Are you a small business owner looking for useful SaaS marketing tips for your small business? If so, you’ve come to the right place! This post contains a comprehensive overview of what your SaaS marketing campaign should entail. You will find incredibly useful SaaS marketing tips for your small business. We know what works and we are going to share them with you.
To start with, you must understand the difference between traditional marketing and SaaS marketing. Traditional marketing often targets a single interaction with the customer, but SaaS marketing plans aim for much more. SaaS marketing aims to continue engaging with the customer. You want to create awareness about your brand and product and get people to subscribe to your software. Your goal is to get an ongoing commitment from your customers, rather than make a one-time sale.
The point here is that customer retention is very vital for B2B SaaS businesses. However, every B2B SaaS company owner and marketing professional knows that customer retention is no easy feat. Read on to learn about the strategies that highly successful SaaS companies use for their marketing.
1. Strategy and Research
Your first point of call if you want a successful SaaS lead generation plan is to develop a strategy and conduct a SaaS market research. Every B2B SaaS marketing agency starts its marketing campaign from this point. Remember that cloud services have a competitive landscape. As such, your marketing efforts must be backed by thorough research and an effective strategy to gain a competitive advantage.
Starting points for SaaS marketing strategy and research
You already have a business idea and your product is ready but that is not enough for a successful SaaS marketing. You need to find out the kind of people that wants your product. Among these people, how will you find the ones who will pay for your product? In other words, you must define your target audience.
Having recognized your target audience, identify their pain points and the keywords they are searching on the internet. Build your marketing strategy around these, and create a procedure for content production and distribution. Further, define the goals of your campaign before launching and identify key metrics to measure the success of the said campaign. Monitor your results with these metrics and make necessary adjustments to your SaaS marketing plan.
Voice of customer (VoC)
VoC is one of the effective research methods for successful SaaS marketing. The goal of VoC research is to collect feedback from customers. This research approach allows you to capture the opinion of customers about your product or brand, as well as their expectations. That will, in turn, give you helpful insights for creating an effective SaaS marketing plan.
Brand message
What is your brand message? What will make you stand out among the many others competing with you for customers? Imagine that you visit a store where similar products are arranged on the same shelf. The product with a distinct brand image and message will stand out to you. That is also true for digital products that appear in online search results.
You should develop a bold brand message and unique value proposition if you want a successful SaaS marketing plan. Let your brand also stand out with an attractive logo and color palette. What’s more, you can use a social mission, fun culture, or even a funky mascot to create a unique brand message.
Differentiation
Before launching your SaaS marketing campaign, identify key markets that will see the utmost value in your product. Focus your marketing efforts on these target markets, but make sure to leverage the power of differentiation. Nail down the key messages and strategies that communicate value to the persona in each target market. Your marketing efforts may fail if you don’t determine the unique, differentiated method with which you will communicate to each target market.
Field marketing
Field marketing refers to programs that can support your marketing plan and generate quality leads for you. There are many forms of field marketing but B2B field marketing often involves teaching classes, supporting sales, hosting demos at events, or leading conference workshops. What’s more, you can set up exhibitor tables at conferences or sponsor a live digital or meet-up event. Make sure to include B2B field marketing in your SaaS marketing strategy.
2. Lead Generation
Lead generation has changed considerably from what it used to be in the past. A few years ago, you could generate significant leads with flash advertisements. Nowadays, that is no longer enough because prospective customers spend almost 60% of their time researching your product, as well as other products online before they contact you.
As such, you must develop a SaaS lead generation plan that focuses on giving them what they are looking for. That way, you will be their number one consideration when they eventually decide to make a purchase.
A/B test with graphics, video, and simple text
A/B testing will help you identify the marketing efforts that will really pay off for your B2B SaaS company. Customer experience is central to the success of any SaaS business, so comparing variables with A/B testing can help you simplify optimization strategies for conversions by comparing variables.
For instance, you can find out the best text for your call to action by comparing variables. Select two CTAs and use both of them for trail campaigns without changing any other text in the copy. Find out which CTA drives more downloads or sign-ups, and use it to generate more leads. You can also do the same thing with different graphics and videos.
