Imagine a business meeting with your potential client where you only talk about yourself— there won’t be a second one for you! The same goes for SaaS marketing, as you need to understand the customer’s needs and demands of the era and then promote the right software as a service product.
Software-as-a-service startups have become famous over the past decade and have revolutionized the cloud-based economy of the world. There are over 10,000 private SaaS companies and 50+ publicly operated ones with a $225 billion market cap. How have these companies acquired such success and huge market cap overnight? The answer is SaaS marketing with the right strategies, relevant content, and extraordinary tactics!
That’s not it, you’ll be glad to know that the target audience can be huge for SaaS— as SaaS Market size is projected to grow at a CAGR of 19.1% between the 6 year span of 2022-2027. The most of the growth in market size is expected to be North America region i.e., 52% as per demographical analysis.
Are you looking for SaaS marketing, especially a content-related marketing guide, to improve sales, generate leads, and boost product sign-ups? Well, look no further. Our complete SaaS marketing guide will help you understand this niche from basics to advanced level— with some expert talks— to help you master the field. Let’s get started:
What is SaaS Marketing?
Before we get into the advanced level of knowledge and turn you into a SaaS marketing genius, let’s unfold the basics first. A type of marketing that promotes the software-as-a-service by finding the relevance between the customer’s needs and the product’s specialties. Thus, from finding the right software-as-a-service, bringing it to the market, and building awareness to generate leads— all can fall under the umbrella of SaaS marketing. A similar term, “SaaS Content Marketing,” will cover all those mentioned above with the help of optimized content.
SaaS Marketing Vs. Traditional Digital Marketing— Is it Same?
SaaS Marketing is quite different from the traditional methods of marketing based on methodology as well as principles. For example, selling a product via online channels and repeating it multiple times falls under digital marketing. In contrast, in SaaS marketing, one can generate leads by selling the same service every month and creating a recurring revenue source.
If we tear it apart, digital marketing is a one-time product sale and then revising strategies to find more clients. At the same time, SaaS Marketing helps you sell the same service to each client multiple times. You can showcase your product’s specialties to the users to influence them to purchase the subscription model regularly.
Top Channels or Techniques for SaaS Marketing
SaaS Marketing is a broad field not limited to a single channel or technique— thus, finding your specific technique is most important. Moreover, copying or imitating the marketing channels of your competitors won’t let you generate leads and improve sales. You have to find the right channel for the software you’re selling as a service.
Here are some types of SaaS marketing you can get your hands on to improve the sales and, ultimately, the recurring revenue.
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Marketing
The first technique one can employ is SEO marketing, which is to create or compose customized content keeping the search terms in mind. You can optimize the webpages, blogs, and SaaS-related content to get organic traffic from Google, Bing, and other search engines. Google shares a whopping 91.8% market share in the search engine market worldwide— imagine the sales you can get by optimizing the content for this single search engine.
Key Strategy:
- All you need to do is utilize the SEO tools alongside knowledge of search engine optimization techniques to find the relevant and less competitive keywords for your software-as-a-service.
- Moreover, you can also optimize the web pages for multiple search engines.
- You can build relevant links from the authority sites to rank higher in search engines.
Successful Brand Example:
As per our research, Zapier is one of the brands that have employed this SEO marketing strategy to generate leads.
SUCCESSFUL BRAND EXAMPLE: Zapier
As per our research, Zapier is one of the brands that have employed this SEO marketing strategy to generate leads.
As per the statistics, Zapier has more than 9 million visitors, and the best part is that more than 83% of the visitors are coming organically. Zapier has managed to master the keyword research alongside the on-page SEO to achieve these metrics.
2. Content Marketing
Another form of marketing is content marketing, where you can get your customer’s trust with blogs and articles and generate sales. Per a survey, the customer tends to read at least 10 pieces of content (i.e., social media posts, blogs, articles, or any other form of writing) before purchasing a specific software-as-a-service product.
Thus, ads contribute less to SaaS marketing, and content can generate more revenue. Content marketing is not limited to blog posts or articles but to white papers, reports, infographics, and even videos throughout your content to boost relevancy and authenticity.
Key Strategy
The fundamental principle here is to combine the content strategy with content marketing. The content strategy comprises the internal guidelines and governance, while the marketing needs the editorial calendars, crafting and designing promotional content, and more. Still unclear to you? Here’s a complete in-depth difference between both:
Successful Brand Example: Moz
Moz is a successful brand that has topped the ladder of SaaS companies purely with content marketing. Moz is a SaaS brand that sells SEO software, which is the main marketing drive for their business.
3. Email Marketing
Email marketing is another type of SaaS marketing where you directly build relationships with your audience. There are 4 billion email users worldwide, and 29% of marketers prefer email as their channel to generate leads.
