The global SaaS market is expected to show incremental growth of over $60 billion between 2019 and 2023. If you operate a SaaS company, this is an encouraging statistic for you. With increasing market size comes an increasing number of revenue growth opportunities.
However, you need to have the right strategies in place to seize these opportunities. Your SaaS marketing team is one of the most important resources that can help you to gain quick growth in your market.
Don’t forget, your sales, product development, advertising, research, and other teams also play a crucial role in pushing your SaaS company’s growth forward. In this article, you’ll learn how you can improve your SaaS marketing game to make sure you get your piece of the growing SaaS market pie.
What is a SaaS Marketing Strategy?
A SaaS marketing strategy promotes Software as a Service solutions through digital channels, content marketing, and customer engagement. It focuses on lead generation, conversion optimization, and customer retention, leveraging data-driven analysis for continuous improvement. SaaS marketing aims to drive user adoption, loyalty, and long-term revenue growth through technology-driven approaches and subscription-based models.
What is the SaaS Model of Marketing?
The SaaS model of marketing refers to strategies tailored specifically for promoting Software as a Service (SaaS) products. It involves subscription-based pricing, digital channels, customer retention efforts, and data-driven analytics. Key aspects include customer onboarding, continuous value delivery, and personalized experiences to drive user engagement and long-term relationships. SaaS marketing leverages technology and automation to optimize campaigns, enhance user experiences, and maximize ROI for both businesses and customers.
Key Elements of the SaaS Model of Marketing:
- Subscription-based pricing and digital channels for promotion.
- Customer retention strategies and personalized experiences.
- Data-driven analytics for campaign optimization.
- Focus on user engagement, value delivery, and long-term relationships.
What is SaaS Product Marketing?
SaaS product marketing is the strategic promotion of Software as a Service solutions, focusing on understanding customer needs, creating value propositions, and utilizing digital channels for outreach. Key elements include product positioning, feature highlights, customer success stories, and data-driven optimization for conversions and retention. It leverages analytics to refine strategies and maximize ROI, emphasizing customer-centric approaches and targeted engagement.
What Makes SaaS Marketing Different?
SaaS marketing differs by its subscription model, offering continuous value, personalized experiences through data analytics, customer-centricity, agility, scalability, and user-centric design. It emphasizes ongoing customer satisfaction, rapid adaptation, and seamless user experiences, setting it apart from traditional marketing approaches.
- Subscription-Based Model: SaaS marketing revolves around subscription-based pricing, offering scalability and flexibility for customers.
- Continuous Value Delivery: Focus on providing ongoing value through updates, support, and enhancements to retain customers.
- Data-Driven Approach: Utilize data analytics to personalize experiences, optimize campaigns, and drive informed decisions.
- Customer-Centric Focus: Tailor strategies to address customer needs, pain points, and preferences for enhanced satisfaction.
- Agile and Scalable Solutions: SaaS marketing enables rapid deployment, agile iterations, and scalability to meet evolving market demands.
- Emphasis on User Experience: Prioritize user-friendly interfaces, intuitive designs, and seamless experiences to drive user adoption and loyalty.
Why SaaS Marketing Plans Matter?
SaaS marketing plans are crucial for several reasons:
- Strategic Direction: They provide a roadmap for reaching target audiences, driving conversions, and achieving business goals.
- Resource Allocation: Plans allocate resources effectively, optimizing budget allocation for maximum ROI.
- Customer Acquisition: They outline strategies to attract and retain customers, crucial for SaaS growth.
- Competitive Edge: Plans help differentiate in a competitive market, showcasing unique value propositions.
- Measurable Results: They enable tracking and measuring marketing efforts, allowing for data-driven decisions and continuous improvement.
What are the elements of SaaS marketing strategy?
- Target Audience Identification: Define and understand the ideal customer profile for precise targeting.
- Value Proposition Development: Create compelling reasons why customers should choose your SaaS product.
- Content Marketing: Produce relevant content to educate, engage, and attract potential customers.
- Lead Generation: Implement strategies to capture and nurture leads throughout the sales funnel.
- Conversion Optimization: Optimize the user experience and sales processes for higher conversion rates.
- Customer Retention: Focus on retaining customers through ongoing support, updates, and value delivery.
- Data Analytics: Utilize data-driven insights to measure performance, make informed decisions, and refine strategies for continuous improvement.