Social media ads (on FB, Insta, LinkedIn, etc)
Leverage the power of social media marketing and ad solutions to generate leads for your SaaS business. Make sure to do your research and use the platform(s) where your key audience hangs out. Target your ads to the audience using location and language parameters.
Use texts, images, and videos in your social media ads; each type of content has its advantages. What’s more, there should be a clear call to action in your ads. Ask the audience to try out your product by signing up for a demo. Also, display testimonials and offer information about your pricing options.
Pay per click (PPC)
PPC is very helpful for SaaS content marketing, especially for rapid results. You can use PPC for testing during the initial launch of your new SaaS product. PPC also allows existing SaaS companies to experiment with different ad and messaging formats for target audience engagements. In summary, both small SaaS businesses and industry heavyweights benefit immensely from investing in PPC.
Generate leads by finding out the questions surrounding your product market and owning them. Build your PPC campaigns around the answers to those questions so that you become their go-to solution provider. Your goal is to make them stop scrolling and consider your product or brand as the ultimate answer to their current search.
LinkedIn AI
Artificial intelligence, such as LinkedIn AI, has become central to SaaS marketing. You should consider utilizing automatic outreach on LinkedIn to generate leads and scale your revenue. The power behind AI is that it gives your customers a personalized experience and content feed. These, in turn, help boost lead volumes, as well as closure rate and overall sales.
Conversion landing pages
Your lead generation plan is fruitless if you don’t have a SaaS landing page that can convert visitors. Your landing page must quickly assure visitors that they are in the right place. The page should contain information relevant to the reason why they clicked your link. What’s more, your landing page should tell them why your product is their best bet among several other options. Give visitors enough information for them to take action.
Your landing page will convert more visitors into customers when it contains the following details:
- The strong points or unique features of your product
- Testimonials of verified customers about your product
- What makes your company trustworthy
- How the true value you are offering outweighs the cost you are charging for the product
3. Organic Social
You need to also drive organic traffic through your social media channels. That means you should be generating traffic to your website or landing page from your social media pages without paid media and ads. Organic social marketing includes using unpaid posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok, and other social media channels to drive traffic. You can do this in three easy ways:
Stay present
Start by building your social media presence and staying present to get more followers. Be consistent in creating content that answers the questions of your audience and gives them what they want. Also, stay present to engage with them – replying to their comments, responding to their messages, etc.
Use brandable templates
You can download brandable templates and customize them for your organic social media marketing. The SaaS social marketing samples will make managing organic social media easier for you and help you reach your marketing goals faster.
Mix it up with text only, graphics, and videos
Your content should include a mix of text-only posts, as well as posts with graphics and video. The following social media content is effective for generating organic traffic:
- Articles
- User-generated content
- Customer testimonials
- Live streams
- Quotes
- Infographics
- Memes
- Videos
- Polls
- Educational content
- Trending topics
- Influencer collaborations
4. Content Marketing
Social media is not the only place for SaaS content marketing. More than 80% of the most successful SaaS companies share content on their blog. However, having a blog does not mean automatic lead generation and conversions. You must offer engaging and creative content that your audience can relate to. More so, your content must stand out from the content clutter existing on the internet.
Here’s how to create successful content marketing:
Become a thought leader in your industry
Develop original content from research so that you are not repeating what other people have said. Also, create point-of-view content from your experience and expertise about major subjects in your industry. Another way to become a thought leader and win the attention and trust of your readers is to keep them updated on trends and the latest news in the industry.
Research and write on keywords and voice of customer research
If you build your content around negative or irrelevant keywords, your SaaS content marketing campaign will fail. As such, you cannot afford to take a blind approach to keyword research. Thankfully, there are various trusted platforms available to help you identify the strongest and most relevant keywords for your campaign.
Create written, audio, and video mediums of your content
Don’t rely on blog posts alone if you want your SaaS content marketing plan to achieve great success. Rather, produce an assortment of outstanding written, audio, and video content. You need a mix of all three for an effective SaaS content strategy. Use written content to share information; use audio content to get more personal with your audience; and leverage the power of videos to deliver highly compelling content.
