Marketing Tips & Strategies For SaaS Companies
From SaaS Digital Marketer
I have worked as Digital Marketing Manager for a SaaS comapny for two years. If you’re a SaaS company looking for tried and tested marketing strategies, this article is for you! I’ll break down some of the techniques I’ve used to get new leads. As part of an integrated approach to the entire sales funnel, I’m going to focus only on those parts of your marketing strategy that you can do within your product.
Sell to a specific niche
You know what they say: if you try to appeal to everybody, you end up appealing to nobody! Try targeting a small niche that can benefit from your product and make it the best fit for their needs. Doing so will allow you to build a high-quality list of potential customers who are more likely to convert into paying customers.
Be active on forums and communities
If you search “best X” in Google, there’s a good chance that you’ll find a forum or community answering your question. If your company is providing SaaS products, then it’s likely that there are already some established forums talking about it. There are many benefits from being active in these communities:
a. You keep up with the latest trends within your industry;
b. You build trust with other people in the industry;
c. You get new leads (for free!)
As far as getting leads goes, one caveat applies: don’t spam! No one wants to see an ad all the time, so don’t be spammy with your content. Instead, try to give value and help others when they ask questions!
Create social media campaigns
Campaigns on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are all great places to start. They allow you to reach out to your current customers, as well as potential customers that could be interested in your product. Once you set up your campaign, monitor the results and make sure they’re delivering what you want them to deliver.
Set up paid ads
This is a smart way to get your name out there quickly. Paid ads allow you to pick and choose exactly who will see them, which means you can target them based on location, age, gender and more. The best part about these ads is that they don’t require you to pay unless someone clicks on them, so there it’s an affordable option when compared with other forms of advertising.
Optimize your website for SEO
A good SEO strategy can do wonders for any business, but it’s especially important when you’re running a SaaS platform because it gets your business out there and creates brand awareness.
At the same time, search engines are constantly changing their algorithms to favour mobile-friendly sites, which means that if yours isn’t optimized for mobile devices, it’ll get pushed further down in search results.
Grow your email list
This is something that every company needs to focus on. It’s the age-old adage: the money is on the list. The bigger and more targeted your list, the better you’ll be able to get customers to convert into paying customers. However, it’s not always easy to grow an email list. You need to know where your target market is hanging out, what their interests are and how you can best get them interested in the content you offer. To make this easier, we’ve put together a few tips below that should help you build up a bigger email list:
- Create a free course or download that users can sign up for in exchange for their contact details.
- Make sure you have an eye-catching pop-up box on every single page of your website — even if it’s just visible briefly!
- Spend some time guest blogging on other sites to reach a bigger audience and increase your following.
Use retargeting ads
According to the Direct Marketing Association, retargeted ads have an impressive 10x higher click-through rate than standard display ads. This is a great strategy for getting users back into the funnel and driving a second-chance sale. This technique works particularly well for SaaS platforms because they generally have longer sales cycles than other industries. Since it can take more time to convince someone that their company needs your product, retargeting ads help remind people of their interest in your product, even if they’re not ready to make a purchase or sign up for a free trial right away.
Don’t underestimate the power of blogging
Content marketing is an important part of any marketing strategy and can help your organization build better relationships with potential customers. Regularly updating your website with quality content is a great way to keep your audience engaged and drive traffic to your site. Some important things to note when starting a blog are — to make sure the topics you choose are relevant to your audience, engage them with content that is informative and/or entertaining, and focus on giving value to build trust in your brand.
Use good keywords for your ad campaigns and on your website
Selecting the right keywords is a crucial step in setting up your B2B marketing campaigns. For example, if you’re selling a sales tool, you’ll need to determine what “pain points” people are having (e.g., bad data quality or poor lead generation). You can use tools like Ubersuggest to search for that keyword and see its related terms, which will help you develop a list of potential keywords for you to target in your campaigns.
Also, don’t forget to include long-tail keywords that are more likely to appear in searches (e.g., “how to improve data quality”) and get a high click-through rate.
Use analytics tools to track your results.
One of the most important aspects of B2B marketing is being able to measure your success. The way you do that is by using tools like Google Analytics or other software to track what results in you’re getting from your efforts. You need to know which campaigns reached their goals and which ones didn’t so that you can make adjustments as necessary; otherwise, there’s little point in spending money on something that isn’t working out well.
Partner up with other companies
Collaborating with other B2B businesses is a great way to improve your marketing efforts. You can reach out to similar, complementary B2B companies that sell products or services that work well with yours. For example, if you’re a cloud computing company, you can partner up with a software company for mutual benefits. If your SaaS platform focuses on content marketing, then you could team up with someone who offers a more technical solution like an SEO tool. This way, both of you can reach out to each other’s audience and promote each other’s services.
