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5 ways VoC data can help you stand out (and stay ahead) in SaaS
Learn practical ways to use VoC data to help your SaaS brand stand out, sharpen your competitive edge and drive steady growth.
Articles
May 9, 2025
10 min read
How SaaS CMOs can build brand equity in a saturated market
You may not use the term "brand equity" in daily conversations, but as a SaaS CMO, you think about it every day. And so does your sales team, because in a saturated market, strong brand equity makes bringing in leads and closing deals a lot easier.
Global buyers want the credibility of a worldwide brand, but they also expect messaging that speaks directly to their individual challenges. They need you to stand out without straying too far. To be memorable. To be the first brand that comes to mind as the smart, reliable choice.
And then there’s the C-suite and your investors. They’re pushing for positioning that’s bold enough to break through, but still clear, credible, and easy to commercialize. It needs to resonate with buyers, make sense to sales, and hold up under investor scrutiny.
Your job as CMO is to balance all of it and build brand equity in the process.
But what is brand equity, and why does it matter for SaaS?
Brand equity extends far beyond brand awareness. It reflects your brand's actual reputation and perceived value in the market, how much more your buyers are willing to pay, how quickly your sales team can close, and how many doors open for you before a single outbound email is sent.
Benefits of strong brand equity:
- Faster sales cycles: Sales cycles accelerate as B2B buyers are more likely to choose brands they recognize and respect.
- Price justification: Companies with strong brand equity can charge more and justify it, with one-third of B2B buyers willing to pay a premium for a vendor they trust.
- Stronger internal advocacy: Employees at companies with strong brand equity are more likely to post positively on platforms like LinkedIn and Glassdoor, and to engage with company content. This creates a reinforcing loop that attracts both customers and top talent alike.
- Higher customer loyalty and retention: Customer loyalty translates directly into higher lifetime value; even a 5% increase in retention can boost your profits by 25-95%. And, perhaps most valuably, customers who believe in your brand become brand referral engines, which significantly lowers your customer acquisition costs (CAC).
How to measure brand equity
When measuring brand equity, traditional metrics like website traffic and share of search still matter. But in 2025, they tell an incomplete story.
A growing share of B2B buying happens outside standard tracking, in private communities, trusted peer networks, and increasingly, via AI recommendations. Some of these newer sources are becoming slightly more trackable (referrals from tools like ChatGPT, for example, have started appearing in Google Analytics), but much of this activity still flies under the radar.
So before jumping to any conclusions, start by talking to your customers and establishing your brand equity baseline by evaluating these key areas:
Brand Awareness
- Unaided recall: Who remembers your brand name without prompting?
- Aided recognition: Who recognizes your brand name from a list? (Less powerful but still important).
- Branded search volume: Are buyers searching for your brand or just your solution category?
Perceived Quality & Reputation
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) trends: Which customer groups like you vs. which ones would actually recommend you?
- Support ticket sentiment: How are your customers talking about you day to day?
- Traditional and social media sentiment: What’s the tone around your brand across industry media, and LinkedIn?
- Review site performance: How do you stack up on SaaS review sites like G2 and TrustRadius?
Share of Voice
- B2B community engagement: Are you part of the conversation in key B2B spaces like Slack groups or Reddit threads?
- SEO visibility for key category terms: Do you rank for high-intent commercial keywords?
- Analyst reports: How are you positioned in spaces like Gartner or Forrester?
- CAC trends: Is your customer acquisition cost (CAC) steadily dropping over time?
- Aquisitions costs: Is it becoming easier (and cheaper) to win new customers?
- Conversion rates: Are buyers moving faster and more confidently through the funnel?
With this baseline in place, here are five powerful strategies you can use to build brand equity and drive every CMO’s favorite word (pipeline).
#1: Craft a clear and defensible brand narrative
Buyers don’t start with a blank slate. They absorb brand narratives from analysts, peers, and thought leaders before formal evaluations even begin. Winning vendors influence how those categories exist in their buyers’ minds.
Brand Equity in SaaS:
- Take Drift as an example. They could have been just another ‘live chat’ tool, but instead, they repositioned themselves under a new category: Conversational Marketing. This shift framed live chat as a revenue driver rather than a support tool, making it highly relevant to revenue leaders focused on pipeline acceleration and growth. By defining the category on its terms, Drift bypassed feature-based competition, commanded premium pricing, and scaled to $135M in revenue.
