SaaS Marketing: A Detailed Guide to Market Your Saas Business

Yash Munjal
Yash Munjal

Last updated on

March 5, 2024

Marketing is tough, especially when you have no physical product presence. SaaS marketing experts have a tough job. Marketing a SaaS business is not the same as marketing any other business.

When we talk about marketing, SaaS has its own rules. Prospects research and largely buy online; makes free trial sign-ups and demos crucial to the process.

Even if you’ve made a sale, it’s just the beginning; the complex landscape of SaaS marketers is made up of subscriptions, deviation rates, growth hacking, and numerous ROI calculations.

Currently, software development and marketing costs have decreased, reducing barriers to entry and updating SaaS with quick updates, which means that there are often few differences between competing products.

We'll walk you through the important activities you'll need to consider and implement in this guide.

What is SaaS Marketing?

Software as a service (SaaS) is a way to deliver applications over the Internet. 

The software is hosted by a third party and can be accessed via the internet rather than being downloaded and installed on a single PC or server. 

Marketing, in a nutshell, is a broad phrase that encompasses all activities aimed at promoting a product or service. 

As a result, SaaS marketing refers to a company’s actions to advertise software as a service product.

Compared to physical products or one-time purchases, SaaS companies offer an intangible product and must consistently demonstrate to their current and potential customers that their "rented" or subscription service is worth the monthly fee.

Why is SaaS Marketing different?

The fact that you're pushing an intangible is probably the most important factor that makes SaaS marketing different. Something you can't see, touch, or feel. Something that resides in the cloud rather than on a person's desk. 

You are, by definition, selling a service rather than a product. As a result, it's critical to think about all facets of the service you give before marketing it.

Yes, SaaS marketing is more complicated than product marketing because there is no tangible product you can show. It's harder to convince someone to integrate your software into their daily processes than to just ask them to buy shoes. 

So this proves that you need proven SaaS marketing strategies to convince consumers and get more conversions.

Let's face it: your software's competitors may be able to assist your prospect in achieving the same aim. As a result, you must go beyond promoting the software's capabilities and benefits to promoting the entire package. 

For instance, your world-class 24/7 customer service, guided onboarding and switching processes, and no-questions-asked money-back guarantee.

How to Get Started With SaaS Marketing

You can't just leap into things without a clear roadmap to where you need to be, even if you have a strong list of SaaS marketing necessities. As a result, it's critical to devote time to developing a SaaS marketing plan.

Define your Targeted Audience

The cornerstone for a focused marketing effort is identifying your target demographic. Create a checklist of questions to categorize the qualities of your target audience. Consider the following scenario:

  • Is your ideal customer a business or a private individual?
  • What gender are they?
  • What is the definition of age?
  • What is their degree of income?
  • What industry do they work in?
  • What is their official title?
  • What other brands do they patronize?
  • What websites do they frequent?
  • What social media accounts do they keep up with?
  •  What trade associations are they members of?
  •  What types of trade shows do they attend?

Make your own checklist that is specific to your product and target market. Using analytics tools to assess your social media following is an effective technique to analyze the characteristics of your audience. 

Platforms like Facebook provide capabilities that allow you to see your following's attributes in granular detail across various categories. You may also use this type of research to locate other social media prospects who have your target audience's qualities.

You can use this information to develop a profile of your ideal buyer once you've determined the features of your target demographic. Give your potential buyer a name to help you brainstorm by putting a face to your profile. You may have more than one target market in some circumstances. You can construct many ideal buyer profiles in this instance. 

Creating a large number of profiles, on the other hand, will become cumbersome and make it harder to target your marketing efforts. So, at most, limit yourself to a few profiles.

Define your Goals & Budget

You should set measurable goals for your content campaigns before employing your keywords to develop content. You'll be able to link your campaigns with the marketing objectives and analyze campaign performance as a result of this.

Some key performance indicators (KPIs), such as the number of unique visitors, session duration, and bounce rate, are standard for content marketing in any business. The SaaS industry can benefit from these KPIs as well. 

However, for SaaS, a few marketing KPIs are especially significant. These are some of them:

  • Free trial registrations can be separated to distinguish requests from specific pages on your site, such as your blog or resource guides.
  • Requests for software demos, which can be separated in the same way.
  • Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is a metric that compares your marketing efforts to the number of clients you get for your money.
  • The lead conversion rate (LCR) is a metric that indicates how many conversions you obtain each visit to your site, such as email sign-ups or trial or demo registrations.

Choose the right marketing platforms

Choosing the best marketing channels and platforms for your SaaS product isn't a one-size-fits-all approach. In reality, broadcasting the same message over various media and hoping that something sticks is one of the most ineffective ways to spend your marketing and advertising budget. 

Choosing the correct channels is an important element of any SaaS marketing plan, and it's one of the finest methods to experiment with different ways to reach your target market. 

SaaS marketers use several main channels, but the best channels are those where you can find your targeted audience.

You must figure out what those channels are, how to build them up, and how to use them to boost, maintain, and expand MRR. 

The first approach is to understand your buyer profiles thoroughly, spend enough time on the channels you believe are essential to them to gather data, and then use that data to allocate resources to the most effective channels.

