In an oversaturated marketplace, the influx of new SaaS companies continues to skyrocket. Gartner predicts the cloud-based market will grow another 18% this year, with its largest segment—SaaS—expected to increase by an astounding 26.6% margin.
Long story short: SaaS companies face steep competition. While outwit, outlast, outplay may be the reality TV show Survivor’s motto, the same holds true for SaaS ventures.
So, if your goal is to reduce customer churn, optimize pricing, and grow your business end-to-end, it’s time for a new, holistic marketing approach—one that’s data-driven and built purposefully with SaaS in mind. But how do you accomplish such a feat?
We’re about to show you.
Challenges of Marketing for SaaS
Before we dive into the SaaS marketing strategies you can deploy, it’s essential to first understand why traditional marketing doesn’t work for SaaS.
Aside from the growing level of competition, an SaaS product creates several other significant marketing challenges, which sets it apart from other industries. For instance, the SaaS buyer’s journey and marketing funnels are significantly more complex compared to those of conventional products. This creates massive hurdles, like:
- An intangible product – SaaS doesn’t provide a physical product that you can look at, touch, and sell using traditional marketing strategies. Instead, you must focus on the pain points the service addresses while helping the potential buyer understand how the software integration may improve their workflows.
- Long-term customers – The ideal SaaS customer isn’t a “one and done” deal. Instead, you need to entice customers to try the product and then convert them into long-term patrons that will continue paying for the annual (or monthly) subscription. Not only do they need to experience the product, they need to believe it’ll improve their enterprise.
- Pricing – Most SaaS follow a tiered-pricing subscription model. By boiling down the product offering into a cost and benefits pitch, SaaS companies yield a higher efficacy in their sales cycle. However, given the disparity of business models, this isn’t an easy task.
- Legacy competition – As if the competition from other SaaS vendors wasn’t already enough, SaaS companies must also compete against and differentiate their product from established traditional software licensing vendors.
- A lengthy buyer journey – Especially at an enterprise level, conventional wisdom says that it can take anywhere from 6 to 18 months to go from the initial touchpoint to a closed deal. And even after a conversion, the job’s not finished. You still need to focus on retention.
How To Create a Data-Driven SaaS Marketing Strategy
With these common pain points in mind, what do you need to do in order to find, convert, and retain the right customers?
You need a data-driven SaaS marketing strategy centered around the following channels:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- High-quality content
- Pay per click (PPC)
- Social media
- Email marketing
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The vast majority of prospective customers start their buying journey with a search engine.
In layman’s terms, if you’re not showing up on Google, you’re not on the megaphone.
When someone types a word or phrase into the Google search engine, the algorithm and web crawlers (sometimes called spiders) pull the most relevant web pages according to keyword ranking, authority, relevance, and recency.
According to famed NASCAR persona Ricky Bobby: If you’re not first, you’re last. And according to a more credible source—the Search Engine Journal—the click-through rate (CTR) on rankings is:
- 1st spot – 28.5%
- 2nd spot – 15.7%
- 3rd spot – 11%
- 4th spot – 8%
- 5th spot – 7.2%
The higher you climb, the greater visibility you create for your platform. If you want to rank higher, your entire website must be optimized for SEO.
When it comes to improving your rankings, the formula boils down to two things—leading every initiative with quality content and adhering to the following steps:
- Building a blog and web pages filled with accurate, relevant, high-quality content
- Using keywords throughout articles and webpages
- Taking advantage of metadata, including meta descriptions, URLs, and title tags
- Optimizing your website and content for voice search
- Strategic internal and external link building
- Leveraging local SEO
How This Applies to SaaS Marketing
When it comes to marketing your SaaS platform, SEO presents an incredible opportunity to address the pain points you solve. By finding search queries related to the efficiencies your product creates, you can provide valuable answers and information to your reader, and then position your SaaS as the ultimate solution.
The end result? Potential leads don’t just have an answer to their question—they have an actualized product that can fix or improve their business.
From there, you can use data to evaluate which blogs are outperforming others, and what format yields the highest conversions. Overall, this can help reduce your cost per acquisition and establish your brand as a thought leader in the marketplace.
High-Quality Content
The days of low-quality, “black hat,” keyword-stuffed SEO content are over.
Today, quality content triumphs over nearly every other SEO stratagem. By leading with informative, resourceful, and engaging content, you can entice potential SaaS buyers and drive perpetual growth.
To that end, if you want to rank highly on SERPS, a blog is your most valuable tool. But it can’t just be keywords on a page. Instead, your blog—like the rest of your content—must provide authoritative, well-researched assets that answer the reader’s question (or piques their interest) and persuades them to take action.
Additionally, your content efforts must cater to your specific buyer personas, creating thought leadership, providing valuable education, and proving that you’re the authority in the space.
