Increasing your software revenue is one of the issues that will keep you awake in the middle of the night, whether you are a SaaS product founder, head of marketing, or VP of sales. The software industry is highly competitive, especially if you’re a start-up looking to find your foot. No matter the uniqueness of your SaaS solution, you’ll always have to contend with bigger brands with more resources and capital. However, if you’re an already established brand with massive financial strength, you can always increase your revenue by implementing a tested and proven SaaS marketing strategy.
Here, we provide a comprehensive guide on how to grow your SaaS company through effective B2B marketing strategies.
What is Good B2B SaaS Marketing?
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies offer software products to customers through online subscriptions, with most of the client-based being Business-to-Business (B2B). A robust SaaS marketing involves promoting this product/software to the right audience. Digital marketing is essential to growing your customer and company. People will not know about the solution you offer unless you reach out to them.
An average company uses at least 24 SaaS applications. As a SaaS solution provider, you must ensure your product is among the top SaaS products every target audience wants in their arsenal. How do you accomplish this? Read on.
Proven Tips To Create a B2B SaaS Marketing Strategy
As a SaaS company, you must be intentional about your marketing campaigns and promotion. Here are some tips for developing a working marketing strategy for your company or products:
- Set Smart Goals
Every marketing campaign or strategy needs a clear goal. A goal makes it easy to set a plan and measure your performance through SaaS marketing metrics. A good goal has to be SMART:
- S = Specific
- M = Measurable
- A = Attainable
- R = Relevant
- T = Timed
A goal like “To increase customers” isn’t SMART enough.
“To increase the number of sign-ups by 30% before the end of 2022”.
Now, that’s better.
Also, remember that it’s your goal that will determine the best B2B SaaS marketing strategy for your company. SaaS companies often have unique goals, which usually require leveraging different techniques.
- Understand Your Target Audience
Your SaaS marketing plan needs to outline everything about your target audience, including their demographics, personas, and buyers’ journey. Who are your potential customers? Where are they? How can you reach them? Which of their problems does your product solve? These are some questions to help you understand the ideal customer for your product. Once you know your customer, reaching them and understanding their buyer’s journey becomes easier. You can create a simple Excel document for this.
- Understand the Buyer’s Journey
Your customers are the backbone of your business; they are the ones who make a purchase. Therefore, it’s critical to understand the stages a customer goes through making a purchase. The three primary stages are:
- Awareness: This is the stage where buyers become aware of their problems and needs
- Consideration: At this stage, buyers start looking for possible solutions to their problems.
- Decision: At this stage, buyers purchase a solution they think is best for them.
Your SaaS marketing plan should guide buyers through each awareness stage. This means you need marketing campaigns to:
- Make people aware of their problems
- Consider your product as a solution
- Give them a reason to choose your products.
However, don’t over-prioritize creating your marketing strategy around the awareness stage that you forget about the most crucial aspect; talking to customers.
- Choose the Best SaaS Marketing Channels
There are multiple channels out there, but not all of them will be suitable for your business. Identify the best channels for your company and target audience. You must research and identify the best medium for finding your customers and distributing content.
Remember, there’s no point promoting your product on a platform where your customers hardly stay active. For instance, if your product caters to the need of busy professionals, LinkedIn is your best bet. However, if you have market software that helps beauty enthusiasts select the best color combination for fashion wear, you will do well using video-oriented platforms like Instagram or TikTok.
Note that the most effective channel for another SaaS company may not be for you. However, some common SaaS marketing platforms include:
- Your website or blog
- Instagram and Facebook
- TikTok
- Set a Budget
A SaaS Marketing budget determines the maximum amount you can allocate to your marketing campaign. You need to break down your marketing budget into categories and allocate a realistic cost. Your budget will depend on your type of campaign, the length of the campaign, and the channel you’re using.
The Best SaaS Marketing Techniques and Practices
As a SaaS company, you have diverse digital marketing strategies to choose from. However, some methods are more effective than others when promoting your product. Here are some of them:
- Attract Customers with a Free Trial
A lot of SaaS startups offer free trials to attract customers. This is a good strategy because some customers do not know they need a product until they try it out. You can let customers see what your product does for a specific time for free. To attract customers, Scribd, a reading app, offers a 30-days trial to new users.
Meanwhile, to use this strategy, you need to offer a free trial long enough to allow customers to get the hang of your product. Also, you need strategies to ensure your trial customers become paying customers.
