You’ve spent a lot of your time building a great SaaS that solves your ideal customer's problems achieving the first path to success. But regardless of how good your solution is, you can’t scale your business without an effective digital marketing strategy. With so much competition in every SaaS industry, you need to know how to stand out from the crowd in order to build brand awareness, get leads, and convert.
This article will walk you through everything you need to know: the process of SaaS marketing and insights on effective marketing campaigns, strategies, tracking your progress, and more.
Let’s dive in.
SaaS marketing (software as a service marketing) is a type of marketing focused on strategically promoting and acquiring leads for subscription-based SaaS solutions. Since the SaaS business model differs in several ways from other business models, it follows that its marketing calls for a distinct approach compared to traditional ones.
Market a SaaS is different due to the following reasons:
Before diving into specific marketing tactics to help you excel in your niche (we’ll get there soon, don’t worry), it’s worth running through what you need to know and do before getting started.
Your website is one of your most important marketing assets for lead generation. It’s the place where you’re able to best show off SaaS solution’s features and value to potential leads, the first challenge is to establish authority in your domain, bring traffic to your site, and get solid leads from this traffic. Here’s how you can do that.
You’ve probably heard the phrase that content is king, however, when it comes to a SaaS, variety is the new kind. To get traffic to your site, establish authority, and demonstrate your SaaS product’s use cases, it’s best to leverage a variety of content types.
Not everyone wants to sit down and read case studies or blog posts, incorporate webinars, listen to podcasts, or analyze infographics too. For content that requires a bit of extra time and needs significant investment to create, you should consider making these assets gated so that interested customers provide contact info in return for accessing it.
You shouldn’t neglect your existing customers either — build up a veritable resource library of Q&As, how-tos, and other helpful content. This kind of content will help reduce the churn rate.
While SEO somewhat goes hand-in-hand with a content marketing plan, good SEO results just from hitting the Publish button on your content are not really likely. Effective optimization of your web pages and content to appear prominently in search engines is part science and part art. The stats show that landing the number one slot on Google for a particular keyword wins you 39.6% of the traffic searching that phrase while landing in second position nets you 18.4%.
Make sure your SEO strategy covers the technical details that make it easier for search engines to crawl your site. Good on-page optimizations (title tags, headings, etc) that convey the intent of the page, and off-site link-building activities, will help signify to search engines the value of your content.
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Your marketing team has gone through all the trouble of attracting traffic to your site and getting leads interested enough to provide their email address. Now it’s time to unleash the power of email marketing. To achieve the best results, segmentation is vital to provide the right messages to audiences who are at varying stages of the sales cycle.
For current customers, perhaps speak to some of their wins from using your solution (for example, Grammarly congratulates its existing customers on the number of words written during given timeframes). It’s great for customer retention and customer success. For prospects who are inactive or in the middle of a trial, keep speaking to their pain points in your email campaigns and help them understand your solution better.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is another way to generate leads and traffic. However, be aware that it requires careful execution to see results without significantly eating into your marketing budget. Paid search results on Google are one option, but you should also look beyond Google into paid ads on other platforms your target customers might hang out on, like Reddit, Facebook, or LinkedIn. To execute a PPC plan, create lots of variations of ad copy and monitor your metrics closely to determine what resonates and gets clicks.
For SaaS businesses, social media can be a good way to reach your buyer persona. The important part is to choose your marketing channels wisely. If you are a b2b SaaS company, such as Hubspot for example, you want to reach decision-makers and a professional demographic, and to do so, social media channels like LinkedIn can be very useful, whereas TikTok probably isn’t. Social media is also great at the top of the marketing funnel, to help with brand awareness.
Once you get traffic and leads, there are many levers to play with in order to effectively turn these prospects into paying customers. The delicate balance to get right with SaaS is that you also need to market to people who’ve already subscribed. Your product marketing strategy should help you get more inbound marketing leads and keep them.
In order to entice people to find out how your solution works, a free trial or freemium model is pretty much mandatory. This contrasts with marketing approaches for traditional goods or services in which offering things for free is the exception rather than the norm. If you don’t offer a trial or freemium option, your competitors will, meaning you’re almost guaranteed to lose potential customers if you don’t adopt this strategy.
If you offer a trial, make sure to have an onboarding process that helps the user navigate your software and its value proposition so that once the trial is over, they want to subscribe.
Paying on a subscription basis for SaaS makes clarity incredibly important in your marketing. Customers need to know exactly what they get for the subscription fee they pay. If you use a tiered model, precisely outline what features and benefits your solution includes in each tier. You’ll also want to be minimalistic with how many pricing tiers you have, otherwise, you risk overwhelming prospects with too many choices.
Sometimes it’s tempting to focus more on getting people interested in your solution before revealing the price, but if people don’t get transparency on what your service costs from the outset, they’ll look elsewhere.
