The wisdom that “if you are friends with everyone, you are not really friends with anyone” is also applicable to founders who position their SaaS product as a “One-size-fits-all”.
It is important to remember three things:
- Your product cannot be valuable to everyone at once: It is unlikely that your product will be valuable to ALL small businesses, ALL marketers, or ALL Americans. It is impossible.
- If your product does everything at once, it probably only does one thing really well: the market is full of “all-in-one marketing” tools, but good marketers still use more than five tools to work. Why do you think that is?
- If a category leader positions their product this way, it means they have spent years improving the product and building an ecosystem between features. However, even market leaders such as Notion, Slack, and Asana no longer use this clichéd positioning. Instead, they focus on the overall value that all product features bring together.
In this article, I’ll explain how to use clichéd positioning approaches to remain unnoticed among competitors, make it harder to convert website visitors into customers, and reduce the value of your SaaS product that you’ve worked so hard to create.
🟢 Always use “Innovative” on the hero screen of the website
Absolutely! Just slap “innovative solution” on a website and people will rush to buy your product. You don’t need to try to communicate the value of this innovation to users if you can simply hide its absence behind a trending word. That’s right!
🟢 Consolidate all trending words into a single tagline
🤩 Join the revolution and empower your business with our cutting-edge software
🤩 Unlock the full potential of your business with our all-in-one tool
🤩 Our cloud-based, data-driven solution is the ultimate business tool for the modern era
Why bother communicating the unique value of your SaaS product when you can just use a bunch of buzzwords and hope potential customers won’t notice the lack of substance? Who needs differentiation anyway? Just blend in with the crowd and hope for the best! After all, who needs a clear and concise message when you can fill your website with meaningless jargon? Genius!
🟢 Remember: to be perceived as a serious product for serious people, your brand identity should not stand out too much.
To create an image of your brand as an innovative and reliable partner, only use shades of blue and grey. Avoid yellow, which can suggest infantilism, and red, which can suggest danger. Pink is also not appropriate unless you are children’s toy store.
The logo shouldn’t fall outside the “category” and have a deep metaphor that only you understand. It’s best to avoid experiments with fonts. Fonts that are too thin can suggest unreliability and fragility, while fonts that are too bold can come across as “shouting” at your audience.
A simple, clean, and minimalistic design will further strengthen your positioning as an innovative and reliable business partner.
Exhale, it’s a joke.
But I’m not laughing. It pains me to see valuable SaaS products with poor positioning that diminish the real value of the product and, as a result, decrease the potential revenue from new website visitors.
In the next article, we will show you how to create a compelling positioning for your SaaS product, which will help you stand out, differentiate yourself, and most importantly, sell the product better by communicating its true value. Spoiler alert: examine your target audience under a microscope.