If offering your SaaS product for free isn’t feasible, you can consider offering a free version of your software with limitations. Slack has a free version available to all users but with limited features. However, premium subscribers get access to all features. SEMrush also allows a 7-day trial for its Pro and Guru plan. But, users must attach a valid card; otherwise, the trial will not go through.
2. Invest in Quality Content
Content marketing is a key pillar of every B2B SaaS marketing plan. A report shows that 90% of all organizations use content in their marketing efforts.
Your SaaS content must be high quality if you intend to boost your brand image and establish yourself as an industry leader. Quality content provides information that helps people decide whether they need your product or not. Also, you should tailor your content to appeal to prospects at each stage of the customer’s journey. In addition, content marketing should cover everything aspect of what your business does.
Your content can be in any form, including social media posts, case studies, articles, infographics, blogs, etc. You can consider investing in content writing services if you do not have an in-house team.
“Getting customers to believe you’re there to help them means you have to genuinely think like them and speak their language. The tools and enablement strategies you leverage in your organization need to reflect a buyer-centric approach.”
– David Priemer VP, Sales, Influitive”
3. Be Flexible with your Pricing Plans
The pricing plan you adopt will to a large extent, determine the success of your business. It’s best to have various price plans to suit the different needs of your target audience. For example, instead of just a yearly plan, you can add a monthly plan and a weekly plan.
Also, you can offer different price structures so that customers can pick what they can afford. For example, a basic price structure may have limited features of your app, while a premium structure offers all the app features.
4. Don’t Underestimate SaaS Social Media Marketing
93% of marketers use social media for their business. If you are wondering if social media can help your business, the answer is yes!
Your SaaS company needs a solid social media presence to help people know more about your brand and build a community. Fortunately, various channels such as Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter are available to create a social media presence for free. The trick to doing social marketing is consistency, creating relevant content, and interacting with your audience.
5. Generate Unique Leads Through SEO
Search Engine Optimization enables you to improve your brand visibility via search engines. Although you can rank Google’s first page through paid ads, however, research shows that 41% of internet users avoid clicking on Google’s ads.
Most of your customers need help first with whatever problems your software can solve. They want to see whether you genuinely care by creating educating content for free. Creating high-quality content and optimizing for relevant keywords through SEO strategies will improve your visibility in search engines. Also, this makes it easy for customers looking for your type of product or service to find you through Google. Hire a b2b SaaS Copywriter to boost your SaaS website SEO performance.
- Invest in Paid Advertising
Despite all the accolades all content marketers and SEO experts (including our agency), paid advertising is still an excellent method to increase the visibility of your SaaS product. This form of marketing is very customizable and helps you reach the exact type of buyer you’re looking for within a short time. That’s why you will see even SEO companies run paid ads.
We had a quick search on “SEMrush pricing,” and unsurprisingly, they had the #1 organic top yet run advertisements for the same keyword. Do you know why? They fear someone else might knock them off the perch with better and more optimized content about their pricing. Smart move!
No matter how much content marketers sugarcoat organic traffic growth, you will achieve more by combining it with paid ads.
Also, you can use paid ads on different channels and platforms such as TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on to increase your reach. One of the most popular paid ads for SaaS companies is the pay-per-click campaigns through Google’s Ads. Google offers options to target audiences based on keywords relevant to your company.
Meanwhile, a noteworthy strategy is combining your Google ads with other PPC platforms for SaaS marketing like Facebook and Instagram. Also, you can hire agencies like a SaaS content writing company or a digital marketing agency to improve your marketing strategies.
- Make Data-Driven Decisions
One of the most critical marketing strategies for SaaS is to make data-driven decisions.
What does this mean? You need to track your marketing activities to identify which strategies generate the most leads. Companies can make strategic decisions and create more quality campaigns with data analytics. For example, if data shows that a particular type of campaign performs better than others, that is your cue to create more SaaS marketing campaigns similar to the one that performs better.
- Look for Partnerships
“Our success has really been based on partnerships from the very beginning.”
—Bill Gates
No company is above partnership; there are many opportunities for your SaaS company to partner with other businesses. Partnering with other companies is a great SaaS marketing strategy to promote your products to your partner’s audience. The point is to look for a company that has a similar audience as you but offers a complimentary product. For example, if you sell software that allows travelers to shop local cuisines in specific locations, you can partner with companies that run booking software. However, ensure that they don’t offer the same services as yours.
Also, a partnership doesn’t have to be with a company. You can partner with influencers with active followers and collaborate to promote your products through their channels.
