Everything You Need To Know About SaaS Marketing (and more!)
Compared to businesses offering physical products or one-time purchases, SaaS provides an entirely different product that allows customers to connect to and utilise cloud-based software through the Internet.
Software as a Service (SaaS) is a subscription-based intangible product. So, as a Saas company, you constantly need to prove to your customers that your product can do wonders for their businesses and is worth the monthly or yearly subscription fee. Here the marketing strategy for SaaS needs to differ from the rest of the industry, hence the existence of the term SaaS marketing.
Table of Contents
What is SaaS Marketing?
SaaS marketing is the technique to introduce a product to market, promote your products, spread awareness of your product, position a product, reach the right target audience and acquire customers.
It may not sound different from digital marketing, but it focuses on various marketing methods to obtain the best conversion rates possible.
How is SaaS marketing different from Digital Marketing?
Customer Loyalty
An essential requirement for your SaaS firm is your clients subscribing to your product for a long time. Once you acquire a client, you must maintain regular communication using marketing tactics with them to avoid churn.
When someone churns, it means they’ve effectively exited your funnel. Therefore, after a demo or download, you have to be laser-focused on long-term retention.
In addition, many SaaS businesses provide a free version of their products to entice customers and push them to subscribe to a better plan.
Complex Customer Journey
SaaS marketing necessitates creating and promoting content with various degrees of awareness. Much work is invested in creating a wide range of content and marketing materials based on what your prospects know and should be aware of. You must find the right balance between educating your audience and inundating them with information.
Competitive Environment
The degree of competition in SaaS demonstrates the demand for innovative solutions and technologies. However, remember that the average company relies on dozens to hundreds of SaaS programmes. Therefore, there is always an opportunity for developing new solutions to the problems that businesses face.
Advantages of Digital Marketing
Increased Customer Loyalty
Attracting and converting new customers costs more than retaining existing customers. Customer loyalty is tough to achieve, but it is worth the effort.
Once satisfied with your service, the consumer is more likely to continue your services or refer your brand to others, which increases revenue.
Engaging Customers Throughout the funnel
With digital marketing, you can record every step a consumer takes from the instant they start looking for a solution or product. For example, you can track a customer’s purchasing journey using analytics and provide them with valuable content to answer their queries.
Engaging with the Right Audience
You can create a buyer persona on a platform such as Google Analytics. This platform has access to web technologies that track a person’s online behaviours and demographic information. You can analyse this data and target a specific audience by offering prospects particular items or services they are interested in.
By providing a relevant solution, you will entice your target audience to subscribe to your product.
Higher Conversion Rates
Unlike traditional marketing, digital advertising platforms are far less expensive because you can monitor every encounter with digital advertising. For example, you can see how many people came across your ad and what actions they took after seeing it.
Your sales team can contact those who show interest and interact with the ad about the solutions you offer, and they may become clients.
Measure results accurately
With digital marketing, you can measure the performance of your marketing campaign. For example, you may find out how many people saw your advertisement, how many sales were successful from it, and your return on investment (ROI).
Brand Credibility
Nowadays, brands that have digitally active businesses have the most credibility. Having a social media presence means a company’s content may answer consumers’ concerns, explain key concepts, and demonstrate that it knows what drives its market.
Once people remember the brand and interact with it, it helps them connect with your brand. This increases your business’s credibility and reputation and enables you to build a solid social media presence.
Critical Elements of a SaaS Marketing Strategy
Identifying your target market
The first stage in developing a successful SaaS marketing plan is identifying your ideal audience, who may profit from utilising your software.
Create customer personas for each audience type to better understand your potential consumers. Standard components of customer persona are:
- Demographics
- Business background
- Beliefs and aspirations
- Influences and sources
- Motivators and obstacles
Selecting your marketing channels
Once you’ve determined your target audience, decide which marketing channels will most effectively promote your programme. Consider the channels your clients spend the most time on to guarantee that they see your advertisements.
The main marketing channels are radio stations, television networks, social media platforms, email, podcasts, blogs, billboards and external signage, and print advertising.
Defining your content marketing strategy
Decide what kind of material you want to publish to advertise your product. Creating a range of content for your SaaS marketing strategy is critical since different types of content appeal to different customers at various sales funnel stages.
Developing your content
Some critical feature of SaaS Marketing is the content, how your customers interpret it and how engaging it is. Today, people’s attention span has been reduced to half a minute, so it is less likely for them to engage with your ad if it is solely text-based. However, even when you add graphic content, their placement is crucial. So, what can you do?
Put content like product videos in places where consumers can view them.
Videos generate 66% more quality leads each year, and nearly eight out of ten individuals have purchased software or an app from a SaaS company after seeing a brand’s video.
