How to Develop a Workable Digital Marketing Plan For Your SaaS Business

The Software as a Service (SaaS) industry has seen substantial growth in the past few years. According to Deloitte, the global SaaS market had a compound annual growth rate of 25% over the past 10 years and reached over $1500 million in 2020.

(Image Source)

With this staggering growth, the SaaS industry will become rife with competition, making it hard for your SaaS brand to leave a mark. However, as with any other sector, SaaS brands also need to adopt a cohesive approach to their marketing.

Here, I am going to delve deeper into how SaaS brands can leverage digital marketing to differentiate themselves from the herd. But first, let’s get clear on what it is and how it’s different for SaaS companies:

What is Digital Marketing for SaaS and How It’s Different?

Digital Marketing for SaaS or SaaS marketing is the use of specific tactics and techniques to not only promote your product but also to build brand awareness. The shrewd application of such tactics will help you position your product in the market and increase conversions.

The fundamentals of SaaS marketing like traffic, leads, and conversions remain the same. However, the specific strategies applied for each touch point distinguish SaaS marketing from the rest.

Also, SaaS products are intangible, thus, selling such products requires a different strategy and approach altogether. Here’s how you can approach digital marketing for your SaaS brand:

How to Develop an Excellent SaaS Marketing Strategy That Works?

For simplicity, I have divided SaaS marketing into two phases. The first phase helps you deal with the traffic and lead generation aspects of your SaaS brand. So, let’s get started:

Traffic and Lead Generation SaaS Strategies

1) Know Your Audience

Is your target audience B2B or B2C? Getting a clear idea of who the decision makers are will help you fabricate tailored strategies to target your customers. Since customers are the key to growing and sustaining your business, here’s how you can get to know them better:

• Get deeper into your target audience’s behavior, wants, needs, and other insights
• Formulate a strategy that helps build trust and credibility for your brand
• If possible, sit down and talk it out with real customers to strengthen the connection with them

2) Invest in SaaS Content Hubs

Content marketing is a proven strategy to keep bringing in a fresh flow of traffic and leads for your SaaS website. Thus, investing in creating content hubs is a surefire way to elevate your brand’s authenticity & trustworthiness and amplify your revenue streams.

Here’s what content hubs mean:

• Create different content hubs each uncovering insights about a particular topic related to your SaaS product
• These hubs are knowledge bases that live on your website but not as blogs
• Since they are hyper-focused on one topic, they have their own UX/UI
• They help appeal to different audience types and your ideal customers

3) Perfect Your Website SEO

Perfecting the SEO of your website will feel like a booster dose to immunize your traffic and lead generation strategy. However, Search Engine Optimization is complex and requires consistent effort from your end.

That’s why it’s better to let that aspect of your marketing be handled by an expert SaaS marketing agency. The professional SEO team helps you rank your site as high as possible to get more organic traffic and qualified leads for your SaaS brand.

4) Build a Community to Fuel Your Growth

If there is one approach that can help you achieve exponential growth for your SaaS, it’s building a strong community. By building and fostering a community of members with high curiosity, you can power up your SaaS marketing.

Here’s how you can do so:

• Enable community members to connect and talk things through about your SaaS product
• Foster them with insightful and personalized content 
• Scale your business effectively by pulling interested audiences with unique value propositions

5) Leverage the Power of Social Media

One of the best use cases of social media is to build a community of your own. HubSpot’s social media marketing report agrees with it too.

(Image Source)

Social media can truly up your SaaS marketing game if you know what platforms to target and what type of content to post. Here’s how to leverage the power of social media:

• Create and post value-based, funny, interactive, and relatable content
• Define your target audience with certain demographics and characteristics
• Leverage social ads to target only specific audience types
• Partner with social media marketing influencers to expand your reach and bring new traffic and leads

6) Utilize Social Proof for Referral Marketing

Did you know that you can use social proof to drive more referral traffic?

Social proof is nothing but reviews, testimonials, and trust scores your SaaS brand gets from your past or existing clients. However, a good review for your SaaS product is hard to come by and the even harder thing is for someone to truly recommend it.

Here’s what you can do:

• Introduce an incentive or loyalty program to reward every referral and review you get
• Design a compelling incentive for both referrer and referees
• Measure return-on-Investment after the initial phase and improvise your strategy accordingly

7) Remarketing & Paid Search/PPC Ads

If you have a good budget and want to get quality traffic from the get-go, consider paid search or PPC ads. While other methods of traffic and lead generation provide great results only if you give them time to show their magic.

Paid ads and remarketing campaigns enable you to get in front of your target audience efficiently so you can spend more time on product development and less on worrying about marketing. Here’s what you should do:

• Do your research to find the right keywords with different variations
• Include those keywords in your ads appropriately for the right audience to engage with them
• A/B test different landing pages with compelling ad copies to see what works and gets more traffic, leads, and conversions

Conversion-Focused SaaS Marketing Strategies

Now that you are adorned with strategies to generate quality traffic and leads, let’s get to know how you can convert them and make them your brand evangelist:

1) Improve First Customer-Interaction

Let’s say you got everything right and customers also turned up in massive amounts. But what will trigger them to subscribe to your SaaS product is the first experience of interacting with your brand. Often the first impression — in your case first interaction — is what lasts longer in users’ minds.

