Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
When I first started working with B2B SaaS clients, I kept hearing the same story. Founders would tell me: "We need to build brand awareness. We need to get our name out there. We need people to know who we are."
And honestly? That approach almost never worked for startups with limited budgets.
Here's what I discovered after working with dozens of SaaS and ecommerce clients: brand affinity beats brand awareness every single time. While competitors were burning cash on "awareness" campaigns, my most successful clients were building something more powerful - genuine connection with their audience.
The difference? Brand awareness is about recognition. Brand affinity is about preference. One makes people know you exist. The other makes them choose you over competitors.
In this playbook, you'll discover:
Why traditional brand awareness campaigns fail for startups
The counterintuitive approach that builds real customer loyalty
How to measure brand affinity (hint: it's not what you think)
My step-by-step system for building preference over recognition
Real metrics from clients who chose affinity over awareness
This isn't about following the latest branding trends. It's about building distribution that actually converts strangers into advocates.
Industry Reality
What every startup founder has been told about branding
Walk into any marketing conference or open any growth playbook, and you'll hear the same advice repeated endlessly:
"You need to build brand awareness first."
The conventional wisdom goes like this:
Invest in logo design and brand guidelines
Create "awareness" campaigns across multiple channels
Measure success through impressions, reach, and recall
Focus on getting your name "out there"
Eventually, awareness will translate to sales
This approach exists because it mirrors how large corporations build brands. Coca-Cola, Apple, Nike - they all invest billions in awareness campaigns. So naturally, startup founders think they should follow the same playbook.
Marketing agencies love this approach too. It's easy to sell "brand awareness" campaigns because the metrics look impressive. "Look, we got you 2 million impressions this month!" sounds great in a board meeting.
But here's the problem: awareness without preference is just expensive noise. I've seen too many startups burn through their entire marketing budget on awareness campaigns that generated zero qualified leads. They got recognition but not revenue.
The reality? For resource-constrained startups, brand affinity - the emotional connection that drives preference - delivers exponentially better ROI than pure awareness plays. You don't need everyone to know you. You need the right people to choose you.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
The moment this clicked for me was during a project with a B2B SaaS client in the HR tech space. They came to me frustrated after spending six months and significant budget on a "brand awareness" campaign.
Their marketing team had followed all the textbook advice. Professional brand guidelines, check. Multi-channel awareness campaigns, check. Impressive reach metrics, double check. They were getting thousands of impressions, decent website traffic, and their brand tracking surveys showed improving "unaided recall."
But their trial signup rates? Flat. Their sales team was struggling to convert leads. Prospects would recognize the company name but couldn't articulate why they should choose them over competitors.
That's when I realized the fundamental flaw in their approach.
We weren't just competing for attention - we were competing for preference. And preference isn't built through logo placement and clever taglines. It's built through demonstrating value, sharing expertise, and creating genuine connections with your audience.
I started digging into their most successful customer acquisition channels. The pattern was clear: their best customers weren't coming from awareness campaigns. They were coming from the founder's LinkedIn content, case studies shared in industry communities, and word-of-mouth referrals from existing customers.
These customers didn't just know about the company - they had developed a preference for their approach, their expertise, and their solutions. They chose this SaaS not because they saw more ads, but because they felt a connection to the brand's values and methods.
This led me to a controversial realization: for startups, brand affinity should come before brand awareness. You need people to prefer you before you worry about whether they know you exist.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Based on this insight, I developed what I call the Affinity-First Framework. Instead of starting with awareness, we start with building genuine preference among a smaller, highly-targeted audience.
Step 1: Document Your Unique Perspective
The first thing we did was shift from generic brand messaging to opinion-driven content. Rather than saying "We help companies manage HR better," we started sharing specific takes on industry problems.
For this client, that meant the founder writing about contrarian hiring practices, sharing behind-the-scenes decision-making processes, and challenging popular HR trends. This wasn't brand awareness content - it was brand affinity content. People started following them not because they had a recognizable logo, but because they had valuable perspectives.
