SaaS, or Software as a Service is a global software solution created by different businesses in order to improve human activities in a matter of clicks. With so many SaaS businesses getting visibility in online marketplaces, we found that new and upcoming businesses are struggling hard to make it to the right set of customers. In this blog, we have created a detailed SaaS marketing strategy guide to ease out that process
What is SaaS Marketing?
SaaS as we already understood is Software as a Service. In this type of software, you use the potential of cloud storage so that the users can use or access these apps from any location. Selling these types of saas businesses to potential buyers using the right medium is called saas marketing.
In SaaS marketing, you generally use online marketing strategies to generate more leads and conversions in your saas business. These SaaS can be either web or app-based or even both.
In all cases, it will always be an online business model, hence digital marketing is considered to be the best saas marketing strategy. Moving down the lines of this blog, you will learn about some of the best SaaS marketing strategies in 2024 that can surely turn around your business.
How Is SaaS Marketing Different?
SaaS Marketing strategy generally involves a collective digital strategy to stay in touch with your potential buyers. Since these apps are solving pain points, the buyers need to feel the need by matching your saas features with their pain points.
This doesn’t happen in one go. In SaaS marketing, you need to consider the entire AIDA model of marketing [ Awareness, Interest, Decision, and Action ]. Segment your saas features and create the best possible landing pages that define a perfect CRO [ Conversion rate optimization ] of your saas business. Does that sound interesting? let’s see these saas marketing differences in the list below which makes it different from other industry’s marketing strategies.
- Most of the SaaS businesses are based on the subscription model.
- A lot of saas businesses consider offering free trials and plans to allow potential buyers to test the products and services before buying.
- Saas businesses generally prefer launching their MVP on saas marketplaces before getting into organic growth.
- These saas businesses prefer generating leads followed by cold calling or email follow-ups for demo schedules.
- Branding is considered to be one of the most important SaaS marketing strategies as the conversions in this niche never happen on first interaction due to high ticket size and other corporate formalities.
- Webinars are considered to be the best way to showcase saas to their customers and also gain feedback.
These few things make SaaS marketing different from the rest of the niche marketing strategies.
While there are several SaaS marketing agencies online, in this blog, we will help you with some of the best SaaS marketing strategies. If you are a new business and still trying to figure out how the industry works, adopting these SaaS marketing strategies will be a good place to start.
Initial Steps: Factors to Consider While Developing a SaaS Marketing Strategy
Planning a successful SaaS marketing roadmap needs a lot of effort and depends on many factors. But before you go about planning a whole strategy, you need to start with some initial steps. For that, you have to address three essential questions, and we have mentioned the respective answers as well:
- Who would buy your products? To know this, you must identify your target customers.
- Who are your competitors? So the next step is to know your competitors.
- What would make your products stand out from the crowd? Develop your Unique Selling Proposition.
For each of these questions, we are ready with an answer for you, and we will discuss them further.
1. Identify Your Target Customers
While planning a SaaS marketing strategy, understanding and identifying your target customer becomes essential. After all, you must know who will buy your products and what are their needs and preferences. Having an insight into your target customer’s needs, preferences, and pain points helps you develop your products better and create tailored solutions for their specific concerns.
2. Know Your Competitors
To develop the perfect SaaS marketing strategy, you must have an in-depth understanding of other SaaS businesses. This will help you understand the crucial factors in the SaaS market space like identifying marketing trends, understanding customer behavior, and planning strategies to differentiate your products and services. Here are some ways in which you can effectively perform competitor research and analysis:
3. Develop an Unique Selling Proposition
Now that we have addressed the above concerns, let’s get into the issue of developing your USP. What makes you stand out among your competitors? Why should they choose your products over the other players in this field? This is where you must work on your product differentiation and positioning and create a verbal tool to deliver your product story and drive the conversation with your potential clients. While this can be a whole new topic to discuss altogether, here are some of our suggestions on how to develop a USP for better SaaS marketing:
How to Prepare a Successful SaaS Marketing Strategy Roadmap?
We just now saw that SaaS marketing is somewhat different from any other online business. You need to align your SaaS marketing strategy according to a general user’s perception of how they consume SaaS-related content and take action by subscribing to one of them.