However, it has been believed that pursuing the audience to generate leads via email marketing is best possible if they are already interested in your software-as-a-service product rather than just converting a stranger into a potential customer.
Email marketing has gained much attention and success in recent years, where the ROI has gone as high as $42 per dollar. These numbers are quite high for any paid marketing strategy.
Key Strategy:
- The key to email marketing is first to find out your potential client’s emails, and here’s how to proceed:
- You can create a landing page where the users submit their emails in return for a discount voucher.
- Then, you can craft content or develop other strategies to drive traffic to your SaaS platform.
- You can also send automated emails to your clients based on user interactions.
Successful Brand Example: Shopify
Shopify brand is a success, and after carefully analyzing, we can say that Email Marketing played a major role here. Imagine a brand sending you a welcome email with a fully customized message, full of gratitude and complete detailing to millions of customers daily.
Successful Brand Example: Shopify
Shopify brand is a success, and after carefully analyzing, we can say that Email Marketing played a major role here. Imagine a brand sending you a welcome email with a fully customized message, full of gratitude and complete detailing to millions of customers daily.
The exciting fact about welcome emails is that more than 91% of users open them, and there is a whopping 26.9% click-through rate.
4. Social Media Marketing
Marketing SaaS on social media platforms is also getting enough reach and engagement from the audience. Viral culture has also uplifted the business leads— all you need is the right content type to post. Social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube have different audience types and, thus, diverse needs. Therefore, you might need to improvise your content strategy for each platform, as a post that goes viral on Facebook might not work for the Instagram audience.
There are more than 4.8 billion users in this world, and that’s what makes marketers promote their SaaS products here. Additionally, SaaS marketing on social media platforms is free at the initial stage and requires no investment to start.
Key Strategy:
The key strategy to post and get your SaaS platform promoted is to craft valuable and relevant content to post first. Answer the following questions to start:
- What services are you selling as software, and which audience will need it?
- What type of posts will help you gather that particular audience?
- How many daily posts will be useful to get the reach and generate leads?
Successful Brand Example: Squarespace's Instagram
Squarespace is a website builder and a competitor of WordPress— which is better and why— we won't go into that. Squarespace has recently run a social media campaign on Instagram, which helped them acquire a perfect 350k+ followers and an immense reach. They partnered with multiple photographers to showcase their beautifully captured images before showcasing the original website (made by Squarespace) in the last campaign.
The Ultimate SaaS Marketing Guide— Craft, Post, and Get Leads!
SaaS marketing is a broad niche and has no limits when running campaigns, promoting services and reaching an audience. Each software-as-a-service product might require a unique way to get promoted and reach the target audience. This guide holds the value of a single piece in a puzzle, but our team has tried its best to gather as many ways and techniques as possible to help give a bite-sized visual of the bigger picture.
1. Identify the Target Audience
The first and foremost step before you step into SaaS marketing is to identify the target audience. Promoting the right services to the wrong audience won’t let you go anywhere. Finding the ideal customers for your services, identifying their pain points, and promoting them will help you generate leads.
The strategy to find the target audience is carefully analyzing different factors and customer personas based on culture, demographics, gender, and goals.
Demographics: Make sure to promote your services to the right audience with relevant content. You cannot post SaaS marketing content without analyzing the target audience who will help you generate leads. Consider factors like age, sex, location, socioeconomic status, etc.
Background: While promoting software-as-a-service, analyze the target audience’s background. Ask yourself particular questions before you start SaaS content marketing, such as who your customers are, where they work, what is their career path and more. It’ll help you craft the content and the pricing of your product.
Goals: This might sound weird, but analyzing your customers’ needs, desires, beliefs, and aspirations will help you market your services in the right possible way.
Challenges: Understand your target customers’ challenges and what makes them avoid purchasing your services/products.
2. Content is the King for Marketing SaaS:
Defining a content marketing strategy before promoting your software-as-a-service product is necessary. You cannot jump to the sales without proving the authenticity and need of SaaS for your target audience. As per recent research, users tend to read 10-12 pieces of content regarding the product before they convert into customers. Crafting the correct type of content will solely depend on the social media platform you’ll use to promote the services or the target audience.
However, make sure that the content marketing you’re pursuing must show relevance to the target audience, i.e., the marketing content must adhere to the customer’s values and discuss their problems in detail while presenting your SaaS product as a solution.
Let’s not talk about the technical services such as website building— suppose you have farm management software as a service. Now, it’s your responsibility to showcase the software’s relevancy to the farmers and influence them to a monthly or yearly subscription. Every content or post must be a forward step to attract the target audience, i.e., farmers.
