A friend of mine just came up with an idea of creating his very own task management software. He invested years in brainstorming the various functionalities of the product and hired some of the best development professionals to turn his SaaS product into reality. Apparently, he somehow successfully nailed it, purchased a domain and a reliable hosting and sent the product out live on the Internet.
My friend Josh had never felt so happy as he felt on the launch of his SaaS-based product.
But now comes the big step! It is now time that he is challenged with a greater objective. It is now time for him to bring relevant traffic to his website so people can sign up and purchase his services.
It happens to be that he had a marketer friend who debriefed Josh on how to deploy the perfect marketing strategy for his SaaS-based product business. At the time I was working with his digital business as a content writer so I still remember bits of information that he shared with Josh and well all of this information came quite handy not just for Josh but for me too.
SaaS marketing strategy isn’t any different than a B2C organization. It has the same phases as a normal B2C marketing strategy have but only this time they are more centered at marketing the SaaS product. It is customer-focused and data-driven as they make the bulk of the product marketing mix.
In this guide, I will be sharing my important tips which will shape your SaaS digital marketing plan.
Content Marketing
Businesses all around the world are making quite an impact with a proper content marketing strategy in place. Words have power and when used in the right context, they can make a subconscious impact on the minds of the people. We live in a day and age where the Internet is just about everywhere and if you want to tap into the market with your SaaS-based product, making an impact is quite competitive.
Unlike other marketing strategies such as the Pay Per Click Advertising or Social Media Marketing, content marketing is not dependent on monetary investments to drive leads. It becomes a perpetual motion machine which when done right can attract leads and churn a great amount of profit in return. Take it as PPC or SMM is a rented service that pays off as long as you are paying the rent, whereas content marketing is an asset that you only have to invest once and watch the business take the lead.
Seeking some SaaS-based product examples which make the best use of content marketing?
Take a look at the Dropbox official website.
Dropbox is a file sharing and storage website which attracts potential customers using targeted content. They do that by publishing value-driven content on their different blog pages and webinars. And through these webinars and blogs, they communicate their credentials to prospective clients.
Here’s what I personally like about Dropbox,
They allow their customers to share their stories and then publish them on their website blog page. By doing so, they empower their customers to share stories that further motivate people to sign-up.
But that’s just one of the ways Dropbox wins customers with the power of content.
If you want to implement a perfect marketing strategy, content marketing might be the first step.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
No content can see the light of the day until an SEO marketing evangelist doesn’t work his/her magic on it. SEO works side by side with content marketing making sure that your content appears on different search engines such as Google, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu to name a few. When it comes to SEO, you should consider it a dual-edged sword where on-page and off-page are the two sides.
1) What is On-Page Optimization?
The best part about on-page optimization is that everything you do online is under your control. You are tasked with creating the content, adding your desired links, publishing and sharing it on your chosen platforms. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg as you are tasked with doing a whole lot more.
For instance, building the right keyword strategy to include within your content. The use of keywords in meta titles and descriptions. And a complete site audit to include good ranking keywords in the site.
2) What is Off-Page Optimization?
When it comes to off-page SEO people often hold a misconception that it’s all about just link-building. It’s not indecisively or completely true but valuable to a certain extent. Off-page isn’t all about creating as many links as you want at the backend of your website, it’s about how many are quality backlinks. High-quality backlinks linking back to your website has a more profound effect as it brings more quantity.
Plus getting your website linked back to quality websites increases your chances of getting shared by strong influencers on the Internet. What you need is a powerful distribution strategy for off-page SEO.
Referral Marketing
Research performed by some of the world’s renowned marketing specialists indicates that referral marketing is one of the fastest ways of growing your SaaS-based business. Referral marketing is when you create a chance for other businesses to earn small monetary benefits every time they add your product link to their websites or make sure that it gets shared on different platforms on the Internet. It is a very sophisticated form of marketing and can allow businesses to earn significantly.
In fact, more than 56% of the world’s sales representatives claim that referral marketing is one of the fastest ways of growing your business in the digital world. If done right, you can earn around millions.
The real challenge is when organizations have to incentivize their referrals. Sometimes brands heavily incentivize their referrals which usually results in getting low value/low-quality referrals which aren’t everlasting. And those who do not choose to incentivize or incentivize low barely get any referrals.
Brands can instead set an intermediate referral plan for their SaaS-based product so it works.
The Power of Google Adwords
No wonder inbound marketing is a great way to increase the network traffic on your SaaS-based product, but here’s the real question, is it the only way of increasing your brand presence? In all honesty, the power of Google Adwords goes beyond that and with just a single platform you can reach millions of people through posting search engine ads just about every day. If you’re not interested in missing out on a great chunk of potential leads, you can try investing your budget in what we call PPC.
Josh did the same thing, and he invested in PPC just as much as he invested in Social Media.
Why did he prefer PPC?
- Firstly, because it helped deliver him target traffic to his website.
- PPC was immensely scalable so he was able to reduce/increase ad spent as per choice.
- It provides good enough insight on both, in terms of costings and in terms of results.
- It’s a much more controlled marketing practice, which can have positive effects on business.
Just like other PPC specialists, Josh also performed a series of tests and identified which activity generated the best ROI for the business. And before you know, results started pouring in abundantly.
If you’re willing to pay for traffic and leads, then might I suggest that you should definitely go for PPC.
Co-Marketing
Most SaaS businesses work collaboratively in running co-marketing campaigns which can benefit both the companies equally and complement their efforts. They usually do that by complementing each others product or talk about a marketing strategy which both of them utilize to start a business.
Usually, brands make the best use of co-marketing by creating a webinar session or an e-book together. Once, these compound efforts generate a lead, both the organizations share on the profit. Also, both the organizations also share the cost incurred in making these strategies successful. Here, both the brands can leverage each other’s followers and network traffic, and both of them get a chance to explore new audience types. By joining other firms in a co-marketing campaign, brands may find a cost-effective approach to generate more leads. Here’s an example from Hubspot + LinkedIn:
Retargeting
The guy we brought in to educate Josh on marketing taught us a very valuable lesson that day.
He asked us what our key conversion metrics were and we showed him many different funnels. There were countless different options as we had e-books, sales copy pages, and webinars. But he told us, there’s no point in investing a large sum of our budget in these metrics if they aren’t really converting.
We sort of got agitated because we invested a fortune! The only thing missing was retargeting. We found ourselves pondering how much we missed out since we weren’t investing much in retargeting. We learned that if you want to see your SaaS based product to turn into a thriving success, never ignore retargeting.
Many different brands make the best use of retargeting by using custom-tailored content which helps bait audiences so they can keep coming back to your website over and over again. You can see the best examples of such contextual offers in most e-commerce websites circulating the Internet. Remember the time when you visited a certain e-commerce website in search for a branded t-shirt and since you couldn’t find what you were looking for you left the website. Apparently, a few days later you started seeing ads of the same t-shirt on different websites and that’s the art of retargeting.
So there you go, here’s everything you are seeking to build the perfect digital marketing plan for your SaaS business. Working in a SaaS based industry can be real competitive, but it isn’t that problematic if you have a sound digital marketing plan in place. Did you find it an interesting read? Let us know.