Atomize your written and video content
You can write long forms but atomize the text to create snippets. The same applies to your videos, too. Remember that no matter how great your content is, people have a short attention span. What’s more, they are eager to move on to the next thing. So then, create snippets for your videos and written content including survey reports, white papers, e-books, and so on.
You may be trying to push your message out with the content you create but you also need bite-sized contents that will entice them. Make sure your atomized contents are short, quick, and engaging.
Host monthly video podcast on topics with a professional MC/host
Many people do not have the time to read your newsletters and blogs. Some people are even too busy to watch your YouTube videos. You can reach and engage these potential customers by strategically inviting them to watch your monthly video podcast. The podcasts can take the form of an interview or a narrative experience.
5. Content Distribution
Content distribution refers to how you are sharing and promoting your content. It is the real deal of SaaS content marketing. Your SaaS marketing plan will fail if your content distribution is poor, regardless of how much effort you put into content creation.
Content distribution strategy determines whether the good-quality content you are creating reaches the ideal audience or not. It is, therefore, important that you promote your SaaS marketing content where your potential customers will see it. Otherwise, the entire process will be a futile effort.
Further, each channel or platform has an ideal content type for its audience. So, make sure you pair your content types with the social media platforms where they will perform optimally. Know what works on Instagram and use it there. If something else works on Facebook or LinkedIn, then stick with it for that platform.
Be on all the platforms and where your customers hang out. These include all social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc), as well as Quora, Reddit, and the like. In addition, feel free to experiment with different content types for these various platforms while you are trying to learn what works.
6. Email Marketing
SaaS email marketing is very effective because it affords you the privilege of actively engaging with your customers. Email marketing makes you their constant companion at all the touchpoints of their customer journey. You will be able to promote your brand and product to a wide audience and attract new customers.
SaaS email marketing makes room for endless possibilities in the entire marketing plan. You can educate people via email, market your product’s value to them, and turn them into paying subscribers. That’s not all; you can leverage the power of emails to build formidable relationships with customers and win their trust and loyalty.
Read on to find out useful SaaS email marketing tips for your small business
Segmentation is key
Remember that you have several people belonging to different categories in your email list. Their backgrounds, professions, challenges, specific goals, etc are not all the same. As such, you need to employ a strategy called email segmentation in your email marketing plan.
Email segmentation means that you divide the people in your email list into groups based on demographic factors, similar traits, or behaviors. This is one of the top secrets to successful SaaS email marketing. Email segmentation has made email marketing the channel that most effectively nurtures leads and converts them into customers.
Did you know that businesses that use email segmentation experience 38 times ROI for whatever they invest in email marketing? To add to that, about 90% of B2B SaaS companies turn a blind eye to email segmentation. Will you join the top 10 SaaS companies benefiting from the power of email segmentation? Thus, make sure you segment your emails before launching your next email marketing campaign.
Give value
If you are providing value to your audience in the emails you send to them, many of them will start looking forward to receiving your emails. Consequently, you will get more link clicks from your audience and be able to drive them to action with ease. In other words, you stand to get better marketing results when your emails are consistently valuable to your audience.
How then can you give value? The easiest and best way to do this is to focus on what your customers are looking for. Further, people often find concise educational content to be valuable.
If you are ever at a loss on how to deliver value to your readers, engage them in conversations. Ask them to tell you what they need from you.
7. SEO & Optimization
Some small businesses emphasize social media marketing more than SEO. That idea is the wrong approach to SaaS marketing. Analytics have shown that almost 70% of online transactions start with an enduring ranking from a search engine. What’s more, small companies often rank higher than heavyweights on Google. Now, that’s some good news!
If you are a marketing professional or the owner, CEO, or executive president of a B2B SaaS company, prioritize SEO over social media. Employ top-performing strategies to ensure your website, products, and contents appear on the first page of Google search or other search engine results.
Some of the top-performing strategies that can increase your organic search traffic are as follows:
- Create very valuable content on your website that other websites will want to reference or link to.
- Optimize your site for Google search. Let Google know what your site is all about so that they can properly index it.