If you successfully align your SaaS marketing strategy with the mindset, pain points, and value that they are looking for, you are going to convert one out of every 10 people who visit your website.
Let us understand all the basic points you should keep in mind while preparing your successful SaaS marketing strategy.
Above are those effective SaaS marketing strategies that will help your SaaS company take the success ladder and amplify your growth rate. Let’s deal with all of them one by one and learn their execution process in detail.
1. Set Your Goals And Plan Accordingly
One of the most important things to consider while developing your SaaS marketing strategy is to set sensible goals and objectives and work accordingly. It always helps to know the things you want to achieve and plan how to achieve them. Some of these goals can be improving your brand visibility in the digital space, enhancing customer experience, boosting ROIs, growing brand awareness, etc.
2. Plan Effective Content Marketing Strategies
One of the most essential SaaS marketing strategies you can adopt is to leverage your content creation and align it with your marketing objectives. The biggest players in the SaaS market space are already ranking on search engines and have built their domain authority. However, if you are just starting with your content marketing plans, you should take slow but sure steps. You can start with some keyword research and find keywords with high intent and low competition.
In this way, although not many people might be searching for the keyword, you will still secure a high rank for this keyword, and secure a decent percentage of engagements and clicks.
You can also focus on various types of content, from creating actionable blog posts and intuitive landing pages to impressive webinars, video content, and podcasts as well. We will discuss the last three content types in greater detail further.
3. Provide easy sign-ups and free trials for your products
All of us like a quick and easy sign-up process, after all, we are always excited to get past this barrier and enjoy the products and services. Keep a crisp and quick sign-up process that preferably does not require the customer’s credit card or bank details. Include clear, actionable buttons mentioning that the customer can avail of the service with a single click. You can also include the duration of free trials or uses for better understanding.
Coming to free trials, everyone loves free stuff! Before investing their hard-earned money in your products and services, it is fair to give them a chance to try them out. If they are impressed by your products and services, they will surely invest in the longer run and also suggest them to other potential customers to try out.
4. Plan a flexible pricing model and multiple payment gateways
Once you step into your target customer’s shoes, you will realize that they want to get the maximum benefits from SaaS products at the most affordable rates. It would be best if you fix competitive pricing for your products and services. Exorbitant pricing models can intimidate your customers and scare them away even before trying out your products, and we don’t want that!
Setting up a pricing model such that you have a successful checkout is very important. Nobody wants to see those abandoned users who just came, tested your saas, and went off even though they could be potential customers.
How to make sure that you don’t lose customers on these payment gateways? Here are some ways:
- Don’t ask for pricing at the first interaction of your SaaS.
- Let users check your complete features and encourage them to upgrade to paid plans if they seem to have a benchmark engagement rate when they sign. You can use various tools to identify the engagement or set an activity counter.
- Don’t collect credit card or payment details even for giving a trial period. Let users explore your saas. Once they are convinced, they will pay themselves.
- Always prefer a subscription payment plan where you can give users the option to pay monthly, quarterly, or annual. A lot of beginner saas don’t consider quarterly plan payments.
- Mention words like “No credit card needed”, “no hidden cost”, and “free signup” so that new users can try your saas without monetary tremors.
- Add whatever features you are offering to users in your pricing plans.
- Do add a section of FAQ about payment and refund so that users can be sure of subscribing to your saas.
There are bundles of other documentation and legal terms to be given acknowledgment. Following these, you can create a healthy transaction process over your SaaS and boost conversions.
5. Have a Well-defined SEO Strategy
Having a well-defined SEO strategy is instrumental in driving your brand reach and awareness. It can help your page rank on top for search engine results and enhance the visibility of your website. To achieve this, you must focus on both on-page and off-page SEO strategies.
How to Optimize On-page SEO? Here are some suggestions:
Off-page SEO also constitutes an important aspect as it helps to establish the relevance and value of your content, help you gain domain authority, and much more. Here are some ways to improve your Off-page SEO:
6. Create an attractive website and run A/B testing plans
Your website is your shop for the product that you have created. If your shop doesn’t look great, it will not attract customers to buy from you. Having an attractive and professional website, that has your products professionally laid out complete with their features and objectives, is a great way to promote your business. A well-designed website will help attract and retain your target customers.