You'll know you're winning when buyers use your terminology unprompted, competitors reposition to keep up, and analysts on key SaaS platforms like Forrester and Gartner validate your approach.
Start by asking: What pressing problem do enterprise buyers struggle to articulate? Frame it in a way that makes your solution the obvious answer.
#2: Build a distinctive (and consistent) visual and verbal identity
In an ocean of “corporate blue” websites, stock photography, and interchangeable messaging, your brand’s visual and verbal identity isn’t just about recognition; it’s about making buying easier.
With more teams, multiple channels, and various stakeholders touching and promoting your brand daily, keeping messaging, design, and tone aligned at scale is a challenge. And the more mental effort it takes for buyers to understand and advocate for your solution, the slower the process.
A lot of B2B marketing teams, especially at the enterprise level, suffer from 'too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen syndrome,' which leads to conflicting messages and eventually watered-down, safe, empty jargon like 'innovative solutions' and 'digital transformation,” that attempt to speak to everyone but end up resonating with no one.
These buzzwords don't just fail to connect, they actively damage your brand’s credibility with buyers who crave authenticity.
A distinctive and consistent brand can significantly reduce that friction. When champions inside your ICP see the same messaging reinforced everywhere, they don’t have to reinterpret or rephrase your value to get stakeholder buy-in; it’s already packaged in a way that’s easy to share and defend.
You might be thinking, “Our buyers care about ROI and integrations, not whether our colors match. Does brand consistency really drive revenue?”
Well, if it didn’t, HubSpot (likely) wouldn’t have gotten to an impressive $2.17 billion in revenue.
Brand Equity in SaaS:
- HubSpot's success isn’t solely due to the development of great software. The company’s playful yet authoritative orange brand stands out because they built scalable systems to keep messaging, design, and tone aligned across a massive team to support great software. Their brand style guide defines typography, color palettes, logo usage, and brand voice, ensuring a unified look and feel across every asset. Their editorial voice guide keeps blog posts, social captions, and customer emails sounding like they came from the same company, whether written by a marketer, product manager, or sales rep.
Buying committees are large, internal selling is messy, and decisions take months. Consistency may not close the deal, but it absolutely accelerates it.
#3: Go beyond product, lead with thought leadership
B2B buyers aren’t starved for content, they’re starved for insight that actually helps them make sense of a noisy, high-stakes market. They crave something with a face, a personality, a clear perspective, and, dare we say… an opinion.
Your prospects are sizing up your thinking just as much as your features. Your brand equity is about what you sell AND about how you think. The strongest enterprise brands are active participants in industry conversations rather than just passive observers.
When you show genuine intellectual leadership instead of regurgitated AI clichés, you can create preference long before prospects even start thinking about buying. So show them you understand their world as well as they do, if not better.
All SaaS companies (especially at the enterprise level) need to develop in-house thought leaders who can win on likeability, uniqueness, and expertise. You don’t need a dozen thought leaders. You need a few consistent, visible experts who can represent your brand’s brain in public.
You have an audience, meet them where they are with:
- Substantive analysis of industry trends
- Case studies with actionable insights
- Original research that challenges conventional wisdom
- Free frameworks that help buyers solve problems
And mix up your content forms:
- Long-form articles for depth
- Short social posts for visibility
- Webinars and podcasts for engagement
- Speaking engagements at industry conferences
Creating genuinely distinctive thought leadership requires exceptional quality and consistency, demanding significant time from executives and subject matter experts who are often focused on immediate revenue activities.
But when you make the space, the payoff is long-term access to your buyers’ attention, before they’re in a sales cycle. Thought leadership earns you the right to show up in their feed, inbox, or event calendar without asking for anything in return. And when they’re finally ready to buy, your brand is already top of mind.
#4: Invite customers into your brand strategy
Your customers are your credibility. When they believe in your brand they promote, defend, and refer.
The best marketers embrace this by building and nurturing a community around their customers.
Brand Equity in SaaS:
- Superhuman grew rapidly by making its earliest users feel like insiders. Their invite-only growth strategy turned early adopters into Superstrong advocates. Their waitlist and referral system created genuine demand and a community where users felt like VIPs. This combination helped Superhuman reach $35.6M in revenue with minimal spend on traditional marketing methods.
To incorporate customers into your brand, invest in customer-led storytelling through case studies, user-generated content, and referral programs. Implement ongoing Voice of Customer programs to capture feedback that shapes both your product and positioning.