So, if you want to convert traffic into paying customers, work on improving the first customer-interaction. Here’s how you can do it:

• Improve website navigation 
• Keep product demo/free trial in the front and center of your website

(Image Source)

• Enhance customer support experience
• Create personalized content hubs to target each specific audience type

2) Hyper-Personalization with ABM

Account-Based Marketing is an emerging trend highly utilized by SaaS brands to target only specific users, nurture them with tailored content, and turn them into paying clients. Achieving success with ABM strategy requires determination, persistence, and personalized content as described below.

(Image Source)

Here’s how you should approach this:

• Identifying high-value individuals
• Researching their pain points & needs
• Offering them personalized content 
• Nurturing them with segmented emails to lead them down the funnel

3) Get Your Emails Right

As mentioned in the above point, segmented emails tend to be effective for generating more conversions. According to research published on Litmus, email marketing can generate an ROI of $36 for each dollar spent by the Software and Technology industry.

(Image Source)

Here are some best practices to follow for email marketing:

• Keep your emails short, crisp, and to the point
• Use engaging visual materials
• Personalize the message and write an eye-catching subject line
• Include smart CTAs that trigger action

4) Make Sign-Ups Easy

Signing up for your SaaS product should be easy and quick for users. Well-designed signup forms can have a big impact on your SaaS product signup rate and even help improve the first customer-interaction.

Here’s how you can ensure your sign-up process is smooth and flawless:

• Keep your signup form short and simple and ask for necessary information only
• Offer a no-risk guarantee, free trial, and money-back guarantee
• Put up an actionable CTAs for users to know what they need to do

5) Offer Free Trials/Freemium/Demos

Your SaaS brand may not be in a position to offer a big fat discount or high-level promotional offer, but you can surely offer a free trial or a demo to potential prospects. If possible, create a freemium version of your SaaS with limited functionalities.

Here are some best practices to follow:

• Choose a suitable period for your free trial, ideally 14 days
• Limit features and functions for a freemium model
• Follow up with users after successful completion of trial/demo
• Ensure users get an enhanced user experience while onboarding

6) Get Accurate with Your Pricing

(Image Source)

Don’t be coy about your SaaS pricing as hiding it would hinder customer acquisition. Be accurate and ensure transparency in your pricing for users to trust and sign up for a free trial. Think about how you would feel if you visit a website and can’t see the price of a product you want to buy?

This would force users to abandon your website and find a competitor who is transparent and keeps pricing listed accurately. Hiding prices would raise suspicions in the minds of your prospects who are on the brink of getting converted but instead leave without any trace.

Few things to keep in mind while determining your SaaS pricing:

• Use a suitable SaaS pricing model e.g.,
  • Flat pricing
  • Usage-based Pricing
  • Tiered pricing
  • Per user/feature pricing
• Boost conversion and ROI with psychological triggers like
  • Price anchoring
  • Odd-even pricing
  • Charm pricing
  • Decoy pricing

Take Your SaaS Marketing a Notch-Higher

SaaS companies that tend to be great at the marketing aspect of their brand can achieve greater economies of scale and dominate the digital landscape. While you are at it, the above-listed strategies would be a catalyst for your SaaS brand’s success.

The apt implementation of these strategies would require a thorough understanding and the hands of experts like Ronkot. We are a Dallas-based SaaS marketing agency specializing in crafting SaaS-focused strategies to boost your conversions.

Get in touch with our team of SaaS experts to know more about our growth-driven SaaS marketing services.

SaaS Marketing Strategies FAQs

Let’s clear up some doubts you may have about SaaS marketing:

1. How does digital marketing promote SaaS products?

Digital marketing strategies like content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, SEO, paid ads, and others can help you promote your SaaS product effectively.

2. How can I promote my SaaS product?

You can effectively implement the strategies listed in the article to promote your SaaS product or outsource it to a team of experts like Ronkot.

3. How is SaaS marketing different?

SaaS products are intangible and don’t have a physical form. Thus, marketing such a product requires specific digital strategies like offering a free trial, targeting high-value individuals, building a community, creating personalized content hubs, and others.

4. How do I market my B2B SaaS product?

B2B SaaS tends to have a longer sales cycle than B2C, thus, you need to define specific strategies like brand positioning, narrative, product marketing, persona building, and others.

5. What is the SaaS strategy?

A SaaS marketing strategy is a promotional strategy that helps bring more traffic and leads to boost the conversion rate for your SaaS product.

6. How do you grow SaaS sales?

By adopting the conversion-focused strategies listed in this article, you’ll be able to scale your SaaS product growth and sales figures. Also, a specialized SaaS marketing agency like Ronkot can help you too.