5 Surefire Ways to Turn Your SaaS Marketing into Revenue Generating Engine
Here are solid SaaS marketing strategies to help your B2B company land more product demo and service trial requests from potential customers and drive revenue through the roof.
Highlight Shoutouts and Customer Feedback that Benefit Your Business
Promptly responding to positive customer reviews and having success stories posted on your website and social media platforms is a powerful way of generating digital word of mouth. Besides your online assets, SaaS product review sites like Capterra, Product Hunt, and G2 are important channels to check and use to respond to customer feedback.
As a better SaaS marketing strategy, you can draw your customer’s attention to compelling case studies and testimonials that showcase your company’s strengths and excellent work through numbers. You should also gather social proof of customer satisfaction and praise by dedicating time to perform social media listening and monitoring.
Keep a Tab on Your Intended Audience by Leveraging B2B Data
Intent data is a useful resource to feel the pulse of your targeted prospects and existing customers. It empowers you to only focus on accounts that are ready to buy from you or actively looking for SaaS solutions similar to yours so that you can close deals faster. Moreover, it can be used to market to new SaaS prospects with a data-driven and streamlined approach.
Best SaaS marketing practices recommend combining intent data with account-level insights and human-verified B2B data. For example, Bombora’s Company Surge Intent data + SalesIntel’s 95% accurate B2B data allows you to perform ABM (account-based marketing) at a superior level. This combination enables you to quickly identify accounts that are most interested in your SaaS offerings. It also allows you to access the direct contact information of such accounts. To begin with it, you can take a free intent assessment offered by B2B or intent data providers.
Create Diverse Content Pieces to Target Different Buyer’s Journey Stages
Bear in mind that the SaaS customer journey is long and complex. You’ll need to cater to the content requirements of customers across the buyer’s journey. No one person going through your marketing funnel will have the same level of awareness about your brand or solutions. Create content that’ll both interest and educate your prospects. Your SaaS marketing content calendar can include webinars, educational videos, case studies, blogs, social media posts, podcasts, product news, etc.
About 88% of video marketers agree that video gives them a positive ROI. Compared to text and images combined, video generates 1,200% more shares on social platforms. Short-form, easy-to-digest, and mobile-friendly videos are the best ones to feed your audience, no matter where they are in the buyer’s journey. These could be personalized marketing, FAQ, landing page, testimonial, social proof, company, and product explainer videos.
Take the Confusion Out of Your Pricing Plans and Clearly State What You Offer
There’s no point in hiding details in your SaaS pricing plans—it’ll only backfire. B2B SaaS customers value their time, and if you beat around the bush or bury secrets in your pricing structure, they’ll shop next door and never come back. You’ll want to include both monthly and annual costs, a list of specific plan features, and the ideal team or company size for each of your pricing plans. Your SaaS customers will have a better experience if you tell them at the start what they should expect with each plan.
Value-based pricing is one of the most effective SaaS pricing strategies. However, you need strong research and data to prove the value that the customer will see by purchasing. To tailor your proposition to the client, you need data that shows what products your customers are interested in, what technologies they’re currently using, how much they’re willing to pay, which competitor products they’re looking to purchase, and who their decision-makers are. These data points are mainly covered in firmographic data and technographic data that you’ll need to gather.
Articulate Your Value Proposition (It’s More than Just a Killer Website Headline)
The value proposition is the primary thing you should be thinking about when marketing to your SaaS prospects or customers. You must quickly communicate who you are, what you do, and why you do it best. That’s a lot to pack in, but you still want to keep it short and sweet. Instead of cluttering your homepage with multiple value propositions, it’s better to mention just one or two core values upfront. The less broad value propositions can be included on different pages of your company website.
Let’s look at an example. You can create a simple yet powerful value proposition like the one Google Drive uses: “A safe place for all your files.” This value proposition wastes no time in letting you know what Google Drive is used for (storing files) and why you should pick it (safety).
You can also use different value propositions to target different types of audiences. For example, the Uber platform is used by both riders and drivers. The ride-hailing service has a different value proposition for its two different audiences. For riders, it’s “Always the ride you want.” For drivers, it’s “Opportunity is everywhere.”
How Much Does a Typical B2B SaaS Company Spend on Marketing?
Saas companies should keep 8% of overall revenue for marketing.
This measure is based on a few major studies that indicate the average B2B company spends roughly this amount on marketing and sales. For instance – Based on research, the US Small Business Administration.
