Most B2B Saas brands are boring. some mostly-white website, a bit of copy about boosting efficiency by automating and streamlining processes. Yawn.

And sure, that works for incumbents with giant market caps. But startups have never won by copying the incumbents. That's true for product and it's also true for marketing.

There are two main reasons why more and more startups are taking chances with their brand:

1. It's harder than ever to stand out, so you need to try harder.
2. It's more and more acceptable to have fun and be less buttoned-up.

That's why we studied 3 startups who crush it with building a non-boring B2B Saas brand. Let's dive in.

What makes a B2B SaaS brand cool?

“Coolness” is a hard to define, but there are common denominators among the non-boring brands: 

• Authenticity matters. You should let the spirit of your company shine through, whatever that means to you. People appreciate vulnerability and transparency online and reward it with engagement.
• Understand your audience. Design and optimize your content for the platform where your audience hangs out: Some brands need to be on TikTok, others on LinkedIn.
• Human touch and personal brand integration. Most startups we studied connect founders and employees directly with the company's brand. People love personal experiences - the journey, the struggle, the hustle, the humor.
• Relevancy. Building a brand means staying relevant, which requires you to stay on top of what people are interested in.

Here's how the brands we studied put this into action:

3 B2B SaaS brands that aren’t boring (according to us)

Plot

Plot is a creative management platform for social media teams and creators. Plot’s mission statement reads, “Existing project management tools have failed to keep pace with the evolving needs of the creative industry, resulting in a generic, one-size-fits-all solution.”

Like many great startups, the idea for Plot came from frustration. As Plot’s co-founder and CEO, Megan Duong, puts it:

“The pain of being a creative in this industry, and ultimately the failure of my creative agency compelled me to build Plot — a better way for creatives to work.” 

And what better way to market a tool for creatives than by creatively showcasing your brand? Plot does this exceptionally well. Here’s how:

• Funny, relevant, snackable content. Plot knows when to jump on trends with real-time marketing, short-form video content, witty messaging, and a genuine and sharp sense of humor. This creates algorithm-friendly posts people love and get high engagement for. This one was posted during the height of the Olympics memes, for example:

• Doubling down on channels that work. Plot has the biggest presence and following on TikTok (14.2k), Instagram (4k) and Linkedin (5k). It makes sense: The first two platforms are visually focused, and where creatives spend time. Plot also leverages the personal brands of its founders and employees on Linkedin, which is a smart distribution play.
• Human touch. Even though Plot markets AI-powered features for ideation, planning, and collaboration, their content is human and often includes founders/employees. It’s genuinely funny and involves many videos of the founders and employees discussing the industry struggles and showcasing how Plot solves them. By doing so, you can make your brand seem approachable, friendly, and appealing.    

For this article, we spoke with Plot's head of marketing Christina Le. I asked her about something Plot is especially skilled at: Using team members' channels to advance the brand without neglecting the product/company's brand. She told me:

"We take a more balanced approach when it comes to differentiating between our team members' social profiles and our company pages. For our employees, we were adamant in creating a company culture they're proud to be part of, so we see their voluntary social media engagement as a win. We don't control or dictate what they post on their personal accounts—and we’d fully encourage others to do that same.

Instead, we trust in their own respective social media expertise to create authentic content that naturally aligns with our brand. "

I was surprised by this. To me, their engagement had always seemed planned. But it makes sense: We're all done with corporate garble on social media. We want to see more authenticity - which only happens when employees want to post, well, authentically.

At the same time, most company pages on LinkedIn are known to be dead. You might see an occasional blog article with 2 likes or a webinar invite nobody responded to. Plot's isn't. I asked Christina how she makes Plot feel so alive:

"Our company pages are super focused on serving our audience of social media marketers. Every piece of content we share aims to entertain, relate to, or help our community in some way. We've developed a distinctive brand personality for Plot, and pretty much maintain this consistent voice across all our posts. We treat our brand page almost like a personal account. This is the thing has helped us to show up and engage with our audience effectively."

I think this is the most important part. Plot doesn't change their approach because now something is on the company page. They're being as casual as if it was their personal profiles.

This might sound odd. After all, B2B is supposed to be more serious and more boring, right? Well, great social marketers like Christina don't think about it that way:

"Look, at the end of the day, it's all about knowing your audience. For us, that's social media marketers. We don't get hung up on the whole B2B/D2C thing because there are real people behind those businesses we're trying to sell to. We fully understand social media behavior, so we meet our audience where they are."

Having social media managers as the core audience probably helps. But still, if you're a more traditional marketer, you might be wondering if this actually sells the product. Here's how Christina does this:

"Not saying that we don’t sprinkle in some product education here and there, but we're not about hard sells. We know the value we're building at Plot, and that makes creating content for social super easy. Our mission is really to help social media teams work better because there has never been anything that was built for them specifically. "

The most important element: Knowing your audience. Or, as Christina put it:

"And we're marketers selling to marketers. We know how they think, what makes them annoyed, and what they're looking for when they're scrolling through their feeds. Nobody goes on social to be sold to. They're there for the good stuff - the relatable content, the laughs, the insights that make them go “lol, same.” So our general rule of thumb is to keep it real, we keep it fun, and focus on delivering value where we can. Whether you're a B2B Decision Maker or not, at the end of the day, you're just another person looking for content that speaks to you."

