So what exactly is SaaS market positioning?
Market positioning is the marketing process of defining how your SaaS product should be perceived by customers in relation to your competitors' offerings. An optimal market positioning platform articulates your unique value proposition — the key benefits you offer that competitors don't, all oriented around a clearly defined buyer persona and their top unmet needs. It shapes everything from product messaging and marketing campaign creative to sales enablement content.
Given its sheer make-or-break importance, how should a SaaS startup carefully approach and validate their market positioning? Here are some key strategies and considerations:
Start with customer discovery
Customer insight has to be the bedrock for any positioning exercise, not recycled conventional wisdom or hunches about the space. Run surveys, interviews, and rigorously listen to the voice of your target market. What are their real-world top needs, pain points, and use cases? What solutions have they tried and been underwhelmed by? What gets them most excited about a hypothetical new offering?
The aim is to uncover golden insights about niche unmet needs or frustrations where you could optimize to over-deliver and delight in a way that incumbents are not. Analyzing this customer voice data should point you towards gaps, tensions, or contradictions that start hinting at opportune positioning territories.
Map the competitive landscape
In parallel to customer discovery, you need to intimately understand the existing competitive landscape you're entering — who the key players are, their current positionings and branding, their real-world reputation and strengths/weaknesses among customers, and any white space opportunities not yet staked out.
Rigorously map all of the competitors and realistically assess where their offerings are competitively advantaged or disadvantaged. Look for openings and angles you could pursue that would allow you to not just be slightly better, but to truly re-define the game and capture uncontested demand.
For example, maybe there's an opportunity to move upmarket and create a more premium enterprise-grade offering than current SMB-focused players. Or to compete on a new dimension like best developer experience or deepest vertical-specific functionality. This landscape mapping should start crystalizing the potential value propositions and positioning themes you could own and closely align to real demand patterns.
Prototype and test positioning hypotheses
With customer insights and a mapping of the competitive arena in hand, now it's time to conceptualize and prototype some specific positioning hypotheses to test and validate. Maybe something like:
- "[Product] is the first true enterprise-grade, scalable workflow automation platform for [industry] teams, built from the ground up to ensure bank-grade security and compliance."
- "Finally, a low-code app builder that eliminates fragmented data silos and technical debt, enabling fast-moving companies to easily build robust, interconnected SaaS products tailored to their needs."
Craft a few positioning statements like these that each has a distinct, differentiated value prop and angle on the market. Probe them with more customer interviews — do they resonate and get people's attention compared to competitors? Do target buyers intuitively understand the positioning and see it as valuable for them?
You can also cost-effectively test positionings quantitatively using audience sampling, social media promotion, and conversion funnels. Put together quick landing pages for each candidate positioning, drive smart traffic, and measure engagement metrics like click-through rates and conversion rates. This agile, data-driven positioning process helps validate whether you've struck gold with the right formula.
A few real-world examples of distinct SaaS product positionings
Airtable: "Part spreadsheet, part database, and entirely flexible. Build collaborative apps or modernize your workflows with a few clicks — no coding required."
Zapier: "Easy automation for busy people. Zapier moves info between your web apps automatically, so you can focus on your most important work."
- Positioning as the clear workflow/task automation solution, making people's lives easier and more efficient.
DocuSign: "The World's #1 eSignature Solution for Business. Digitally transform your organization to be 100% digital."
- Positioning as the leading, top enterprise-grade solution for contract process digitization and signature efficiency.
Totango: "Totango maximizes recurring revenue through recurring data. Gain insights across the R&R lifecycle to drive retention, expansion, and customer success."
- Positioning as the data-driven recurring revenue optimization and customer success solution.
Stay agile and evolve with the market
Lastly, it's critical for SaaS companies to stay nimble and continually evaluate if market conditions or their own offering has evolved to the point where pivot or refinement of their positioning is ideal. Maybe those initial customer profiles and needs shift as the product scales and moves upmarket. Or perhaps a new game-changing feature is developed that allows you to 'reposition' into an entirely new category.
The key is to always be in tune with market trends and have a data-driven feedback loop so that you can agilely course-correct rather than stubbornly sticking to a positioning that may no longer optimally fit. Market positioning defines your SaaS product strategy and is too important to be set in stone. Continuously tweak it based on market signals while retaining your core differentiation and identity.
Summary
In summary, for SaaS startups and new products, few strategic decisions are as pivotal as crafting your market positioning. It determines how prospects categorize and compare you. Nail the right positioning through diligent customer discovery, landscape mapping, and positioning iteration, and you can set the terms of engagement — establishing lasting differentiation and dominance in a lucrative niche. Get it wrong, and your SaaS will languish as an undifferentiated afterthought. Take the time to get it right from the outset, as it can truly make or break your startup.