If you choose Mailmunch’s white label email marketing software, you get to use our email marketing and lead generation platform as your own solution. You can customize the platform according to your choice and then sell it to your customers. Mailmunch gives you complete control over the all-in-one email marketing and lead generation platform for your own customers. 

Below are some SaaS marketing best strategies to grow faster in 2021:

Content Marketing

Content marketing is the top SaaS marketing technique for a reason: it simply works. However, written material isn't the only type of content that can be used in content marketing. 

Many SaaS companies create videos for their prospects and send them out via email. However, written material, and mainly the humble blog, is by far the most popular type of SaaS content marketing.

SEO

There are three main components to SaaS SEO: On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, and SAAS Technical SEO. Technical SEO is concerned with how your website is set up, how it functions and influences the user experience. 

Do you know what has a negative impact on your technical SEO? That’s broken links and slow page load. Your website must be well-optimized to improve the load time.

Your content marketing approach should have both on-page and off-page SEO. All the material on your website, including blog articles and landing page content, is referred to as on-page content. 

Building links from other websites back to yours is what off-page SEO is all about. This is frequently accomplished by guest posting on other websites or appearing in a listicle that mentions your SaaS. A SaaS link building agency can be really helpful in providing such SaaS SEO Services.

Product Led Growth

Customers may utilize all the capabilities of the app without paying for them because of . Because of its subscription model, this method has proven to be particularly effective for SaaS enterprises. 

You obtain free access to the platform first, and only after evaluating a product for a period of time do you decide whether or not you want to pay for a subscription.

Referral Marketing

Referral marketing works by rewarding your current customers once they recommend new customers to you. The beauty of referral marketing is that it is completely free to get started. 

But you need to invest your time in planning, preparation, and communication with your clientele.

Referral marketing works because of three factors:

  • First, customers come to you without you having to spend a dime on advertising.
  • Second, they boost client loyalty - customers who are benefiting from your referral program are more likely to stay on board.
  • Third, if each consumer refers to ten clients, each of them refers to ten, the company will grow exponentially. 

Marketing Funnels

A SaaS funnel is traditionally a defined procedure that examines the SaaS marketing and sales process from beginning to end. It consists of the following four basic stages:

  1. Awareness: Getting potential customer’s attention
  2. Interest: Customer shows interest in your product
  3. Consideration: Customer converts from a lead.
  4. Conversion:  Lead gets converted into a customer after the purchase.

This SaaS funnel is modeled after the inbound technique, which divides the process into stages to help you plan your marketing and sales operations.

Email Marketing

With a projected ROI of more than $40 for every $1 spent, email marketing is one of SaaS companies’ most profitable marketing methods. You can launch a variety of SaaS email marketing campaigns. To obtain email addresses, one frequent strategy is to use lead generation tools such as content upgrades.

You may then enroll these leads in a top-of-funnel email campaign that sends them a series of content pieces aimed at helping them better understand your service, demonstrating knowledge and authority, and pushing them further down the funnel.

Email marketing can also be a helpful strategy for clients who have already been onboarded and are using a free or limited-access version of your SaaS. You may educate customers about the benefits of upgrading to your premium version through email marketing.

Create Content & Assets

Set up your business model and nail your brand. And the imperative thing is to make the most of interactive and engaging content. Digital marketing helps your business create strong content and engage in SEO optimization. The way to beat the people is to stand out from this crowd.

Content marketing is a proven model for generating sales leads for each SaaS website. At the most basic level, getting more traffic to your website means publishing quality content to your site. The topics you want to write about should be of interest to your audience. You need to plan a proper content strategy for your SaaS business for each of the funnel stages.

Plan a Distribution Strategy

While product quality plays a vital role in user selection, the overall marketing strategy and its execution have the biggest impact at the end of the day. 

Therefore, a company with relatively poor cloud services and secure distribution channels could ultimately outperform better services with weaker distribution channels.

Because costs usually determine the number of leads generated by your ad, your budget greatly affects your campaign's overall results. 

In some cases, especially when advertisers create ingeniously simple ads perfectly matched to an audience, the number of leads generated may exceed the number of advertisements from the corresponding more expensive ad. Therefore, strategy and content are more important than budget.

Track and Optimize

You need to optimize the content you create for your blog for both user intent and keywords. It means the content must match the query that the website visitor wanted to receive. For example, if they’re going to buy the service through Google search, they want to see the sales page. 

On the other hand, when searchers search for information, they may want to reach a blog post.

It is important to understand which sales channel these potential customers are coming from, and if the right content is available. This could be a landing page, detailed case studies, general blog posts, or something else.

Conclusion

We've covered all you need to know about running a successful SaaS content marketing campaign in this article. We started by looking at the differences between SaaS content marketing and other types of marketing. 

This distinction stemming from SaaS marketing, is responsible for advertising both digital products and the customer service that supports them. The eventual purpose of SaaS marketing is to promote repeat business through subscription or license renewals. 

In addition to these critical criteria, we discovered that SaaS marketing relies substantially on educating prospects, delivering SEO results, reducing customer risk worries, and eliciting favorable suggestions.

Author Bio

Yash Munjal

Yash Munjal is a freelance writer for software and marketing brands. He’s helped businesses from fast-growing SaaS companies to Fortune 500s grow with actionable & data-driven content.

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