Build safe spaces for customer connection, whether Slack groups, private LinkedIn communities, or in-person roundtables for key personas in your target market.
When you put real customer stories and conversations at the heart of your content, you kickstart a cycle where customers naturally become your best advocates. And in turn, social proof carries exceptional weight when buyers have to make complex, risky decisions.
The most effective Voice of Customer programs flip the traditional approach and focus first on delivering genuine value rather than trying to squeeze out perfectly polished testimonials.
#5: Improve brand quality in the eyes of your customers
Brand equity isn’t merely a perception play. It’s a financial asset that can appreciate or depreciate based on how well your software experience aligns with customer expectations. Yet, most enterprise SaaS companies undervalue and undermanage it because brand is still treated as a marketing function rather than a company-wide responsibility.
Enterprise buyers talk, share screenshots, and flag friction fast. So if your onboarding feels disjointed or your support is slow, your brand takes a hit.
Look closely at where your brand consistency could be compromised.
Here are the usual culprits:
- Onboarding process: A poor onboarding experience with your product, platform, or solution can quickly dissolve any trust that was built during the sales process. When new customers can't quickly find success with your platform, they're likely to leave before they've truly experienced what your solution offers, which leads to lost revenue that compounds over time.
- Support experience: A frustrating support journey can turn a well-loved product into a liability. Investing in high-quality human support boosts retention and strengthens lifetime value.
- UI/UX design: In SaaS, your UI is your brand. A beautiful website won’t make up for a clunky, unintuitive product experience. And vice versa. A great product is harder to sell if your brand looks outdated or untrustworthy.
As humans, we’re wired to feel negative experiences 5x more intensely than positive ones. An unclear onboarding flow or a lost support ticket can outweigh five great client experiences. So before you double down on delight, find ways to fix the friction.
Brand Equity in SaaS:
- Notion's "simplicity with power" brand promise stays alive through an intuitive product interface. From the clean menu to drag-and-drop functionality, the product walks the walk, and, in turn, has helped them scale to $300M in revenue.
If championing UX efforts feels overwhelming, start by gathering Voice of Customer data to build your case and prioritize opportunities. Audit your entire customer journey to identify areas where friction is frustrating your customers the most.
For CMOs, influencing product experience can be particularly challenging due to organizational boundaries. Cross-functional brand workshops and shared success metrics can align teams around brand experience and make it a shared responsibility.
The long-term payoff of building brand equity
Your C-Suite may not ask about brand equity by name, but it underpins everything they do care about: CAC, sales velocity, retention, expansion, and revenue.
Strong brand equity makes your entire go-to-market motion more efficient:
- Your content performs better with less promotion
- Word-of-mouth reduces dependency on paid channels
- Sales cycles shorten because buyers trust you faster
- Deal sizes grow, and customers stay longer
Brand equity is not a soft metric. It’s a strategic asset. One that builds trust at scale, shortens time-to-value, and drives compound growth across every function, from marketing and sales to recruiting and retention.
That said, it doesn’t spike, it accumulates. Brand equity gains strength with consistency. Every great experience, every sharp insight, every customer who shares your name adds weight to it.
To recap, here’s how you build brand equity:
- Craft a clear, defensible brand narrative that shapes the market on your terms
- Build a distinctive and consistent identity that reduces friction and builds trust
- Lead with meaningful thought leadership that buyers want to read and share
- Invite customers into your brand and turn advocates into amplifiers
- Deliver experiences that match the message from onboarding to renewal
The payoff? Your demand gen engine works harder for less:
- Content drives more qualified attention with less spend
- Warm leads multiply through social proof and referrals
- Sales cycles shrink because buyers already believe in your value
- Conversion rates and retention improve as brand trust strengthens
And despite the old narrative, CFOs aren’t universally against brand marketing. In fact, 73% are either supportive or cautiously open to investing in it. What they do push back on is marketing without a measurable return.
That’s your opportunity. Show them, and your C-Suite, that in a saturated market, brand equity isn’t fluff.
Because brand and demand aren’t competing priorities, they’re compounding forces. A trusted brand makes your campaigns more effective. And high-performing demand engines give your brand more chances to be seen and remembered.
In a market flooded with lookalikes, demand can be fickle, and campaigns come and go. Brand equity is what gives you staying power.
It’s what gives you the resilience to lead your category, win over competitors, and drive steady ARR growth year after year.