Motion

Motion is a creative analytics platform that provides insights to media buyers and creative teams. Reza Khadjavi founded Motion to address common pain points in e-commerce and digital advertising, such as difficulty in interpretation of performance data and scaling creative output. 

Similarly to Plot, Motion aims to disrupt the media/creative space, but with a different angle. Here’s how they’re successful at doing that:

• Travis Tyler: There's no other way to say it - Motion has hired one of LinkedIn's best marketing creators, Travis Tyler. That's it - sometimes you just have to hire a great person. It puts a face to the brand and humanizes your company.

• Shouting out creative ads. Motion’s has its biggest following on Linkedin (26K), where they’re also implementing a very specific social marketing strategy - sharing great ads and breaking them down. By doing that you can ride the wave of someone’s creative genius while adding your own insights and expertise. Many of those ads are so good that they instantly get high engagement, and Motion leverages that to talk about best practices and build their brand presence in the industry. 

• Marketing deep dives. Another big part of Motion’s social media strategy is sharing their own creative deep dives through illustrations containing witty hot takes, quotes, or jokes. Again, this play works wonders for Linkedin’s algorithm and generates huge engagement, contributing to Motion’s brand awareness and social media presence. 

• Being funny and authentic. Motion’s social strategy works so well because their sense of humor is authentic and effortless. They’re not scared of being a bit quirky or even absurd, which is something not many B2B SaaS brands are willing to explore. And from their engagement metrics, it seems that people appreciate and reward this kind of vulnerability with their clicks.

For this article, we also interviewed Travis Tyler, the senior social media manager at Motion. I asked him what he'd advise someone joining an early-stage startup in social media. His focus wasn't on formats or channels.

It was about the fundamentals:

"Hammer your strategic narrative with your founders. Everything you create afterward will be a way to get that message into the world. You can craft this strategic narrative by answering these questions. Also, avoid trying to do everything all at once by aligning with your CEO of what is the priority this year and to not deviate from it too much with shiny, short-term distractions."

Travis's content is hilarious. Scroll on his LinkedIn for about 48 seconds and you'll realize that. But funny content always comes with the problem of "does this actually sell anything?". In other words - becoming a meme page that gets engagement, but doesn't sell, is worthless. Here's what Travis said about it:

Just ask ChatGPT how to be funny. JK – don’t do that. But seriously, you have to strike a balance between being absurd all the time and delivering on your brand promise. For Motion, we don’t mind being playful because we know our core product is unbelievably useful.

People will stop for the laughs, but stay for the lessons.

Especially as a startup, it's important to stand out. It's important to not sound like the incumbent you're disrupting. This works especially well for Motion: Their entertaining content still centers on its product and audience - and what they care about.

RB2B/Retention.com 

Controversy is a great way to become more well-known. Should everyone do it? No. Do some companies succeed with it? Absolutely.

RB2B and Retention.com are tools that help companies identify anonymous website traffic and convert them into identifiable leads. The first is designed for B2B companies, while the second caters to e-commerce businesses. They share one thing in common - Adam Robinson, their founder.  

Adam Robinson has garnered an impressive following on Linkedin (92k), and has effectively become the main marketing vehicle for both companies. And while his brand and methods may not be for everyone, he’s certainly very successful in standing out and building a community around him. Here’s how he did that:

• Authentic and transparent content. Adam’s brand strategy is authenticity. He’s not afraid of using strong language or being vulnerable. He shares his personal experiences, including failures. He’s openly discussed the financials of his businesses. He’s often in the comments, asking questions and engaging with his audience. He might even get into it with some of his interlocutor’s! All of that contributes to his authenticity and makes him very approachable in the eyes of the users, which translates very well into clicks and engagement.

• Hacking engagement and community building. Recognizing the power of high-quality video content, Adam uses it extensively in his communication. He employs a dedicated team that creates almost movie-like snippets with his insights and stories. It’s no mystery that video content is king, and short-digestible videos automatically get more attention. Combine that with Adam’s brand voice, and you will have a recipe for high user engagement.

• Influencer collaboration. One of the staples of Adam’s content is the collaboration with other thought leaders - he’s a frequent guest on podcasts, webinars and often tags people in his posts or features their insights. That helps him reach an even wider audience and establishes him as a strong voice in his industry... even when the collaborations are about a fight.

• Not shying away from controversy. Many brands avoid controversy like the plague. But not Adam Robinson. Whether it’s the “no such thing as bad PR” spirit or just part of his strategy to be authentic and fully transparent online, Adam knows how to use controversy to his advantage. Take the recent 6sense drama as an example, where a competing company sued Robinson over a viral Linkedin post. He wasn’t afraid of getting into a public fight, posting the entire Cease and Desist letter and refusing to meet competitors' demands. So, while Adam’s social media strategy may not be for everyone, it’s as far from boring as possible.

Conclusion

To sum it up, what can make a B2B SaaS brand “cool”? A combination of authenticity, platform-specific content creation, real-time relevance, and a strong human touch. Implementing these can help a B2B company stand out from a sea of competitors, build a loyal community of followers and users, and drive crazy engagement and growth.