Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Short-term (< 3 months)
I once watched a startup spend €20,000 on a "brand strategy" that resulted in zero conversions. Beautiful logo, perfect color palette, impressive brand guidelines – the whole nine yards. The only problem? Nobody could figure out what the company actually did or why they should care.
This isn't uncommon. Most businesses treat online brand presence like a vanity project instead of a revenue driver. They obsess over looking professional while their competitors who "look worse" are closing deals left and right.
After building online presences for dozens of SaaS startups and e-commerce stores, I've learned that effective brand presence has nothing to do with what marketing agencies teach you. It's not about consistency, color schemes, or sophisticated messaging frameworks.
Here's what you'll learn from my experience building brands that actually convert:
Why traditional brand presence strategies fail to drive revenue
The contrarian approach I use to build authentic brand authority
Real examples from client projects that transformed their market position
The specific tactics that turn brand visibility into qualified leads
How to build brand presence without a massive budget or design team
If you're tired of "building awareness" that doesn't translate to actual business results, this playbook will show you a different way.
Industry Reality
What every business owner has already heard
Walk into any marketing agency or read any branding guide, and you'll hear the same advice about building online brand presence:
Develop a comprehensive brand identity with logos, color palettes, and typography guidelines
Create consistent messaging across all channels and touchpoints
Build thought leadership through regular content publishing and industry engagement
Invest in professional design to look credible and trustworthy
Focus on brand awareness metrics like reach, impressions, and brand mentions
This advice exists because it's what traditional marketing has always taught. Brand agencies make money from comprehensive identity packages. Marketing departments justify their existence through awareness metrics. Everyone assumes that "looking professional" automatically leads to business success.
The problem? This approach treats brand presence as separate from revenue generation. It optimizes for looking impressive rather than driving results. Companies end up with beautiful brands that nobody remembers or, worse, that actively confuse potential customers about what they actually offer.
In today's attention economy, where people scroll past hundreds of "professional" brands daily, following the same playbook everyone else uses is a recipe for invisibility. Your perfectly designed brand becomes wallpaper – nice to look at but ultimately ignored.
The businesses that actually break through aren't the ones with the most polished presence. They're the ones that understand brand presence as a direct driver of customer acquisition and revenue growth.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
When I started building websites for SaaS startups, I fell into the same trap as every other designer. I was obsessed with creating "professional" brand presences that looked impressive in portfolio screenshots.
One particular B2B SaaS client taught me everything I know about why traditional brand presence fails. They came to me with a modest budget but big ambitions – they wanted to compete against established players in the project management space.
My first instinct was textbook: clean design, professional imagery, corporate messaging that sounded "enterprise-ready." We spent weeks perfecting their visual identity, crafting sophisticated value propositions, and building a website that looked like it belonged next to the industry leaders.
The results? Crickets. Beautiful, expensive crickets.
Traffic was minimal, but even worse – the visitors who did find the site couldn't figure out what made this company different. The messaging was so polished and generic that it could have been copied and pasted onto any competitor's site. We'd created the business equivalent of elevator music: pleasant, professional, and completely forgettable.
That's when I discovered the real problem with traditional brand presence. We were building a brand for other marketers to admire, not for customers to choose.
The breakthrough came when the founder started sharing his actual opinions about the industry on LinkedIn. Not polished thought leadership pieces, but raw takes on why most project management tools overcomplicate simple problems. Suddenly, people started paying attention.
His posts generated more meaningful engagement in a week than our "professional" website had in months. That's when I realized I'd been thinking about brand presence completely wrong.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
After that wake-up call, I completely rebuilt how I approach online brand presence. Instead of starting with visual identity and messaging frameworks, I start with a fundamental question: What unique perspective does this business have that no competitor can copy?
Here's the exact process I now use to build brand presence that actually drives business results:
Step 1: Identify Your Contrarian Position
I spend the first week with every client mapping out what everyone else in their industry says, then finding where they genuinely disagree. Not manufactured controversy – authentic perspectives based on their real experience. For that project management SaaS, their contrarian position was "most productivity tools make you less productive." Simple, but completely different from competitors promising more features.
