ShivaniToday, saas is a popular business model. There are several advantages to the software as a service (SaaS) offer like lower costs, a smaller sales cycle, and recurring revenue, to name a few — but marketing is not one of them. Therefore, SaaS marketing can be challenging, we’ll see why. But before we understand SaaS marketing in depth, let’s have a look at the basics first.
What is SaaS Marketing?
SaaS marketing is a kind of marketing that explicitly focuses on promoting and getting leads for subscription-based SaaS products. SaaS, also remembered as Software as a Service, is a way in which companies sell their products in cloud-based applications with daily updates and added functionality.
SaaS marketing further refers to the different set of activities, tactics, and strategies executed to position and sell subscription-based products to new customers.
You can consider SaaS marketing as the art to make sure that your SaaS product is relevant and can address your target customer’s requirements in a way that makes prospects want to understand more about your product, try it, and eventually subscribe to, across the multitude of competitors.
Best Ways to Give Your SaaS Marketing Efforts A Boost
To get started your SaaS marketing in the right way, try executing some of these tried-and-true SaaS marketing best practices:
a) Only allow a free trial if it makes sense
It appears like every SaaS company under the sun provides a free trial for its product or service — but just because you can provide a free trial doesn’t mean you should. Also, keep in mind that free trials don’t always make sense, particularly if your product is complicated or comes with a sheer learning curve.
If either of those things applies to your product, a free trial could harm your chances with prospective customers because they likely won’t have the opportunity to experience its full functionality within the trial period or might be disappointed by the barrier to entry. That said, free trials should be offered on a case-by-case basis.
And, if you do ultimately decide to provide one, make it work for you by observing usage: A trial user who logs in many times throughout a one-month trial period makes for a better lead than someone whose only login was when they first signed up.
b) Don’t make your site visitors hunt for more information
If we haven’t stressed it enough by now, content is king in the world of online SaaS marketing. Prospective customers are likely comparing multiple products, so it’s essential that the content on your website is well-written and simple to access and that it offers visitors with all information they have to commit to buying or, at the very least, to connect with your brand.
c) Build an SLA for your sales and marketing teams
Now, we’re not suggesting that you need to draw an SLA for sales and marketing but rather a symbolic one. Usually, these teams will point fingers at one another, with sales charging marketing for bringing them poor quality leads and marketing blaming sales for not following up on leads fast enough.
It doesn’t do anyone any good from a SaaS marketing opinion, so SaaS companies have to ensure that both sides understand what is expected of them and that sales and marketing work together to accomplish the same goal.
d) Have a solid social media presence
One of the best things about utilizing social media for SaaS marketing is that — except for PPC ads — it’s free. Use analytics to decide which sites your audience frequents and then establish a strong presence there. It will enable you to draw organic visitors, build a rapport with your audience, and grow your existing customer relationships.
e) Be transparent about pricing
Like the earlier item on our list, there’s no sense hide your pricing or making it challenging to understand. Showcase your pricing tiers in a format that’s simple to understand so that prospective customers can immediately decide whether to move forward or move on.
f) Keep your product selection simple
The more subscription plans you provide, the more difficult it is for prospective customers. Limit your choice to no more than three plans (think entry-level, mid-level, and pro-level) j and be sure to explain which features each version clearly covers, either on their separate web pages or on your pricing page.
g) Always be optimizing
One of the major principles of SaaS marketing is to always look for ways to enhance, whether that’s updating old blog posts with updated information, A/B testing all of your marketing campaigns, or a chatbot module to your website to manage low-level customer inquiries. The more you invest to optimize your current SaaS marketing strategy, the more returns you’ll get from it.
h) Offer deals
Presenting customers with some incentive, such as a discount on a longer-term plan, can drive sales. That said, much like free trials, whether you provide a deal — or what sort of deal you choose to provide — should be determined on a case-by-case basis so that you don’t lose out on any possible revenue.
i) Make it simple for prospects to sign up for things
In keeping with the concept of making things as simple for prospective customers as possible, you must streamline signup pages so that they aren’t stuck filling out dozens of fields to gain access to an eBook or a free trial.
6 Tools To Use in Your SaaS Marketing Toolkit
There are so many SaaS marketing tools and platforms available out there it becomes challenging to determine which ones you should implement; therefore, we’ve put together this list of some of the best to help you narrow things down.
1. InviteReferrals
InviteReferrals is a solid yet simple-to-integrate referral program software that enables you to expand your business and get new customers through referral marketing. It combines with several eCommerce platforms that involve WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, MailChimp, and a lot more. InviteReferrals works across all platforms and devices. InviteReferrals’ referral Program widgets adjust themselves automatically depending on the platform.
Customers can moreover utilize the InviteReferrals mobile application to invite their friends through the referral program. Friends who accept the invite and further install the mobile app. InviteReferrals, then provide coupons to the referrer over email for making a referral install.
InviteReferrals shows complete customer referral program analytics that involves invites filtered by referral channels.
2. Wistia
If you’ve ever tried to attempt your hand at video marketing, then Wistia is the answer for you. It might appear like any other free video hosting platform at a glance but take a closer look, and you’ll see that its built-in marketing capabilities involving advanced data analytics, retargeting functionality, customer relationship management (CRM) system integration, and video SEO make it a different way to improve your SaaS marketing strategies.
3. Hootsuite
Social media acts as the next frontier of SaaS marketing, but with several platforms to keep track of — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, you name it — it can be difficult to form a comprehensive social media strategy. Fortunately, Hootsuite’s free social media management platform allows you to schedule posts, observe trending topics, curate content, and analyze data to know social media performance better.
4. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is well-known web analytics that allows a complete breakdown of website traffic metrics, including pages per session, session duration, and bounce rate. Google Analytics is a simple and efficient way to gather and analyze data from the site traffic emerging from your marketing campaigns. Best of all, you get all of the power of Google for free, making this SaaS marketing tool a no-brainer.
5. GoToMeeting
Although GoToMeeting isn’t a rigid SaaS marketing tool, its online meeting functionality can let your SaaS marketing team stay connected, particularly if they’re spread out worldwide. GoToMeeting’s video conferencing, mobile conferencing, screen sharing, and more make it feasible for members of your marketing team to get in touch not only with each other but also with customers, all from the comfort of their desk.
6. PeppyBiz
Although PeppyBiz’s CRM allows many enticing capabilities, it continues the gold standard in CRM technology today. In addition to giving granular visibility into the whole SaaS sales cycle, PeppyBiz involves unique, marketing-specific features such as PeppyBiz Campaigns, a built-in Sales Cloud utility that allows you to monitor marketing initiatives Pardot for SaaS marketing automation — and that’s just scratching the surface. PeppyBiz is a valuable addition to your SaaS marketing toolkit with so many features and functionalities to choose from.
Conclusion
In this post, we have learned a lot about SaaS marketing and strategies that you can employ to expand your business. Therefore, you read this post carefully to understand it precisely.