- Promote your content through the right channels so that you will reach the right audience that will link back to your content.
- Put in consistent efforts as you strive to gain power through SEO to drive organic traffic. After earning one of the top spots in search results, make sure to maintain that spot.
Organic search has credibility and gives you a competitive advantage. It is also cost-effective and sustainable. However, it is quite challenging. Here are a few tips to help with your SEO campaign:
Identify what works for your competitors
What are the top-performing web pages on your competitors’ websites? Analyze these pages and use them as a guide for:
- Better content on your website
- Keyword improvement
- A better understanding of what the audience is looking for
- Link opportunities
Write good-quality content
We cannot overemphasize the benefits of quality content. You must write useful, outstanding, and trustworthy content for your audience. Your content should not be all about what you want your customers to know. It should also be about the relevant searchers that your present and potential customers make through search engines.
As such, you will need to research popular keywords and find relevant topics to guide your content creation. What’s more, use internal and external links, as well as meta tags for all your posts.
Optimize images
Search engines also display image results for search queries. You should, therefore, optimize every image you upload on your site for SEO, just like you would for your web pages and blogs. Remember that users have a better visual experience with images than with text, so you can use images to boost traffic.
Apart from that, when you optimize your images, visually impaired people can still be carried along. The audio reader gives them a description of your image, based on the alt text you added to the image. Search engines also use alt text to index your image. You may include both descriptive text and brand-related keywords in alt text to boost its visibility.
Let your campaign run for 2-4 weeks then optimize based on findings
Your SaaS marketing campaign needs thorough analytics to make sure you get the best results from the time, money, and effort you are putting into your SaaS marketing plan. Ensuring that you reach the right audience at the right time, generating leads, and converting them could be somewhat tricky. You should, therefore, monitor your results and adjust your approach to get the best from your campaign.
Measure the results you are getting and compare them with your SaaS marketing goals and efforts. Wait for about 2-4 weeks before performing analytics because it usually takes that long for marketing campaigns to pick up.
Make the best use of analytics
Keep clear questions and goals in mind when you are analyzing your SaaS marketing results. Do you desire to improve anything? What are they? Is there anything specific you desire to see in your results? It could be more people landing on a particular page or qualified leads. These questions will give sense to the data you are seeing and help you gain insight into how customer behavior relates to your goals. That way, you will be better equipped to make well-informed adjustments toward achieving your SaaS marketing goals.
Bottom Line
There is no better time than now to scale up your SaaS business with top-performing lead generation tips. There were probably many things you didn’t know in the past, but you have learned about them from this post. Our goal for putting together these tips is to put an end to your marketing woes and help you put them behind you.
This is indeed a comprehensive SaaS marketing guide with incredibly useful tips for your small business. The tips and strategies we have outlined will deliver optimum results if you execute them properly. Take note of all the things you have learned and stay optimistic about achieving all the goals you have set for your SaaS marketing plan.
We admit that your best bet is to run all of these marketing strategies in parallel, but we also know how challenging and time-consuming that would be. So, find the ones that work for you and apply them diligently. You do not need to apply all of the tips to achieve success. Identify the ones that you trust to deliver results for your business and put them to the test vigorously in your SaaS marketing plan.
Who is epIQ?
epIQ Creative Group is a digital marketing agency that specializes in accelerating sales and scaling revenue for businesses. With over a decade of experience, epIQ's expert team ensures your investment yields a substantial return, eliminating guesswork and saving you thousands through data-driven strategies. Our services encompass brand messaging, paid media advertising, inbound marketing, and creative content creation.
epIQ's proprietary systems have a proven track record, with clients experiencing 2x to 5x growth within 90 days. We are transparent and agile, providing you with progress reports, and direct access to growth marketers.
What sets epIQ apart is our flexibility and cost-effectiveness. We offer month-to-month contracts, a-la-carte services, and our team's expertise comes at a fraction of the cost of hiring in-house.
epIQ Creative Group is not just another digital marketing agency; we are a partner committed to your success. Our innovative approach, dedication, and transparency guarantee not just growth, but unparalleled success for your business.