Here are some features of a good SaaS website:
A/B testing is considered to be the most important concern for SaaS websites. You need to understand how your users are behaving when you open the doorway for your SaaS. A lot of time things don’t perform as expected from your users, and you must strictly study user behavior to understand the non-working funnel of your website.
So how to do A/B tests for your Website? Here are some suggestions:
For doing A/B testing, just make two copies of your app and rotate them to a different set of audiences. This will help you find the winning pages, app dashboard, and your saas click funnels.
It will also help you identify redundant steps in order to complete any task in your saas. Your target while doing A/B testing must be to eliminate redundant steps and make it easy for users to work with your saas.
7. List Your Website on SaaS Marketplaces
This is one of the best strategies to scale up your SaaS quickly. There are bundles of websites where you can list your saas in all the featured categories and get visibility.
Why it is important to list your business in SaaS marketplaces?
- You get to feature your product in a list of your desired categories that are already getting a huge footfall of potential buyers.
- You can improve the reputation of your SaaS business by using the review systems to allow your customers to put reviews and showcase success stories about them. This improves your sales.
- Your saas website gets a backlink that helps boost your SEO and website ranking.
- These saas listing websites create a comparison of your saas with other competitors. It’s like free content for promotion if you are better than your competitor.
8. Build Domain Authority
Domain Authority, or DA, is an important metric that determines a website’s potential to rank on various search engines. Originally created by Moz, the score ranges from 0 to 100, and if you have a good enough SaaS website, scoring above 50 is considered quite good. However, if you are considering taking your SaaS marketing game up a notch and scoring almost 70, then we have some awesome SaaS marketing tips for improving domain authority:
9. Develop Video Marketing Strategies
Video marketing can help you ace the SaaS marketing game! You can create crisp and engaging video marketing campaigns to educate your audience about your SaaS products and services, inform them about best practices, or drop some short video content about offers and discounts!
This is how video marketing strategies can help with marketing your business:
Brownie tips for developing video marketing strategies for SaaS companies:
10. Leverage Webinars and Interview Sessions
Webinars have been a beneficial way to not only engage with your potential customers but it is one of the effective methods to connect with your existing customers. They are highly effective for B2B SaaS businesses to boost their lead generation. They also provide you with a space to present your expertise in specific areas, offer valuable insights to potential customers, and engage in real-time discussions with them.
You must include conducting webinars in three formats:
- Webinar with leads who are willing to buy your SaaS but need informative reviews before purchasing.
- Webinar with existing customers about how your SaaS can amplify/automate their business operations, or anything that will encourage them to tune into your webinar.
- Webinar with Industry experts who can talk about trends, hacks, tips, and discuss other issues that can be valuable to listeners and viewers. This can be beneficial for you and help increase your authoritative visibility across the globe and channels.
Here are some added brownie tips for conducting webinars:
11. Timeline your Podcast Channel
Podcasts have grown as a cost-effective trend in SaaS marketing. With the advent and growth in voice search, we believe that podcasts would rank in those voice searches. Right now there are billions of blogs existing, and podcasts are surely catching up in the game.
You can start your podcast channel and create blogs around your podcast episodes as well, so there is no dearth of topics for content creation!
Here are some advantages of using the Podcast Channel:
12. Try Influencer Marketing
Influencer SaaS marketing is not just a marketing campaign for fashion and lifestyle companies and D2C brands anymore. Even SaaS brands can drive a lot of traffic to their website and improve conversions with a good influencer marketing strategy.
Here are some tips on how to go about influencer marketing for your SaaS business:
13. Leverage PPC Campaigns
PPC ads have become one of the most popular methods of SaaS marketing in recent times. PPC or pay-per-click, as the name suggests, are ads that you pay for only when users click on them. This SaaS marketing strategy effectively helps to bring in traffic and generate valuable leads.
How do you build effective PPC campaigns for SaaS marketing? Here are some tips to follow:
14. Register in SaaS Review Sites
One of the best practices to get more valuable leads is by registering in SaaS review sites. In this way, not only can clients provide great feedback about your services, but it can also help you find new customers who require similar SaaS solutions.