Find out where your customers are online and be there
If you’re a SaaS platform looking for some B2B marketing strategies, this article is for you!
You can’t expect to be found by your customers if you don’t know where they are. The first thing you need to do is analyze what channels your target audience uses the most and put your efforts towards those channels. To get the best results, it’s recommended that you focus on two or three platforms where your audience is most likely to be present.
Once you’ve identified the platforms where your potential customers are active, it’s time to create a business account on each of these channels and start reaching out to them. You can post relevant content or promotional offers to get their attention.
Build relationships with influencers in your niche
Influencers are individuals that have an established presence and a strong connection with your target audience. To build a relationship with influencers, you must first identify them. You can do this by going through articles, blog posts, podcasts, and other relevant sources in your niche and finding out the authors, or the people who are being interviewed. Once you have identified these individuals, start engaging with them on social media. Follow their accounts and share their content on your page as well. On top of this, find out which events they will be attending and attend these events yourself. You should also reach out to them by email once in a while but make sure not to bombard them with too many messages at once.
Give your subscribers incentives to sign up
It’s not enough to have a great product if you don’t let people know about it. The first step toward promoting your startup is to get people to sign up. Your product may be unique and useful, but you need to give users an incentive to try it out.
You can offer free trials or free accounts with limited features. You can also show off your product’s features on the homepage of your website, so users will see what they’re signing up for before they subscribe. If you don’t have a lot of budgets to work with, you can try advertising on social media and make use of influencers who would be willing to try out your product.
Use storytelling as a marketing strategy
Stories are a powerful way to connect with your audience in ways that data-heavy content can’t. It’s simply human nature. “People are obsessed with stories because they’re the human operating system,” says Jonah Sachs, founder of Free Range Studios and author of Winning the Story Wars. “We think in story terms, we learn best through stories and we remember stories.”
When it comes to business, the biggest problem for marketers is that consumers don’t care about their products. We tend to be biased toward our own companies, but customers don’t want to hear about how great your product is or how cool it is that you were founded by two best friends or whatever.
Instead of focusing on how amazing your company is, focus on how customers can benefit from using your product. This is where storytelling comes in. You need to tell customers how they’ll benefit from using your product, whether it will help them overcome an obstacle or make their lives better in some way.
By using storytelling techniques, you can show your audience why they should be using your product and what problems it can solve.
Host an event to build brand awareness and customer loyalty
Holding an event is a great way to build brand awareness, especially in the B2B sector. Your business can use events to boost visibility and create opportunities for networking and lead generation. Events can also help with customer retention, as they show your clients that your company values them by organising something special for them. This can be anything from a small gathering for a select group of clients to a huge conference attracting attendees from all over the world.
Events are so effective at building brand awareness because they spread the word about your business through social media, word-of-mouth and traditional advertising campaigns like posters or radio adverts. They are also a great way to make connections with potential clients who might have otherwise been hard to reach. It’s fair to say that events are one of the most powerful tools in any B2B marketer’s arsenal.
Use your customers as part of your content marketing strategy
One of the best ways to earn the trust of B2B decision-makers is by showcasing the success of your current clients. You should be using case studies and customer testimonials as part of your content marketing strategy.
When sharing success stories on your website, don’t forget to include a ‘customer spotlights’ section. This is where you can share in-depth interviews about how each client is using your SaaS platform and what their results look like. Feel free to get creative with it. Some examples of this include:
• Video interviews with great questions and answers
• Written interviews with quotes from clients and links to relevant case studies
• Infographics that demonstrate results
Use public relations to generate buzz about your app
If you want to get on the radar of potential B2B clients, PR is a great way to do it. But how can you use public relations to market your SaaS platform? Here are just a few ideas:
Write thought leadership pieces: As a SaaS company, you probably have a lot of information that people don’t know yet in your industry. Write articles that inform people about the latest trends and how they can solve their problems with your software.
Guest post on related blogs: Want to reach people who are already interested in the service that your SaaS company provides? Write content for relevant blogs as a guest author. This will help you get your name out there as well as potentially drive new leads when you link back to your content.
Get interviewed: Have some valuable insights and data about the industry you’re working in? Reach out to journalists who write about your area and offer them an interview or data that they can use for their next news piece. You can also consider reaching out to podcasts too!
Set up an affiliate program
The affiliate model relies on the notion of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” You provide your affiliates with tracking links that they embed in blog posts, ads and other content. Affiliates are compensated when people use their links to sign up or buy your product.
Some companies have found success with a multi-tier affiliate program that pays out not only based on sales, but also based on how many people an affiliate has referred to your platform. So if you pay out $100 per sale, in a two-tier model, you would also pay $10 for each of those customers’ referrals. Affiliate programs are easy and free to set up and can help you expand your reach, which is important when starting a new SaaS business.