When people look online to make purchases, reviews play a huge role in their decisions. This is as true for SaaS solutions as it is for a fancy $300 toothbrush. In fact, 84 percent of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.
Use this trust to your advantage in your SaaS marketing plan by placing customer testimonials on your site’s landing pages. Also, don’t forget to sign up to as many third-party SaaS review platforms as possible. Examples include G2crowd, Capterra, and SaaSGenius. You can also feature some of your best partnerships, awards, or customers (with their blessing of course).
Referral marketing is a powerful tactic in SaaS both for reducing customer acquisition costs and increasing loyalty among existing customers. A referral program works by rewarding existing subscribers when they refer somebody else to sign up for your solution. Rewards could include discounts or free access to premium features at higher pricing tiers.
Two major barriers to conversions in SaaS are calls to action that aren’t prominent or distinguishable and sign-up forms that are overly long. Focus on both the design of your CTA buttons (ensuring it stands out on the page) in addition to the microcopy (the label telling customers what to do).
Even the most interested customers will regard a lengthy sign-up form as an obstacle. Try to take a minimalistic approach and only ask your potential customers for the absolute necessary details when signing up. You can always ask for optional details at a later point.
Another way to reduce barriers could be to simplify the product, for example, offering templates for marketing agencies, or making sure a common pain point for new customers is taken care of.
Vertical SaaS marketing somewhat differs in that you’re trying to market to customers in a specific industry. You need to figure out ways to provide these customers with additional value.
One option that often doesn’t require industry-specific insight is to bundle a well-designed website with your vertical SaaS solution. A commonality across many different industries is that small businesses within them lack an online presence. Including a feature allowing them to create their digital presence will immediately strike leads as something incredibly valuable to their success, no matter your vertical. To learn more, read about
how vertical SaaS providers amplify customer value with websites, and if you’re looking for a specific example, read about
fueling growth In hospitality SaaS by selling websites.
Getting in place a good mix of tactics is all well and good, but how do you track your SaaS marketing progress? Here are some key metrics to concentrate on.
PS: remember that it can be helpful to not only compare these metrics over time but also use industry benchmarks to see where you stand.
Traffic is an easy metric to track, but it’s not so simple to track it in a way that’s meaningful. Instead of just loading up Google Analytics and viewing total traffic volume, go more granular. Look at returning users, unique visitors, organic traffic, and paid traffic metrics because each distinct measure provides insight into the performance of different facets of your marketing strategy.
If the purpose of marketing is to reach a target audience and communicate the benefits of your solution, then conversions provide an excellent measure of how successful your marketing efforts are. Conversions are simply the percentage of website visitors taking a desired action.
Google Analytics is once again your friend for setting up conversions. Make sure you track conversions at different levels of the sales funnel and different attribution. Poor conversion rates at different stages indicate a need to tweak what you’re doing.
Minimizing the rate at which customers cancel their paid subscriptions is critical to SaaS success. Acquiring new customers is far costlier than retaining existing customers. High levels of churn indicate you’re not doing a good enough job at marketing to existing subscribers. Potential marketing tweaks motivated by high churn rates include publishing more helpful content about your solution, communicating regularly about new features or updates, and rewarding existing customers through referral programs or other methods.
Another tactic to reduce churn is by implementing added-value functionalities into your product. For example, Appfolio, a property management SaaS company was able to reduce its churn rate by 4.8% by partnering with Duda website building platform, providing property managers with websites along with their property management software.
The customer acquisition cost (CAC) measures how much it costs you to win one paying subscriber across your marketing and sales activities in a given period. On its own, this metric is not spectacularly valuable, but when compared with your customer lifetime value (CLV) it becomes more useful in terms of marketing insights.
CLV (or LTV) measures how much a single customer is worth to your business. When comparing the ratio of CLV to CAC, you get a singular indicator of the viability of your current marketing strategies. If the ratio is something close to parity (1:1), there is clearly something wrong because acquiring each customer is costing about the same amount of money as the revenue they generate for you in their lifetime.
Lead velocity rate (LVR) is the month-to-month growth in the number of qualified leads you generate. Ideally, your marketing efforts should result in a growing pool of qualified leads. Tracking this metric allows for swiftly adjusting your tactics rather than depending on future revenue metrics months down the line to spot lead gen issues.
Related:
Top SaaS Metrics To Consider
Top 5 Ways To Improve Your SaaS Customer Experience
Bringing a SaaS to market calls for appreciating the uniqueness of the business model, attracting a sizable and sustainable number of users, marketing your solution in an effective way and then tracking progress to refine tactics. Putting all of this together will create a formidable marketing strategy that should provide a solid groundwork and thereby enable growth.
