SaaS marketing, also known as Software as a Service marketing, has grown in leaps and bounds over the years and is a specialized digital marketing tactic that focuses on marketing and selling software products with subscription models. The primary belief behind such a concept is not just building new customers who will try their products but also retaining the existing ones. This concept has a customer-centric approach that makes use of strategies designed to resonate with the needs, challenges, and issues faced by potential customers, compelling them to subscribe to the services of the seller.
In a competitive market, effective SaaS marketing strategies are crucial for setting a product apart from its rivals. Here in this guide, you will understand why SaaS marketing is important in today’s era and traverse through the best SaaS marketing strategies that can get your business in action:
The Importance of SaaS Marketing Strategies
SaaS marketing and other old-age methods of traditional marketing both have a common aim to increase the brand visibility of businesses and resonate with the target audience. However, these two strategies diverge in their approaches, metrics, and SaaS marketing communication channels. According to a study, it is believed that the SaaS market has boomed over the last few years and is growing at a 600% faster speed than the remaining global economy of the world.
Understanding Your Target Audience
Begin by focusing on your audience. Dive deep into their goals and pain points because the better you understand your audience, the better you will be able to deliver them what they need. Get on a mission to uncover the thoughts that keep them fueled for action and other things that keep them awake, tossing at night.
By addressing their challenges, fears and frustrations, you can create a deeper connection. Further, by syncing up with their goals and objectives, you’ll ignite their motivation to get things rolling. So, the basic rule for SaaS marketing is to understand your audience, and things will start aligning in your favour. On the contrary, if you mess things up while understanding the perspective of your audience, you will end up throwing your time, resources and money unnecessarily.
To gain an upper edge in understanding what your audience demands, consider doing market research to deliver solutions that can transform potential audiences into buyers. Here are a few things that you can consider to tailor your marketing strategies
- Conduct polls and surveys
- Do a market research
- Use the right SEO keywords
- Community engagement
- Use popular and engaging content
- Listen to customer interviews
- Indulge in social listening
- Use sales call recordings
- Pay attention to the questions being asked online
Explore our curated collection of construction website designs for more inspiration.
Effective SaaS Marketing Strategies
Implementing the right SaaS marketing strategies helps in increasing website traffic, generating more leads, and propels your brand to achieve greater success. Here we list down a few SaaS Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses:
1. Content Marketing and SEO
As it is believed, content is king; this marketing strategy encompasses a broader scope that is inclusive of blog posts, video posts, webinars, podcasts and much more. Any content that goes to your website should be top-notch and should boost the recognition of your brand. This aids in building trustworthiness and also helps you connect with your audience in a better way out.
Your business should aim at creating SEO optimized content that craftily markets your SaaS business and nurtures leads. Create content that fosters strong relationships with your audience and speaks out loud about your brand.
2. Paid Search Ads
Paid search ads play a pivotal role in incorporating B2B SaaS marketing strategies. It is because these ads are like ninjas that sneak into the minds of potential clients and provide them with exactly what they need when they are Googling for solutions. Consider targeting specific keywords related to your SaaS products to attract high-quality leads.
On the contrary, if you can produce a profitable return on Ad Spends, paid advertising enables quick and scalable growth for your SaaS business. Search engines are by far the easiest paid channels. Mastering Google Ads requires proficiency in distinct variables, majorly landing page experience, creativity in ads and selection of effective target keywords.
Begin by targeting transactional keywords, which ensure that the leads you have already shown their interest by searching for terms directly relevant to your B2B SaaS solutions. Review your Google Analytics data to find out which search terms are successfully converting leads into paying customers.
If your paid ads aren’t converting, there may be two major culprits behind such chaos. The first one is not having a compelling product market fit, and the second is the incapability of explaining the value of your products and services. To tackle such an issue, you may need to gather your team for a brainstorming session and also hire a skilled copywriter to get magic done on your words to make your ads blockbuster hits.
3. Account-Based Marketing
Another SaaS marketing strategy that engages your audience with a long sales cycle is account-based marketing, which aims at putting the prospects in the first place. You target your marketing on key high-value accounts and key decision-makers within those companies which further boosts the chances of reeling as a winner.
Start by crafting an ideal customer profile, followed by compiling a list of B2C and B2B companies to focus on. Next, find people in those companies who are worth connecting with and collect as much information as possible about the prospects. Platforms like LinkedIn are a great way to start, but do not just abruptly start selling your services; instead, engage with your audience via comments, share valuable content and add value to your offering.
Furthermore, to get started with a conversation, you can also opt for cold calling by building a sales team. Here are a few more tips to get started with lead generation:
- Identify high-potential existing accounts.
- Gain insight into customer needs.
- Create tailored content and offers
- Ensure harmony and coordination between your sales and customer success teams to get into action for those high-value existing accounts.
- Execute target campaigns
- Keep an eye on the metrics.
- Discover opportunities for upselling and cross-selling.
- Be proactive
- Gather feedback and suggestions.
- Make way for refinement and improvement.
4. Community Marketing
Fostering a community that revolves around the brand is another effective marketing strategy that can be used to find and provide support. This community may include influencers and other members who can engage and converse with your audience.
For this, you can also consider hosting live events and other online resources such as consumer forums, etc. These are places where users ask questions, and you can find a chance to give solutions to their questions and engage with them. Besides just helping the product users, this strategy also eases the workload of the customer support team of your business.