Bozena Pieniazek (VP of Marketing at Maze) has delivered a piece of advice on content’s importance:
Leverage your users to create user-generated content. Work with your partners and experts to help you scale content production and bring authority to all your content.
Not a One-off Exercise: Content marketing must be persistent and long-term to show authenticity to the users, come up with new updates and valuable additions, and keep up with the new technological terms. It’ll help you attract more customers and a positive ROI. Thus, pay attention to the content marketing schedule as it needs to be biweekly or weekly per post— even if you need to outsource the content creation to a content writing agency.
Now, the question is what type of content can be lasting and rank higher in search engines to promote your SaaS products. Let’s find out!
Type of Content for SaaS Marketing
SaaS marketing can be done using various forms of content, each with pros and cons. However, adding more is never less when it comes to marketing. Thus, you can even combine two or more ways mentioned below to get better results.
- Blog posts:
The very first way to promote your SaaS product is a blog post. Blogging will help you generate leads due to being more relevant and authentic in customers’ eyes.
- Product or Relevant Videos:
Another form of marketing is to generate sales through videos. You can market the SaaS product in the videos and share valuable information regarding those services or, in general, to show authenticity.
For example, posting videos on the importance of fertilizer for farming or any new farming method while promoting the farming management software as a service.
- E-Books:
The last but not the least way of content marketing is via E-books. You can share the latest industry research, valuable information, modern methods in that niche, and more via E-Books. However, E-books are lengthy and might require a lot of time and effort to write, but they are worth it. According to Forbes, E-books are also considered Lead Magnets, which you need in your SaaS Marketing.
3. Microsatellite Content Hubs
Focusing on your crucial topic rather than just covering the general case is the key to success. One of the industry’s leading mentors has also advised marketers to “Delete/Destroy the Blog” and start with a magazine in its place. Yes! You heard it right— instead of one blog, you can replace it with a magazine to cover the topics you’re experts in.
However, microsatellites are more focused on particular niches or topics and present the audience with the core area of knowledge. It is good to some extent, but one must allow the microsatellites to drift slightly in the user interface or UX. For example, you’re hitting at a single niche. Still, that niche might cover a lot of individuals from different communities and personas—hence, you need to cover the aspects for all.
Moreover, you’ll need to devise strategies as per the audience. You cannot craft a long-form article for the busiest profession and wait for your luck to let the content rank. For example, writing a long-form piece for the CEOs or CMOs to create brand awareness of your SaaS brand is a false strategy as these roles are always busy. Thus, the marketing blog must be skimmed and precise.
4. Build a Community
SaaS brands are nothing without building a strong community! This can also be done using branding or marketing techniques such as content and video marketing. However, the idea to build a community was fostered when like-minded people from different brands (competitors) came together to invent something unique. These people can share immense knowledge and develop a SaaS product that was never seen before in the tech world.
One example of a SaaS community is the SaaS Insider. Multiple CEOs, CMOs, and founders are included as members of this community. How can you start one yourself? Here it is:
First, you need to look for ambassadors for your community who will advocate for your SaaS product. These people must have the qualities to lead the community, build connections, and communicate effectively.
Then, start looking for connections, such as like-minded members with ideas to share and grow together.
Building a SaaS community around your product will help you understand people’s needs and develop new products. This can lead you to increase the Return on investment (ROI) by more than 4000%.
5. Identifying Customer Needs and Personalized Targeting
SaaS marketing requires you to identify the customer’s needs and problems and then do a hyper-personalized targeting of your product. For example, in simpler words, presenting your SaaS products to an audience who doesn’t need them will not generate sales.
Adam Goyette (Growth Advisor) has put some light on targeting the right audience:
How are you using intent data to really get targeted around who you're going after? Or are you using data scrapers to find out what technology they're using and adapting your go-to marketing strategy for that? I think efficiency, targeting, and personalization are things to focus on right now.
This is all about understanding your audience’s interest and presenting them with the right SaaS products, which can be done via content marketing. You can write blogs to attract an audience towards a niche/product, and that’s how you can know that you’re promoting or marketing your SaaS product to the right audience by looking at the demographics.
Final Verdict
Marketing your SaaS products can help you generate leads and increase the number of sales multiple times. Who’d not like that immense growth? Marketing your Software-as-a-Service product will require you to find the right audience first, and hyper-personalized targeting will lead you to success.
You can market your SaaS product in terms of blogs, articles, newsletters, short-form videos, brochures, E-books, and more. Each type of marketing method in the funnel will have different pros and cons. Boneza Pieniazek, VP of Marketing at Maze, has also emphasised the landing pages and downloadable webpages, considering those as a valuable marketing content with huge impact.
We assume that you now have enough knowledge of what is SaaS marketing and its impact on your SaaS product. In case you have any queries, feel free to contact us!
