Marketing any product can be a tall order. But promoting a product that isn’t tangible can be even tougher. For this reason, SaaS marketing may require a different approach than marketing a physical product.
So, if you’re looking to grow your SaaS company to new heights, it’s crucial to understand the unique challenges and opportunities of marketing a SaaS product.
In this article, you’ll learn what SaaS marketing entails and the advanced strategies you can implement to help you boost conversions and, ultimately, grow your business.
What Is SaaS Marketing?
As you probably know, SaaS marketing involves promoting and selling software products. But what makes it so different from marketing a physical product?
For one, the SaaS business model is quite different from others. For example, many software-as-a-service products are sold to B2B businesses. That can make for a longer sales cycle, as several stakeholders are often involved in the buying process.
As a result, you likely need to provide more information to help business customers make a purchase decision. That means implementing marketing efforts tailored to their stage of the sales cycle.
Plus, SaaS software can be more complicated than other types of products because they often have a learning curve, are feature-rich, have various types of customization, and integrate with other systems.
So, implementing marketing tactics that both promote the product and illustrate how the product works is key.
When selling software, it’s also important to build and maintain relationships with your customers because SaaS products are often subscription-based. So, nurturing the customer relationship is critical.
Whether you’re sending personalized, relevant emails or leveraging social media, improving customer retention can help you grow your SaaS business.
6 Advanced SaaS Marketing Strategies
1. Beef Up Your Email Marketing
Email marketing should be a staple in every business’s marketing toolbox. But it’s an especially important strategy for SaaS companies.
Why? Potential SaaS customers need help making a purchase decision, which also helps reduce the lengthy sales process.
Sending out relevant, targeted email blasts will keep them engaged throughout the buyer’s journey. The result? They can make quick, informed decisions.
Take advantage of email newsletters to provide your target customer with the information they crave in exchange for their email address. In 2022, 80% of industry experts will use email newsletters as part of their marketing strategies.
So, this tactic is clearly paying off. The onboarding email sequence (often triggered by email newsletter sign-ups) is the most important part of an email marketing strategy. It welcomes prospects with open arms and lets them know what to expect.
With each email, you should be taking them on a journey. Here’s a simple example of that journey:
- Introducing prospects to your brand
- Sharing the most important features of your software
- Letting them know what problems you can solve for them
Need inspiration? Here’s an email from Canva sharing a few of the ways it can help improve the design process:
Writing a series of emails that’ll go out over 5 to 7 days is a great way to:
- Tell a story about your brand
- Tap into customer pain points
- Share the benefits of using your software
- Build a sense of urgency through a compelling call-to-action (CTA
- Encourages them to sign up now rather than later
The subject lines and content of your emails are obviously the most important parts of your SaaS email campaign. But don’t overlook your email signature.
Having a professional, eye-catching email signature helps reinforce your brand identity and adds a touch of credibility. You can easily create impactful signatures by getting inspiration from modern email signature templates.
Wisestamp offers effective, visually pleasing email templates to take your email marketing to the next level.
Don’t underestimate the small details. When B2B buyers are constantly bombarded with emails (all day, every day), a professional email signature could be the one thing that differentiates you from the pack. The result? Another closed deal.
2. Say Yes to Sales Enablement
Another advanced approach to SaaS marketing is sales enablement. This holistic approach increases the performance and productivity of your sales team.
Sales enablement can provide your sales team with the knowledge, tools, and resources they need to engage and close deals with leads, prospects, and customers.
Marketing has several roles in sales enablement, but the biggest one is creating content.
When your marketing team creates high-quality, targeted content tailored for different stages of the sales funnel, your sales team has a much higher chance of sealing the deal. They’re equipped with the right content at the right time. It makes conversations more relevant and resonant for the prospect.
But don’t stop there.
Your marketing team can conduct regular training sessions to help keep your sales team up-to-date with the latest product features, industry trends, and customer pain points.
Fresh access to this information allows sales reps to speak confidently and informatively about the product they’re selling. When it comes to sales, confidence is key.
3. Supercharge Your Content Marketing
SaaS companies that invested in content grew 30% faster and retained customers 10% better than those that didn’t.
Perhaps the biggest reason for this is that target customers shopping for SaaS software need tons of information to make an informed decision.