Step 2: Build Depth Before Width
Instead of trying to reach everyone in HR tech, we focused obsessively on building deep relationships with 500 highly-qualified prospects. We identified companies that fit their ideal customer profile and started engaging with their decision-makers through valuable content and direct outreach.
This approach mirrors what I learned from my B2B newsletter growth work - it's better to have 100 people who eagerly read every piece of content than 10,000 who barely notice you exist.
Step 3: Create Preference Through Problem-Solving
We transformed their content strategy from promotional to educational. Instead of talking about their product features, we started solving actual problems their prospects faced daily.
They created detailed guides on compliance issues, shared templates for performance reviews, and offered free tools for common HR calculations. Each piece of content was designed to make prospects think: "These people really understand my challenges."
Step 4: Measure Connection, Not Impressions
We completely changed how we measured success. Instead of tracking reach and impressions, we focused on engagement depth: email replies to newsletters, time spent on resource pages, direct messages from prospects, and most importantly, the quality of sales conversations.
The sales team started reporting that prospects were coming to calls already educated about their approach and genuinely excited to work with them. That's brand affinity in action.
Depth Over Width
Focus on building strong connections with fewer people rather than weak recognition with many
Value-First Content
Share expertise and solve problems before pitching products or services
Opinion-Driven Messaging
Take clear stances on industry issues to attract aligned prospects and repel misaligned ones
Connection Metrics
Measure engagement depth and sales conversation quality instead of impressions and reach
The transformation was remarkable. Within four months of implementing the Affinity-First Framework, several key metrics shifted dramatically:
Lead quality improved significantly. Sales reported that prospects were coming to discovery calls already familiar with their methodology and genuinely interested in their solution. The "why us?" conversation became much shorter.
Sales cycle compression. Because prospects had developed preference before entering the sales process, they moved through the funnel much faster. Average time from first touchpoint to closed deal decreased from 8 months to 5 months.
Higher win rates. When competing against other vendors, they started winning more frequently because prospects had already developed a preference for their approach through the content relationship.
Organic advocacy increased. Existing customers started referring new prospects more frequently because they felt genuinely connected to the brand's values and methods, not just satisfied with the product.
The most telling metric? When we surveyed recent customers about their buying decision, over 70% mentioned the founder's content or the company's educational resources as a major factor in choosing them over competitors. They didn't just know about the company - they preferred their approach.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
This experience taught me several counterintuitive lessons about building brand affinity:
Polarization creates preference. When you take clear stances on industry issues, you repel some people but create stronger connections with others. This is more valuable than being universally liked but forgettable.
Expertise trumps exposure. Demonstrating deep knowledge in a specific area builds more affinity than broad awareness campaigns.
Personal brands drive business brands. The founder's individual voice and perspective became the company's strongest differentiator.
Solving problems builds preference. Every piece of helpful content deposits affinity into your "brand bank account."
Small audiences compound. 500 highly-engaged prospects are worth more than 50,000 casual observers.
Affinity accelerates everything. When prospects prefer you before they meet you, sales cycles compress and win rates increase.
Content creates connection. The best brand affinity campaigns don't feel like marketing - they feel like education and relationship-building.
The biggest mistake I see founders make is trying to build awareness before preference. You end up with people who recognize your name but can't articulate why they should choose you. Build affinity first, and awareness follows naturally through word-of-mouth and referrals.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups building brand affinity:
Start with founder-led content sharing unique industry perspectives
Focus on solving specific problems your prospects face daily
Measure engagement depth over reach metrics
Build email lists of highly-engaged prospects, not mass audiences
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce stores building brand affinity:
Share behind-the-scenes content about product creation and sourcing
Create educational content around product usage and lifestyle integration
Build community around shared values, not just product features
Focus on customer stories and user-generated content over promotional messaging