- Get Leads Through Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is a very effective SaaS marketing strategy to market your products and companies. This form of marketing generates inbound interest by focusing on your customer’s needs rather than your company. This customer-centric approach comes alive through other forms of marketing like content marketing and SEO. According to HubSpot, marketers who invest in inbound marketing like blogging are 13 times more likely to get a positive ROI.
There are four critical processes involved in inbound marketing, and they are:
- Attract, e.g., Blog posts, social media, and referrals
- Convert: e.g., CTAs, Sign Up forms
- Close: e.g., Email, CRM
- Delight: e.g., Social listening, incentives, surveys
You’ll attract your target audience, convert them into leads, turn them into customers and find ways to retain them by following this approach.
- Use Great CTAs on Your Website
Your main goal as a SaaS company is to get people to purchase your products. That means you should have a Call-To-Action (CTA) in your content to show visitors what to do next. Your CTA should be short, obvious, and direct. Some common examples are, Buy Now, Sign Up For Free, Subscribe Today, and Get 30 Days Free Trial.
Also, you need to place the CTAs strategically at different parts of your page. You want to compel your site visitors to take a specific action, and from experience, it will take more than a single CTA to accomplish that for your website’s homepage. A landing page usually requires a single CTA.
- List Your Brand on SaaS Review Sites
Many people only purchase a product after comparing it with similar products. Your potential customers want to know if they are getting the best from you, and you need to help them believe it. An essential marketing strategy is building your brand on review sites and encouraging customers to drop reviews. This way, new customers can read reviews which can help them decide if to buy from you or not.
- Build a Referral Program
Word-of-mouth marketing has been the oldest and one of the best forms of marketing for many decades. When you tell people to sign up for your software, they may not listen to you. Meanwhile, when friends tell them the same, they are 5x more likely to do so.
You can build a referral program as a SaaS company by getting happy and loyal customers to recommend your products to others. In many cases, they may need a little push, such as an incentive or a discount, before taking action.
- Deliver a Great User Experience
It doesn’t matter how many digital marketing tips for SaaS companies you have consumed; there’s no way to achieve a remarkable result without delivering great products and experiences. Your goal isn’t just to get new customers and retain existing ones.
Imagine a customer signs up for your software but has issues navigating the app or can’t get through to customer support; such customers will most likely not renew their subscription. A SaaS company is sustained mainly by the user experience and support, so you need to deliver. If customers do not find your product user-friendly or customer service good enough, they may not renew their subscription.
No two SaaS products/companies are precisely the same.
So, ensure you:
- Invest in excellent designs,
- Create an easy signup process
- Set up reliable customer support and
- Continue to upgrade your product features.
Hire a B2B SaaS Copywriter
Offering a great product isn’t enough for your SaaS company to get customers. You need a strategy or model to entice customers to experience the excellent software you offer. Help people understand why they need your remarkable product and how this product can make their tasks or problems easier. A good start is developing a B2B SaaS marketing strategy and following some of the most effective practices in the industry. If you need compelling, data-driven, and customer-centric website copies that highlight your SaaS solutions and content (article, blog posts, email copies) that seamlessly turn your site visitors and trial subscriber into premium subscribers, you are in the right place.
LEADSEO Content creates high-quality copies that sell your SaaS products to your target audience without being sale-sy or pushy. Our copywriting process combines the arts and science of marketing, and you can bank on us to generate results without breaking the bank.
Shoot us a message now, and we will be happy to book a meeting with you to see how our content marketing services can accelerate your SaaS success.
FAQs: SaaS Marketing Strategy
Why is SaaS Marketing Different From Other Forms Of Marketing?
SaaS marketing is different from other types of marketing because it focuses a lot on the buyer’s journey. Traditional marketing often focuses on sales by looking for ways to get customers to buy what you sell, usually a physical product. However, SaaS deals with an intangible product, and nobody buys a SaaS product on a whim. You’re not selling a physical product, so you don’t have the option of taking pictures or putting it on a shelf. For this reason, your goal isn’t to make customers buy and leave but to make them commit to your product. To do this, you need customers to know about the product, help them see why they need it, and get them to stick around.
What Are the Most Important SaaS Marketing Metrics?
Some of the most important marketing metrics for SaaS companies include:
- Churn rate
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
- Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)
- Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
- Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)
- Net Promoter Score
How do you promote a SaaS company?
One of the best tips to promote a SaaS company is to offer a great product that provides a solution to the needs of your target audience. Some other effective tactics to boost your SaaS company include:
- Investing in paid advertising
- Offering free trials
- Building a referral program
- Listing your brand on review sites
- Focusing on social media marketing
- Partnering with other companies