A feeling of community nurtures strong brand loyalty and encourages people to speak positively and advocate for the brand. A community that stays engaged with your offerings is more prone to become your loyal customers.
A community can also help in collecting valuable feedback that paves a path for improvement and betterment. Understanding what users want, their concerns and their feature requests can help steer product development in the right direction.
5. Launch a Newsletter
If you are focused on community building, getting started with a newsletter can also help you in great ways to establish trust with prospective customers and engage with current ones. Having a newsletter filled with valuable tips and other product updates that directly go into the inboxes of your potential customers is an indirect way to get your customers to know about your products instead of selling things directly.
You can attract subscribers to your newsletter by offering lead magnets or incorporating a subscribe option within your website and blog content. You can also encourage people to sign up for your newsletter as part of your user onboarding experience. Newsletters help build a strong brand and present you as a thought wizard in your specific industry. However, consistency in posting content and its quality should be maintained to achieve such a spot. What’s more? If people like reading your content and find your products to be of good quality, they may soon become your paying customers.
For a successful newsletter SaaS marketing campaign, consider breaking it up into two parts:
- For providing product updates to current users and customers.
- For producing content for your target audience without expecting anything in exchange.
6. Do Sponsorships with Media Sites
Indulging in paid sponsorships with media sites can help you reach a wider audience network and enhance your brand visibility. Partnering with reputable online platforms that cater to your target audience lets you reach people who are already interested in your industry-related news and insights. This further drives traffic to your website, generating leads and, ultimately, converting them into paying customers.
This strategy is a great way to advertise your brand and lets you reach a point where your competitors don’t exist. Advertising on platforms like YouTube will not only have your ads running on the platform but also your competitors because everyone exists there. But, finding online places that uncover hidden opportunities has a greater potential to deliver excellent outcomes.
7. Do Sponsorships with Micro-Influencers
Going ahead in the same line of sponsorships, another approach is to reach out to the micro-influencers who specialize in your niche. Not only is such an approach cost-effective for driving the attention of your audience, but a smaller audience exhibits greater loyalty.
A Small audience is often more enthusiastic and receptive to information and recommendations that they get from influencers whom they admire. There are limitless possibilities in such a scenario only if you can identify individuals who already capture the interest of your target customers.
On the contrary, if you have an affiliate program in place, you can reach out to the micro-influencers to offer them a sponsorship or an affiliate deal, which helps you soar above your competitors who are looking for low-paid sponsorships.
8. Launch on Product Hunt
If you want to delve deeper into the SaaS space, you can also consider debuting on Product Hunt by launching your website on this platform. Product Hunt is a platform where different individuals from different backgrounds share their products and others can upvote and comment on their posts. Thus, it is easy to predict that this platform has the potential to garner a surge in attention towards your products.
Sometimes, this sudden attention is all you need to get your products the fuel and momentum to get rolling towards a huge success. Also, if you somehow manage to reach the top product of the day page on Product Hunt, this can trigger a website party with thousands of visitors visiting your website within a span of just a few days.
9. Do Manual Outreach via LinkedIn & Email
If you own a large-scale SaaS company or are majorly dependent on SaaS sales, this strategy is surely going to bring a boom. Look out for decision-makers on platforms like LinkedIn, find out their emails and send them personalized messages introducing yourself and telling them how you can be of help.
Sending mass emails is a common scenario these days, but it may harm your brand. So, focus on doing things in an ethical way and consider customizing every email you transmit to showcase your products and services. Creation of email templates is fine but it should not exceed 80% of the emails you send. At least a mere 20% of emails should be dedicated to customization and should display a personalized touch while sending it to the person to whom you plan to reach out. For additional resources on enhancing your marketing efforts, don’t miss our article on the 3 Best Free Email Marketing Tools and Services.
It is because the individuals you are planning to contact may receive a huge amount of emails on a daily basis from other people who are trying to sell just like you. But, what distinguishes your email from others might be the touch of personalization that you add to your email to grab eyeballs.
Provide value to your potential customers without expecting anything in return. It is quite impolite to expect your audience to give you time without offering something valuable in return. Your goal should be to establish trust because this way, you can earn more qualified leads. Learn how to build a powerful business website with our in-depth web development company guide.
10. Join Communities with Other SaaS Marketers
Finding people of the same mindset can also help you go a long way in the SaaS marketing space. The best way is to indulge with fellow SaaS marketers by joining a community that has many of them onboard. You can learn something from your fellow SaaS marketers that can help you grow your business.
To gain a deeper understanding of the business models that can drive success, check out our detailed post on What is a SaaS Business Model for eCommerce Websites.
The Future of SaaS Marketing
Gone are those days when lead generation used to be straightforward and could be achieved by simple digital marketing techniques. This approach is no longer sufficient in the current times and requires businesses to jump into the ever-evolving landscape of SaaS to adopt creative and best SaaS marketing strategies that set their offerings apart. Creating a B2B SaaS marketing plan can be both challenging and overwhelming. But, with the right guidance and strategies in place, you can come up with a better approach to thrive in this competitive market that exists today!
For more inspiration on creating an effective SaaS presence, check out our previous blog post on the 10 Best SaaS Website Designs to Take Inspiration
