Software as a Service (SaaS) marketing is different from traditional marketing because there is no physical product at hand.
You are selling a subscription to a service, and the end consumer will keep using the software as long as the subscription is valid. And it is their choice to either renew or not.
Thus, when marketing SaaS products it’s important to remember these differences and create the best marketing strategies for longer consumer relationships. The focus is on impressing clients and renewing subscriptions apart from concentrating on acquiring new consumers.
You May Read: Hiring Digital Marketing Agencies
Here are some proven ways to create an effective SaaS marketing strategy.
Pre-Marketing Plan for SaaS Marketing
Before getting into the actual SaaS marketing plan, let’s discuss the preparation process. Having a solid plan helps avoid confusion in the future. The pre-marketing plan should include:
- Business goals of the company: Have an in-depth understanding of your company’s goals and marketing milestones.
- Budget: Have a realistic calculation of the total spend that your business is ready to make on the SaaS strategies and tactics.
- Marketing strategies: Decide on the strategy that you can incorporate in the marketing campaigns. Popular options include content marketing, white label link building, social media marketing, and pay-per-click (PPC).
- Website design: Before driving traffic to your website with your marketing strategies, make sure you have a strong website design and a strong landing page.
- Customer personas: Understand who your potential customers are, what is important to them, and ways to reach them. This will help you create an efficient SaaS marketing plan.
You May Read: Facebook for Marketing
Saas Marketing Strategies That Work for Your Service
Gartner forecasts that the revenue of SaaS companies will grow 21.7% to reach $482 billion in 2022. The ultimate aim of your SaaS marketing strategy is to create awareness of your product, generate leads, and drive conversions.
Create and accomplish strategies that will help the software leave a lasting impression on your audience. SaaS marketing also requires a deep technical knowledge of the service that you wish to sell, so you can develop an interest in the end consumer and keep their interest throughout the selling process.
Here are some proven ways that you can broadcast and sell your software.
1. Communicate Your Service and Generate Leads Through Content Marketing
Content marketing should be the central pillar of your marketing plan. Creating informative content that is free of errors is the best way to get your service known to the larger public.
Google will penalize duplicate content in the search engine results pages (SERPS). Be sure to use a plagiarism checker to ensure your content is unique so its rank won’t be affected.
Content marketing, when combined with SEO and email marketing, will boost your reach. Make sure the content you create focuses on all the facets of your SaaS product. You can create:
- Blog posts: Engage prospects and answer relevant questions. Blog posts help enhance your SEO ranking. The SaaS world revolves around information, and you can use blogs to offer unique insights into the product you are selling.
- Case studies: Present hard data in a way that’s framed by quantifiable results. Prove how your methods work in the real world and how your product helps businesses grow and improve their ROI.
- White papers: Publishing white papers proves your in-depth knowledge on the subject. This is the best way to move your leads toward the bottom of the sales funnel. At more than 4,000 words, they create detailed insights and help improve your SEO ranks.
You May Read: Real Estate Marketing Strategies
2. Spread the Word and Let the People Know
Creating stunning content to promote your software is not useful if people don’t see it. Spread the word about your brand through appropriate advertising and email marketing. Email marketing can be extremely useful in retaining leads. It’s a great way to contact leads to share content, and you can send a follow-up email to tell them about promotions and other business changes, send newsletters, and seek feedback.
To enhance engagement, you can also create different email marketing content for leads based on their stage in the sales funnel. A sales automation process can handle your email marketing so you can focus on other aspects of the marketing campaign.
You May Read: Efficient Payment Process for Online Customers
3. Offer Free Trials
Companies that offer free trials are uniquely positioned to attract new customers and improve their revenue. It is often little or no cost involved in letting a consumer use a trial version of your software, and it can be an effective customer acquisition strategy.
Free trials are an excellent opportunity to show off your product and your customer service support. They offer tremendous opportunities in creating lead conversions and paid subscriptions at no additional cost and effort. Free trials also offer valuable insights into what people like and dislike about the SaaS platform. This feedback can do wonders for product development and help you market it better.
4. Create an Easy Sign-Up Process
Make the SaaS sign-up process as easy and frictionless as possible. Never overwhelm your customers with too many questions or a lengthy sign-up process.
For a free trial, you could ask only for a name and email address. Most successful SaaS campaigns don’t even ask for credit card information until the user has experienced what your software can offer.
A smooth sign-up process not only improves the sign-up rate for free trials but also encourages users to upgrade for a paid plan.
You May Read: How to Improve Your Real Estate Marketing Strategy
5. Strengthen the Referral Machine
Influencer marketing and creating leads through referrals are the most effective lead generation strategies in the arena of software marketing.
When you tell your audience how great the software is, they may barely listen or not believe it. But when customer reviews or influencers they trust vouch for your software, your audience is more likely to trust your product, and that is the best form of marketing.
Get your happy customers to recommend your service or leverage influencer marketing to your advantage.
Measuring the Performance of Your Saas Marketing Strategy
This is perhaps the most important step of creating a SaaS marketing plan. You should measure your success, as it helps you to improve and make appropriate changes. Aim to reach specific metrics and work toward them.
Seek tangible results and monitor them to enhance performance over time. Leverage data to improve future business plans and achieve even higher goals. Attaining success in the SaaS business is a long journey, but it is not impossible.
Focus on strategies that lead to success and discard those that hold you back. Here are some metrics you can leverage to help you build an effective SaaS marketing strategy.
- Website traffic: Monitor how many people visit your website landing page. Segregate first-time visitors and repeat visitors. If your traffic is high, that is a clear sign that your campaign is bringing people in. But compare traffic with conversions, because if the traffic is not converting you are not creating new business.
- Retention rates: Website visitors who leave your site within minutes are of no use to your business. Traffic retention is a major goal for SaaS companies as it directly converts into revenue. Most companies will be successful with the initial transaction, but holding on to your clients and having them use your service for a long time is what differentiates leaders in the industry from the rest.
- Conversions: This is the most vital metric that measures the number of website visitors who have signed up for the paid subscription of your software. Paid conversions are the ultimate success of your SaaS marketing strategy, as it reflects directly on the ROI of the business.
You May Read: Tips to Choose Web Development Company for Business Website
Bottom Line
Apart from all these marketing strategies, having a strong call to action on your website leads your visitors to sign up. Make sure the CTAs are clear and visible and are on the right pages of your website. Be ready to adapt and modify your marketing strategies as required to attract more leads.
The market keeps evolving and so should your marketing techniques. This will help you to enhance client engagement and visibility in the crowded SaaS marketplace.