What is SaaS Product Positioning and How To Do It Right

One of the crucial elements of a SaaS business success is how they position their product.

What is product positioning and how to approach it better?

What is Product Positioning?

Product positioning is the message you bring to the market: It is how you describe where your product fits the market, how it solves existing problems and why it is better than the competitors.

Simply put, product positioning is making it clear why your product exists.

Product positioning can be implemented through advertising creatives, packaging and even pricing.

A strong positioning statement defines a lot of aspects of your further marketing:

• Your target audience
• Your unique voice and message
• Your advertising strategy

Product positioning helps you control your brand’s narrative.

Positioning is strategic. It serves as the foundation for your marketing tactics.

Your whole team should be aware of your product positioning strategy to be able to communicate it to your customers effectively and consistently.

How to Position Your SaaS Product?

There are several ways to position your SaaS product:

• by product attribute/feature
• by user
• by class
• by application/use
• by value
• against competition

Here’s what each of these types are about:

Position by Product Feature

This type of product positioning focuses on a particular feature of the product that is represented as something that is different from anything offered by competitors.

The key to success in this type is to focus: You don’t want to market too many features. One is the best choice, two is an absolute maximum.

Clearly you know exactly what your current competition is offering and how your platform is unique to correctly position your product using this type.

SE Ranking offers an advanced competitor traffic research platform allowing you to identify and analyze your competitors.

Keyword gap analysis of your current competition is one of possible ways to do that. This type of analysis identifies your competitors’ missing organic opportunities which your product may help bridge:

Position by User

This type of product positioning focuses on your target user describing how your product matches their needs quite perfectly.

For this product positioning it is important to clearly understand your target audience and build buyer personas.

Paykickstart demographics section allows SaaS founders to collect comprehensive data about their current buyers and helps them create detailed buyer personas.

Each customer profile includes:

• The company they work for and the organization details
• The customer’s job title
• Their personal social media profiles
• Products they purchased
• The amount of money they spent, etc.

Using surveys and web forms are more great way to generate feedback and position your product based on your userbase. Consider running a business assessment survey to better understand your collective organizational goals and perspectives.

Further reading:

• Gathering Customer Demographics & Intelligence
• Why a Quantified Buyer Persona Will Explode Your SaaS Growth
• Knowing Your Buyer Persona with Demographic Enrichment
• Finding Your B2B Buyer Persona

Position by Product Class

Is your product targeting small businesses or rather huge corporations? Answering this question helps you position your product by class.

This is where positioning your platform as a VIP or exclusive product usually works.

Position by Use

This type of product positioning focuses on the task your SaaS platform helps to fulfill.

This is where SEO really comes in handy because you can position your brand by searchable tasks or problems that your platform helps solve.

This is also where your business name should reflect your niche and product applications. This business name generator is going to be helpful for your brand positioning purposes.

Position by Value

Value-based product positioning means focusing on the pricing of the product.

If you enter a market with a quality product at a cheaper price and focus your marketing strategy on that, that means positioning your product by value.

Further reading:

• Competition Based Pricing for SaaS
• Is Penetration Pricing the Right Pricing Model for your Business?
• How to Price Your Product in Three Easy Steps
• Competitor Comparison

Position against Competition

This type of positioning focuses on how your product is better than a well-known competitor. Sometimes this comparison is implied. Sometimes it is directly rooted into the marketing message and keywords you are bidding on:

Here are two great examples of marketing messaging focusing on established competitors:

Product Positioning versus Value Proposition

Basically speaking, the value proposition is more generic. It includes all kinds of features and benefits of the product while product positioning focuses on the most relevant one.

While marketers can choose to use a combination of several positioning methods (for example, positioning by perceived value +against their competitor), focus is the most important thing here. If you spread your positioning tactics too thin, you will have a hard time building brand recognizability. 

If you integrate your chosen positioning method in all your marketing methods, you will quickly notice people recognize your brand. And with brand awareness comes a higher conversion rate.

Product positioning statement always aims at a carefully built buyer persona while value proposition is the generic list of everything that makes your SaaS platform useful.

Use Text Optimizer to understand your niche associations. Type your competitor’s brand name into the tool and let it identify underlying concepts Google’s users associate your competitor with:

Further reading:

• How Your Value Proposition Affects Willingness to Pay
• Craft Your Perfect SaaS Product Value Proposition
• SaaS Growth: 6 Systems That’ll Give You Repeat Customers

Product Positioning versus Messaging

Both product positioning and messaging describe the value your SaaS platform provides.

But these are two different processes: 

• Product positioning is fundamental
• Messaging is how you communicate your product positioning

Messaging can take different forms and formats:

• Your product name and your domain name
• Your ad copy (and even keywords you are focusing on)
• Content you are publishing on your site, social media channels and email newsletters
• Your videos and ad creatives, etc.

Messaging is the content you serve to your target audience based on your chosen product positioning strategy.

Conclusion

It is important to understand that product positioning has less to do with the actual product features; it’s more about perceptions.

Product positioning allows you to take control of the narrative that people are associating with your platform.

Brand positioning helps you identify and impact how your customers perceive your brand.

Ann Smarty

Ann Smarty is the Brand Manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas, as well as co-founder of Viral Content Bee. Ann has been into Internet Marketing for over a decade, she is the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Ann is also the frequent speaker at Pubcon and the host of a weekly Twitter chat #vcbuzz

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