Some of the leading SaaS review sites are:
Listing your SaaS company on these websites is not very difficult. You can contact the website’s editorial team and they will get back to you with all the details of how to go about it.
Once listed, you can enter the important aspects of your company, like the product features, use cases, testimonials, and more. Many of your prospective customers may be comparing different SaaS products before buying a solution, and you can strategically use this to boost your SaaS marketing.
These SaaS review sites can help you build trust among your target customers by providing them with honest feedback about your products and services from your previous users. Not only are these websites a platform to showcase your company and offerings, but the feedback will also help you understand the aspects for improvement so that you can provide a better and smoother experience to your clients.
15. Emphasize Use Cases and Create Case Studies
Incorporating case studies is one of the most persuasive SaaS marketing strategies. They help in narrating your success stories to new and prospective customers directly from the experience of your previous clients. This also helps in building trust among new prospects as they are more likely to trust the reviews of people who have already used your products and received great results.
You must strategically incorporate these use cases into your landing pages, and while listing your business on SaaS marketplaces and review sites. In this way, more people get to see your success stories online and it encourages more engagement and traffic to your website.
After all, who does not love a success story? And incorporating this can turn out to be a game changer for your business!
16. Plan Social Media Integration With Your SaaS Business
You need to be very strategic while choosing your social media platform for the purpose of marketing your SaaS to your audience present on those platforms.
The best way to identify the right channel is by doing a social media competitor analysis. When you do a social media competitor analysis, you will understand which social media platform is generating more traffic for your competitors. Your competitors might be putting more effort into generating traffic from a particular platform as it must be giving them good returns for the time and effort invested.
To identify this, you can use a tool called Similarwebs. Using this tool, you can check your top 10 competitors and judge, the social media which is generating more traffic to their website. For example, if 7 out of 10 competitors show that Facebook is giving them more traffic, it is good to include Facebook in your SaaS marketing campaigns.
Often, we can see that some of the niche SaaS businesses generate good traffic from WhatsApp. This will remain untapped if you don’t do a competitor analysis. You will never know that Whatsapp group or WhatsApp bulk marketing is helping your type of business effectively.
So, a good way to get started with social media is to identify which social media is more profitable for your competitors.
In the next step, visit your competitor’s social media pages and identify the kind of content that is getting more engagement.
Hence, with such research, you will get two most important insights:
- Which social media platform is best for you?
- What kind of content can attract your target audience?
Once you have identified these, you can go about designing your social media strategies.
17. Use Monitoring Tools To Identify Business Emotions Over The Internet.
When your SaaS business starts growing, a lot of buzz will be created about your tool, and people of different opinions will exist. Some of them will be their advocates while others will spit venom and negativity.
Every new acquisition in your business would come after a journey from awareness to acquisition and during their journey of conversion, you need to make sure that they don’t encounter any fake facts about your business.
Criticism is also important as it helps you build a better solution but you will always have a base of people who will speak irrelevant about your saas without exploring.
Hence you need to monitor your mentions over the internet.
A few recommended tools can help you monitor and notify whenever there is a buzz about your business name on the internet space. Some of them are:
- Brand24
- Semrush
- Google Alerts
- Social Mention
These 4 tools are must-have tools in order to keep an eye on what people are talking about your company and you can react accordingly to improve or save yourself from any negativity before it starts affecting your business.
Saas Marketing In 2024 – Final Thought
As per reports, the SaaS industry was estimated to be worth approximately $197 billion in 2023, and in 2024, it is estimated to reach $247 billion. According to Statista, the SaaS revenue is set to reach a whopping $344 billion by 2027, and it is growing at a decent rate of 7.89% every year.
If you or your business has the potential to build something that’s revolutionary or that can solve any pain point of an industry then don’t wait for things to be on paper. Take action and execute! With the best SaaS marketing strategies, you can grow consistently and surely in this industry. This is a billion-dollar industry and you are just a few steps away with your software.
If the steps mentioned in this blog are implemented well, and if you remain consistent with effective SaaS marketing plans and efforts, you will soon be able to carve a niche in this industry.
What are you waiting for? Set out to execute these SaaS marketing strategies today.
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