying signs like returning to the website and viewing the features of Hubspot’s product, I’m moved to another automated workflow where I get sent more product-related content like case studies, buying guides, etc.

If I complete an action highly-indicative of purchase intent, like look at their pricing page for instance, one of their sales representatives is notified of my action and gives me a call to talk about my needs and how their product can meet them.

Ever since I first gave them my email address, they have been systematically educating me on the benefits of their product and moving me through the sales process, without ever lifting a finger.

Once I show enough ‘purchase intent’, the sales rep is notified and contacts me, but by that time I’d educated myself on their product I was pretty much ready to buy.

This refined, completely automated process nets them 1 million unique visits and more than 70,000 new leads EACH MONTH. Pretty impressive huh?

Despite these tactics being increasingly common in the market, a quick look at the websites of some of Sydney’s big name agencies, and I see very few blogs, no downloadable content to capture leads and many basic website features missing (like calls to action).

With such a wealth of advertising and marketing knowledge inside the building and plenty of people capable of stringing words together, advertising agencies are perfectly positioned to create killer inbound marketing and drive new business leads that with a bit of nurturing can turn into huge account wins.

So my question to you guys is what’s the hold up?

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I wanted to share with you, my two subscribers and 30 odd monthly visitors (who are most likely bots or people who landed here accidentally) a few of the things i’ve learnt from being involved in a startup.

Get proof of concept, then throw it out the window

A bit dramatic I know, but steeped in truth none the less. One thing we failed to do correctly when first starting is get proper proof of concept from people who would actually buy our product. We told a lot of people in bars and at family gatherings about our idea and they were all very enthusiastic about its potential, but having few contacts in the right areas meant we probably based our decision to go for it on a lot of enthusiasm and advice from people who would never be in a position to buy our product. Of the few people in the right places that we did speak too, I learnt that there’s a difference between saying it’s a good idea and actually handing money over, so my advice to you is ask right questions to these people, questions not related to the idea but to the problem and whether they’d pay money to solve it. Once you have the answer to these questions, take them with a grain of salt as there is also a significant difference between saying you’d buy it to a friend and actually handing money over.

Do a P&L early, and do it often

One of the biggest mistakes we made early on is that whilst we did a P&L and it all looked great, we never updated it as new information and feedback came to hand. For instance, our initial price point was probably 5 or 6 times higher than what we went to market with but we never updated our P&L with the new figures. Had we done that, I think we would’ve realised we needed to diversify our product offering earlier in order to survive, and I think we would’ve probably reached Cash flow Positive quicker.

Release early and release often

This is an age old mantra, but until you actually make the mistake of not doing it it tends be one of those pieces of advice you know but for some reason ignore (kind of like how speeding kills, or junk food is bad for you). We initially made the mistake of trying to build the greatest product ever and launch with the biggest bang possible and as result we significantly put back our launch date and burnt more of our startup capitol then we needed to. Fortunately for us, when we shifted our direction most of that functionality actually gave us a significant competitive advantage but it could’ve easily worked out differently. Build a minimal viable product, test it works and get out there and start selling it and iterating on feedback.

It’ll cost you, but hire a damn good team of people

We have managed to put together quite a good, committed team over at Launchpad6, but I think we’re really only hitting our stride now after almost 2 years of existence. They say management inexperience is the biggest contributor to business failure and I can now see why, and I often wonder what would be different if we had a rockstar CEO who had done this all before. Regardless of that however, even the little things make up a huge difference. When we first started we had a fairly inexperienced development team (myself as acting product manager included), and as a result we made a lot of poor choices in the planning stage of development which had to be reviewed and changed at a later date. Even if you cant afford to have rockstars inside your company, at least get one to look over some of the important parts as although it’ll cost you upfront, it’ll save you time, stress and hassles when you make the right decision the first time around.

Most of the time, patenting your idea early on is a waste of time and money

This of course doesnt apply to every business, but from the what i’ve learnt from the companies i’ve advised and rockstar startup people I’ve spoken to I would have to agree that patenting your idea early on is a huge waste of valuable capitol. This isnt to say that you shouldn’t do it at the appropriate time, but most startups change so much through their early development phases that they usually look very different to what they started out as, and the 10k-20k that it takes to patent the original idea is much better spent actually bringing the idea to life. Competition is a fact of life and you’ll never be the only one offering what you offer so just accept it and focus on being better than the rest.

The post 5 things I’ve learnt from co-founding a startup appeared first on Aaron Beashel.

The most notable I thought, was Happy Soldiers campaign for Tontine, the Australian market leader in pillows.

The problem Tontine faced was that there market was stagnating and their products lifecycle was too long, consumers were too attached to their pillows and refused to change them.

Enter Happy Soldiers and the ‘Dated Pillows’ campaign. Happy soldiers research showed them that a whole ecosystem of bacteria, dead skin cells and fungi were living in old pillows and that if they could educate the population of this, they could create a level of mass anxiety and fear that would shorten the product lifecycle of pillows in general, considering Tontine had a 50% market share, this would result in increased sales for their client

Their media execution was spot on, ‘burning’ the entire budget in a five day campaign that included TVC’s, drive-time radio and online in an attempt to create mass anxiety and power word of mouth that would extend the campaign lifecycle even when ad spend ceased.

The most brilliant part of the campaign however, was using the product itself as a billboard. By stamping each pillow with a ‘best before’ date they ensured that consumers were reminded of the facts and figures put forward in the campaign every time they changed their pillowcases, and were given a time sensitive call to action that ultimately encouraged the consumer to take the desire action.

In a world where time-sensitive, contextual advertising is the most effective at driving consumer action… They nailed it. The result: after just 15 days sales of Tontine pillows went from an average of 32,000 per week to 142,000, a 345% uplift in sales.

Kudos to Happy Soldiers and Tontine for a well executed campaign, and a well deserved win for Ad Campaign of the Year and Media Campaign of the Year.

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