There are a variety of ways to educate your potential customers. Blogs and articles aren’t the only formats you can use to share relevant content. You can also organize and share:
- Landing pages
- Videos
- Webinars
- Case studies
- Virtual summits
- Video sales calls and demos
- ebooks
- White papers
You can use these marketing materials in your content marketing strategy. But you can also use them for sales enablement, as mentioned above. Your sales team can use the same content to address any concerns prospects have, answer questions, and convert interested buyers into customers.
Repurposing your content into different formats might also be a great idea. For example, you can use the information you shared in a blog post to make a video or record a webinar. Ahrefs has seen great success with this method.
Then, you can also share the valuable content you’ve created in your email campaigns. This strategy can be effective because everyone has different preferences in consuming content.
One prospect may not like watching webinars. Instead, they’d rather get their information from a blog post. Repurposing your content can be a huge time saver, and it can ensure more eyes see your content.
4. Keep Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Top of Mind
If you want your SaaS website to appear in organic searches, then SEO is an essential part of your marketing plan. SEO for SaaS businesses is pretty similar to SEO for any other industry.
But it’s different in that you’re offering not only a product but an ongoing service. So, you’ll need to cater to users at many sales funnel stages.
That means you’re not just convincing people to sign up to use your product. You also need to get them to keep paying month to month or year to year. So, it’s important to engage both new and existing customers through your SEO strategy.
One of the first steps of any good SEO strategy is to perform keyword research. Pay close attention to keywords that potential customers may search for, as well as keywords existing customers use.
For example, new leads may search for terms like “benefits of SaaS” or “how SaaS works.” You can implement these keywords on your landing pages or product pages. On the other hand, your current customers may search for terms like “SaaS customer support” or “SaaS customer portal.”
You might incorporate these keywords on your customer support pages. By ensuring your keyword’s intent matches what you want to accomplish on your page, you can drive relevant traffic to your site and keep users on the page longer.
Keywords aren’t the only aspect of an effective SaaS SEO strategy. Your site’s domain name is also important. According to most recent domain stats, the “.com” extension is the most popular and often preferred by search engines.
Armed with this information, you can plan your SEO strategy in a way that gives you a competitive edge.
5. Embrace Social Media Marketing
As of 2023, there are almost 5 billion social media users worldwide. So having a social media presence gives many businesses the opportunity to reach a wide audience, build brand awareness, and achieve sustainable growth. SaaS companies are no different.
Choose one social media platform and learn everything you can about it. To maximize reach and engagement, try to find out what platforms your target audience is most active on.
Create content tailored to prospects at the top of the funnel (TOFU). This part of the funnel is a very early stage of the buyer journey.
Your potential customers are searching for information about how to solve their pain points. So, the goal is to generate awareness and inform your audience about your product or service.
You can share user testimonials (if you already have a customer base), interviews, tips, company life posts, company milestones, and other introductory content.
Here’s a creative example from Wordable that shares user testimonials:
As a SaaS brand, you’re likely promoting a product with a long list of features, so sharing visuals that illustrate how your product works is welcome by B2B buyers. Social media provides a great opportunity for sharing visual content, such as detailed infographics, statistics, GIFs, and explainer videos.
6. Leverage Automation
Automate all the marketing techniques above to improve efficiency and boost the customer experience. One way to automate your SaaS marketing is by using email marketing software to automatically send targeted emails to leads based on where they are in the buyer’s journey.
So, if a prospect signs up for your email newsletter in exchange for an ebook, you can set up a trigger in your email marketing software that sends over the ebook within seconds.
From there, you can set up emails to send automatically throughout the week to introduce subscribers to your product and nurture leads.
You can also automate your social media marketing using different tools. Create and/or write social media posts in advance and choose a day and time to share those posts. Your social media marketing software will automatically publish those posts based on the date and time you set.
Last but certainly not least, you can use artificial intelligence to write unique copy that boosts conversion rates for your SaaS brand. An AI text generator can help you create different versions of copy faster for a more optimized marketing campaign.
Why work harder when you can work smarter? Invest in the proper tools to help take your SaaS marketing efforts to the next level.
Boost Your Conversion Rates With Advanced SaaS Marketing Efforts
Marketing is one of those roles that requires lots of research, strategy, and planning, especially when it comes to more complex industries like SaaS. But with the right advanced strategies, it can take your company far.
Whether you leverage email marketing or take advantage of automation tools, you can put your SaaS company on the right path to growth.
Here’s to your success!
Why is FinancesOnline free?
Leave a comment!