Step 2: Document Real Experiences, Not Theories
Instead of generic thought leadership, I help clients document specific situations they've encountered. Real client problems they've solved. Actual results they've achieved. This becomes the foundation of their content strategy. People don't remember abstract concepts, but they remember specific stories that relate to their own challenges.
Step 3: Build Content Around "I Did This" Not "You Should Do This"
The most powerful brand presence comes from sharing what you've actually done, not what you think others should do. I restructured their entire content approach around case studies, experiment results, and lessons learned from real client work. This immediately differentiated them from competitors sharing generic advice.
Step 4: Design for Recognition, Not Impression
Instead of trying to look like established players, I help clients develop visual elements that make them instantly recognizable. This might mean unconventional color choices, unexpected layouts, or design patterns that feel familiar to their specific audience rather than "professional" in general.
Step 5: Optimize for Shareability, Not Awards
Every piece of content gets evaluated on one criterion: would someone save this or share it with a colleague? Beautiful design that doesn't get shared is worthless. Rough content that gets saved and referenced drives real business value.
Contrarian Positioning
Find the specific opinions that make your business unique and impossible to replicate
Experience Documentation
Turn your real work into content that competitors can't copy
Recognition Design
Create visual identity that customers remember, not just admire
Shareability Focus
Build content people actually save and reference in their work
The transformation was immediate and measurable. Within three months of implementing this approach, several key metrics shifted dramatically:
Traffic quality improved before quantity. Instead of random visitors who bounced immediately, we started attracting people who spent 5+ minutes on the site and explored multiple pages. The bounce rate dropped from 78% to 31% – not because we'd improved the design, but because the right people were finally finding us.
Content engagement exploded. The founder's LinkedIn posts went from 3-5 reactions to 50+ comments and hundreds of shares. More importantly, these weren't vanity metrics – the comments were from potential customers asking specific questions about implementation.
Sales conversations changed completely. Instead of starting calls with "tell me about your company," prospects would reference specific posts or case studies. They arrived pre-qualified and already convinced about the approach. Sales cycles shortened from 6 months to 3 months on average.
The most surprising result? Competitors started copying their messaging. Within six months, I noticed other companies in their space adopting similar contrarian positions – the ultimate validation that their brand presence had become influential enough to shape industry conversation.
This wasn't luck or timing. The same principles have worked across different industries and company sizes. When you build brand presence around authentic differentiation rather than polish, people notice.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Building brand presence this way taught me lessons that completely changed how I approach marketing for every client:
Authenticity beats polish every time. People connect with real experiences and honest perspectives, not marketing-speak and stock photos.
Controversial opinions drive engagement better than safe content. As long as they're genuinely held beliefs, contrarian positions create memorable brand differentiation.
Documentation beats creation. Sharing what you've actually done is more powerful than inventing what others should do.
Industry best practices often create commoditization. Following the same playbook as competitors guarantees you'll blend in rather than stand out.
Brand presence should directly impact sales metrics. If your branding efforts aren't shortening sales cycles or improving lead quality, you're optimizing for the wrong things.
Shareability is the ultimate brand metric. Content that gets saved and referenced drives more value than content that just gets viewed.
Recognition matters more than impression. Being instantly recognizable to your target audience beats looking impressive to everyone.
The biggest mistake I see businesses make is treating brand presence as a vanity project rather than a revenue driver. When you approach it as customer acquisition infrastructure, everything changes.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups specifically:
Share specific metrics and experiments from your product development
Document customer problems you've solved that competitors ignore
Build content around your unique approach to industry challenges
Use founder-led content to establish thought leadership quickly
For your Ecommerce store
For e-commerce stores:
Showcase behind-the-scenes processes that differentiate your products
Share customer success stories with specific, measurable outcomes
Create educational content that positions you as the category expert
Build community around your brand values, not just products