Why SaaS Marketing is Different?
SaaS marketing is unique because you are selling something that has no physical presence or marketing something that is constantly changing.
3 Marketing Tips Your B2B SaaS Company Can’t Afford to Reject
Remember to take a holistic approach when marketing and not put all your eggs in one basket. Let’s see how social media marketing, email marketing, product marketing, and co-marketing can catapult your B2B SaaS marketing to the next level.
Some B2B SaaS marketers are tied up with webinar preparation, website redesign, or B2B content creation and fail to dedicate equal attention to social media marketing. Downplaying the significance of social media, thinking it’s mainly used for B2C marketing could lose you valuable opportunities to connect with prospects and customers.
Social networking lets the world know about your company values and culture, how you appreciate and encourage your employees, and your industry accolades. A strong social media presence can help you pass the sniff test for new prospective customers and is a chance to show how you quickly respond to a customer’s needs. It’s also a great way of generating traffic for your top-of-the-funnel content and informing your customers about the release of new products and services.
2. Email Marketing is Still the Rockstar of B2B SaaS Marketing
Taking into consideration the lengthy SaaS buyer’s journey, you need to maintain consistent communication with your potential customers. Any slack in your customer communication management could cost you important business deals. Email marketing with multiple one-to-one touchpoints is an outstanding and proven customer nurturing strategy, especially for SaaS companies.
To gain success in your SaaS email marketing campaign, it’s imperative to target the right people with the right messages. You’re also required to build accurate and clean email lists to guarantee your email marketing effort isn’t ruined by data decay.
Personalization is another vital aspect of email marketing that you need to pay close attention to. Again, maintaining data hygiene is critical to effectively personalizing your SaaS marketing emails and reaching higher conversions. Compared with companies that send generalized emails, those with a personalized email marketing approach generate 760% higher email marketing revenue.
3. Use Product Marketing + Co-marketing for Better Impact
Product marketing is a data-driven approach to the promotion and selling of products to a target audience. Product marketers ensure your products are well-aligned with the needs of your potential customers. They create a foolproof product launch plan and go-to-market strategy covering both pre-product launch and post-product launch activities and efforts to drive product demand and adoption.
Co-marketing is another promising strategy you can use to create joint marketing campaigns with brands that have similar audiences and offer non-competing products. It allows you to combine your resources with your marketing partner and share in the ensuing benefits such as improved lead generation, unique content creation, and the chance to reach out to a new customer base.
With the addition of an effective co-marketing plan, your product marketing success will only shoot up higher. Co-marketing opens up a wealth of opportunities to market your SaaS products to a new customer community, increase your footprint, and understand how different customers interact with your products.
How to Define Metrics in SaaS Marketing?
Following are the SaaS marketing metrics that you absolutely need to keep in mind:
- Unique visitors
- Monthly recurring revenue (MRR)
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
- Customer lifetime value (CLV)
- CLV: CAC ratio
- Lead-to-customer rate
- Churn
- Lead velocity rate (LVR)
- Leads by lifecycle stage
- Customer engagement and health scores
What Are The Best Tools for SaaS Marketing?
The number of sales and marketing products available on the market has skyrocketed. We have a detailed article on the best SaaS tools.
How to get marketing data for SaaS? Or Have You Partnered with a Trusted B2B Data Provider Yet?
All of the strategies discussed above need a strong B2B data source to ensure your SaaS company is hitting the right targets when it comes to marketing. Deeply understanding your intended audience and existing customers is essential to give the right direction to your SaaS marketing efforts.
Your B2B database needs to be accurate, up-to-date, and leave no room for bad data to creep in—because the results of poor data can be devastating to your business. This infographic will open your eyes to see how badly poor-quality data can hurt your B2B company by losing revenue and wasting time.
SalesIntel is the B2B contact and company data partner your SaaS business needs to gain insights into multiple personas and pick up your prospects’ behavioral signals. Our human-verified B2B data, which is also reverified every 90 days, is a great resource for achieving a tremendous ROI on your SaaS ABM.
Packed with easy-to-access, highly reliable demographic, firmographic, psychographic, intent, and technographic data, our 95% accurate B2B data solution is perfect for creating hyper-targeted SaaS ABM campaigns.
Want to know how SalesIntel can create success stories for your B2B SaaS marketers? Request a free trial today.