In order to kick off your journey of mastering SaaS Marketing, we are going to take a look at several important articles and resources.
First, here is a powerful article by Codeless titled SaaS Marketing Is Different. Here’s How to Do It Well.
Let's examine several specific pieces within the article:
Though many SaaS products technically fall under the B2B umbrella, their sales cycle follows a distinct, three-step process:
Important Note: an analysis from Price Intelligently found that when comparing the relative impact of 1% improvements in each of these three stages, monetization and customer retention both had much more significant impacts than customer acquisition.
5 Tactics to Include in Your SaaS Marketing Strategy:
Moving along, here are the key takeaways from a superb article by Social Sprout, How to put together a top-tier SaaS marketing strategy:
SaaS marketing is all about long-term customers
In short, SaaS companies are looking to acquire and retain customers for the long haul – years at a time.
The SaaS customer journey is complex
Food for thought: it can take anywhere between six to eighteen months to close an enterprise deal in SaaS.
The SaaS space is crowded with competition
Take a peek at the SaaS 1000 or the MarTech 5000 and you’ll see just how crowded the SaaS space is.
Email Marketing
Email marketing might seem old-school but it’s integral to SaaS. Remember what we said earlier about the customer lifecycle lasting a long time? Email remains one of the best channels for making frequent, one-on-one touchpoints with customers. Here are some typical SaaS marketing emails that most companies send on the regular:
Note that approximately half of SaaS customers log in or use a product less often than once a month. Yikes. Email is the perfect way to give customers a nudge and likewise make sure that someone is satisfied with your product.
SEO
The importance of SEO and organic reach really can’t be stressed enough.
As illustrated in his research regarding the best traffic sources for SaaS, consultant Mike Sonders notes that organic traffic accounts for the bulk of leads and traffic for top-tier SaaS companies (up to 68% total).
The previous Gartner study highlights the fact that folks are doing more and more independent research when looking up SaaS products. In many cases, this means turning to a quick Google search. This is why so many companies are looking to get featured on “best of” lists in addition to creating their own blog content for SEO.
Webinars
Webinars are all the rage right now for a reason. Data gathered by GoToWebinar notes that a quarter of all webinars are created by SaaS companies. Meanwhile, the same data notes that nearly three-fourths of B2B and sales leaders cite webinars as the best method for generating high-quality leads.
Webinars and digital events are great for driving demos, showing off your product and likewise promoting thought leadership.
Webinars can either be presented live or downloadable “on-demand,” perfect for prospects and current customers alike. Plus, replays and broadcasts can be uploaded to the likes of YouTube to help build out your channel and score search traffic at the same time.
PPC and Social Ads
Pay-per-click advertising is alive and well for SaaS.
Many companies use Google ads to increase visibility for specific keywords and likewise outrank competitors. PPC campaigns can be run immediately and don’t require the waiting game involved with SEO.
Social ads are similarly becoming more prevalent for SaaS, enabling companies to bypass social algorithms and advertise directly to relevant customers.
Checklists, webinars and case studies are prime content for social ads, for example. Facebook actually has its own slew of SaaS marketing success stories such as BigCommerce who saw a 3x lift in trial conversions from their ad campaign.
Organic social media
Social media has become integral to SaaS marketing at large. Although software companies may not seem like the ideal candidates to thrive on social media, many SaaS brands are taking full advantage of platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. For example, social media represents a place to do all of the following:
What should be the top priorities of my SaaS marketing plan?
How else can SaaS companies stand out from the crowd?
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