Distribute the videos anywhere they may be seen. Examine how videos may integrate into your sales funnels, email journeys, and, most importantly, your PPC landing pages.
Three great tools for video creation and communications are:
- Piktochart – turns one video into multiple pieces of content.
- Veed – creates professional-looking videos in a few clicks.
- VideoAsk – easily hosts remote video interviews.
You can also optimise your existing website content on the website using the Google search console and edit it according to your target audience queries. This strategy helps you gain organic traffic on your website.
Increase brand awareness
New SaaS marketing campaigns use brand awareness advertising to present their product to potential consumers. Focus on running informative advertisements describing your product and how it can help them attract clients.
During the brand awareness stage of your SaaS marketing strategy, pay attention to KPIs such as the number of views or audience reached.
Building a community
A strong community is a powerful one. Therefore, one of your prime goals should be building a community and encouraging people to join. Your community is only as strong as its framing members, whether they are a handful of thousands.
How to operationally manage a community?
After building a community, you need to manage and engage with it. However, first, you need to pull your best strategies together and start making connections that will last. Here are two ways in which you can manage your community:
- Find ambassadors: Find people passionate about your product and who desire to lead the community. Having only firm workers serve as community administrators have enormous overhead expenses and are unfeasible.
- Foster connections: Allow community members to connect with you and each other. Your community thrives when members support each other and respond to each other’s queries instead of waiting for the management to do so.
Identifying customer needs beyond your projects
Your clients have demands that go well beyond what your product can provide. Remember that you’re marketing to people, not customers. So, first, you must spend time investigating your present product’s user base. Then, go beyond that and inquire about their wants other than the products you offer.
Once you’ve discovered what the people want that isn’t met by what you offer, strive to match those demands while being true to your goal and vision. If you can address needs beyond your product, you will establish a more extensive consumer base and strengthen it.
Define how you measure success
Success may signify various things, and you can measure it in infinite ways. So, what does success mean to you?
Determine how marketing can help you with conversions further in the funnel. Once you’ve determined these objectives, you can establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to determine if your marketing techniques benefit your business.
Capturing leads
When your SaaS marketing campaign reaches the point where your potential customers have likely engaged with your advertisements, encourage them to make a purchase.
You should capture genuine leads and create ads that provide high value while securing a commitment from your potential customers.
Building strong customer relationships
Client retention is critical because SaaS businesses rely on subscriptions and upgrades to generate income. You may add value to your client’s business by providing them with high-quality content and outstanding service.
Keep in touch with your customers and ensure your product meets their requirements. This can help you strengthen your customer connections, enhance the quality of your software, generate product referrals, and maintain your current client base.
Tips for Implementing SaaS Marketing
Provide value to your customers and prospects. For example, potential clients should see value in your ads. As a result, provide free demos, trials, or freemium versions of your product and instructional materials.
Listen to your Customer. Request customer feedback and pay attention to what they say about your brand, services, and software. This allows you to find unfulfilled requirements among your clients, enhance the quality of your product, and boost customer retention.
Embrace Variety by creating content and experimenting with various marketing platforms to reach a broader audience. It will let potential buyers interact with your material.
Investing in a data and analytics platform may help you track campaign effectiveness, boost efficiency, create better adverts, and calculate your total ROI (ROI).
Be Patient as the sort of product you sell and its price might influence how long it takes prospects to buy your product. Being patient with them will help you give them the right information at each level of the sales funnel.
Real-life SaaS Marketing Examples
RingCentral
RingCentral is a global cloud communications solution powerhouse. Despite its accomplishments, it wanted to grow its core service offerings in new regions, improve organic traffic, and increase non-branded visits to its website. Consequently, they employed digital marketing to concentrate on developing their on-site content to reach new markets with excellent results.
The problem they faced previously was the content failing to reach its intended audience. So, to combat this issue, they implemented a new SEO strategy focusing on content that focuses on customers’ queries. As a result, they optimised over 200 pages on their website using new and upcoming keywords.
RingCentral modified its blog material by updating previous on-site posts. Moreover, they created over 100 fresh blog pieces to entice new readers. Finally, they made over 700 pieces of offsite content, which resulted in a +1185% increase in non-branded visitors and a 291% rise in overall website traffic value.
Key Takeaways
The critical elements of a SaaS Marketing Strategy will allow you to take the leap and bring your business where you’ve always wanted it.
Sure, it is not easy to achieve it in the blink of an eye as it is easy to write about this, but still, one step at a time will make a difference. So if you feel overwhelmed by this information, remember to select one strategy and focus on it for the time being.
All the best with your SaaS marketing journey!