You should consider leveraging each of these channels for your content pursuits:
- Videos
- Social media
- Articles
- White papers
- eBooks
- Blogs
- Case studies
How This Applies to SaaS Marketing
According to a 2016 Demand Gen Report, 47% of B2B buyers will read 3-5 blog posts before ever speaking with a salesperson. Building readership with your content through your blog allows you to engage your audience, establish your expertise, and hit on many of the questions and pain points potential buyers may have without taking an overtly “sales-y” approach.
Over time, this allows you to become a genuine resource within the SaaS space.
PPC
Pay per click (PPC) campaigns are one of the most effective paid advertising mediums available to SaaS vendors. Whether it’s Google AdWords or paid social, paid search is a viable marketing strategy that leverages consumer’s behavioral data and tracking metrics to make more informed marketing decisions.
You can use PPC campaigns for:
- Branded campaigns – Consists of keywords that list the product name and your company name
- Competitor – Targets your competitors’ current and potential clients
- Retargeting – Utilizes browser cookies to send a display ad to customers who have previously visited your site
How This Applies to SaaS Marketing
Survey your direct competitors. What offers are they leading with? How are they positioning their PPC copy? From there, isolate a value proposition that you have and they don’t. Bid on relevant keywords and try to funnel leads by embodying the best qualities of an SaaS and championing your unique value proposition.
Social Media
When leveraged correctly, social media creates a direct line of communication between you and your potential customer. Whether it’s Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or LinkedIn, you can use your social presence to:
- Highlight success stories
- Empower your target audience
- Partner with relevant influencers
- Build a community
- Share new and old content like blogs, articles, white papers, ebooks
- Educate your consumers on how to take advantage of your product
- Provide instant customer support
To build your presence on social media, you need a custom content strategy that’s anchored to a social calendar. It’s also vital to constantly monitor and manage the community. In doing so, you can then glean data-driven insights to better market your software solution.
How This Applies to SaaS Marketing
The social channel presents a unique opportunity for SaaS companies to highlight the utility of their product. Rather than speaking on what the product is, focus on what it can do for your customers. Additionally, by creating different buyer personas and building marketing assets tailored to their affinities, you can showcase case studies, use reports, and reviews.
Then, track your individual campaigns.
Which performed highest? Which garnered the most engagement?
Once you have visibility, optimize.
Email Marketing
To this day, email is one of the most effective forms of direct marketing, which is why it should be one your primary lead generation channels. According to Oberlo, the average expected ROI is $42 for every dollar spent on email marketing.
Using email automation, you can build highly effective:
- Welcome emails – Introduce your brand while telling its story and providing incentives to purchase the SaaS.
- Lead nurturing emails – Educate and engage the potential customer while guiding them down the sales funnel.
- Re-engagement emails – Prevent customer churn by rekindling the conversation, reminding customers of your value, and providing them with incentives to remain a customer.
How This Applies to SaaS Marketing
The email channel is a fantastic opportunity for SaaS companies to target potential leads, incentivize them with an offer (free trial, referral, etc.), and usher them to take action. Given that most SaaS platforms are B2B, if done correctly, email is a direct line into your customers’ inbox.
Email also allows SaaS companies to target specific leads who are in different stages of the buyer’s journeys, including people who’ve already purchased the product, people who have shown interest but have yet to buy, and people who have started a trial but haven’t yet purchased.
According to Mail Chimp, a segmented email campaign receives a 14.31% higher open rate than non-segmented campaigns.
Semgeeks—Powerful Digital Marketing Strategies and Analytics
The ideas discussed above are some of the primary channels you can use to create an effective SaaS marketing strategy. However, for a holistic, 360-degree, data-driven marketing campaign, you’ll want to deploy all your marketing initiatives beneath a single controller.
For that, you’re in the right place. At Semgeeks, our premier internet marketing consultants help you define your KPIs, build a comprehensive marketing strategy that orbits those indicators, and then analyze the results throughout the entirety of your campaign.
As a leading SEM marketing agency, we take a holistic approach to SaaS campaigns. By partnering with us, we’ll ensure that all decisions we make are powered by, driven by, and focused on data.
After all, data is what sets apart digital marketing from any other type of advertisement.
Sources:
Gartner. Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Public Cloud End-User Spending to Grow 18% in 2021. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-11-17-gartner-forecasts-worldwide-public-cloud-end-user-spending-to-grow-18-percent-in-2021
Search Engine Journal. Over 25% of People Click the First Google Search Result. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-first-page-clicks/374516/#close
Demand Gen Reports. 2016 Content Preferences Survey: B2B Buyers Value Content That Offers Data And Analysis
Oberlo. 10 Email Marketing Statistics. https://www.oberlo.com/blog/email-marketing-statistics
Mail Chimp. Effects of List Segmentation on Email Marketing Stats.
https://mailchimp.com/resources/effects-of-list-segmentation-on-email-marketing-stats/
