Digital marketing services of all kinds are knockin' on your door.
You know you need them, but what do you do when there are so many options, ideas, methodologies, and conflicting opinions?
If you're shopping for help from a digital marketing agency, you likely have many questions. The answers, while broadly applicable to your SaaS or just about any B2B business and many B2C businesses, can be a bit confusing, because there are so many different choices and varying definitions of the same choices. For example, I've seen the term "inbound marketing" used and abused more ways than you can imagine, but there are very specific requirements that something inbound or not.
We're also going to need to look at where your business is in its life cycle.
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For this article, I'm breaking up how to market your SaaS based on your business' life cycle stage. That said, based on the type of marketing we're discussing (organic marketing, that is), there are elements that apply to every stage of your business growth. There's just going to be a different emphasis on core activities and overall marketing objectives depending on where you are with everything.
1. Early Stage Start-Ups
So, you built a killer platform that is supposed to make my life easier. Now you just need customers, but because you're a start-up, you don't have much in the way of website traffic, you don't have much brand awareness, if any, and you're still trying to figure out how to automate the sales process.
Main marketing objective: get GOOD traffic to the website
How to acheive it:
- SEO - Identifying your target keywords early is important. Put yourself in your prospective customers' shoes and ask yourself how you would find you... even if you didn't know about you. What questions are people typing into Google to get to you? Do it early, so you can start earning favor from the searching engines from day 1, because it won't happen overnight. FYI: You're going to need tools to help you with this, so you can find the good keywords and measure your progress. (looking for help from a professional SEO marketing service?)
- Blogging - Once you have your SEO strategy started, put together a blogging strategy that helps educate your prospective customers on reasons why your platform is so important. Don't advertise your service on your blog or use it for news or company announcements, but rather, focus on the pain your prospects are feeling, and help them further diagnose their problems. Use your keywords for subjects, blog 1 - 4 times per week, and you'll even boost your SEO rankings!
- Social Media Management - Get on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, & LinkedIn. Build company profiles, and get them connected to others. Most importantly, be active and SOCIAL! No blasting company ads all day, please. Social media works better when you're involved in other conversations as well. The more you share of theirs, the more they'll share of yours. Monitoring is also important, so get tools that help you publish AND listen for buying signals. (Get the social media management playbook HERE)
Pay really close attention to what works and what doesn't. Which keywords are getting you traffic? Which blog topics are generating the most traffic, and which ones are getting shares and follows? Which social media platform gives you the best results, and what are people saying?
Get the playbook on executing YOUR SEO strategy
2. Late Stage Start-Ups
Your SaaS has customers, you've been through many iterations of your platform, you're getting website traffic, and people are signing up to your trial AND Paid services. But there is room to improve, and now it's time to move onto your next set of problems. Perhaps your conversions from trial to customer could be stronger, and it would be nice to generate some actual leads.
Main marketing objectives: Convert more visitors into trials and customers. Convert visitors into leads. Convert more trial users into paid users.
How to achieve them:
- Lead conversion paths - Traffic is great, but not everybody who visits you wants to convert into a trial or paid customer right away. They could be very early in their buyer's journey, and still be looking to diagnose their problems rather than solve them. So, convert them into leads by offering reasons for them to provide their contact information... maybe a white paper or an ROI calculator.... Maybe a template of sorts that fits with your platform but can be used independently. Provide the fluid path to something of substance, and they will follow.
- Update SEO - Traffic is coming, which is great, but is it the RIGHT traffic? How are you ranking on your keywords? Are any of them actually helping you? Have you tried running them yourself to see what other results come up? SEO is a tricky game, and sometimes what WE would search isn't what our customers would search, so we must refine our SEO strategies on a regular basis.
- Blogging - This is a great way to connect with trial users and prospects that are still on the fence. By blogging around topics that address the pains of your customers, you open their eyes to other possibilities your platform can fulfill. Your prospects will be able to better diagnose their problems, and when you're there with all of the answers, you can bet that they'll give you a shot!
- Email nurturing - When people sign up for your trial, do you just send them off into the void and hope they "get it" after reading a couple of newsletters? Or do you have a system in place that helps users understand the value and functionality of your platform through bite-sized email chunks? Most of your users are there because they saw a sliver of something that resonated with them, so it's your job to open the doors to the rest of the possibilities your SaaS can address.
Get the email nurturing playbook designed to engage
3. Established SaaS
In a way your SaaS is flourishing. You're getting traffic, which is great - thousands and even tens of thousands of visitors every month. You're getting a couple dozen new customers and hundreds of trial users, but you hit a wall. Retention could be stronger, and month-over-month customer acquisitions are not increasing anymore. But costs continue to rise, because the environment is getting increasingly more complex, your users are getting more demanding, and your competition is catching up.
Main marketing objectives: Increase customer retention. Increase customer acquisition rates.
How to achieve them:
- Email nurturing - Just because somebody has been with you for 6 months, doesn't meant they're happy with your service. It could be that they're satisfied, but if/when your competitors offer the same product for slightly less money and/or slightly more functionality, they'll jump ship as soon as the opportunity arrives (ie, their 1 year subscription is up), but don't let them! Continue emailing (spaced out, of course) tips and ideas on how to use your program. Keep them in the know when something changes, and offer opportunities to upgrade to that next tier.
- Social media - Turn your biggest fans into advocates of your business. Being active and interesting in social media provides opportunities for them to rave about your SaaS with all of their friends and colleagues.
- Feedback forums - Have you asked your users what they think about your platform? Do you send out surveys or point blank ask them, "why do you use our program?" Sometimes the answers to retention are right in front of us, but we're afraid to ask the questions that yield painful responses. But without those responses, how can you expect to know what they are thinking? Surveymonkey.com is a free service that makes this a breeze!
- Referral programs - If you want to grab more market share and boost your 3rd party promotional activities, give out free months of service for paying referrals.
- Usage-based rules - You should be able to send usage reports to your marketing and/or sales software platform. Knowing whether somebody is active versus dormant allows you to cater your outgoing messages to fit the proper scenario. For the active users you may want to provide tips on more complex functionality, while the inactive users will need more reasons to jump on it.
- Lead conversion paths - It doesn't matter if you're a start-up or established SaaS, having lead conversion paths will help you do more with less. You're probably letting perfect customers slip away by not having permission based marketing tools in place, such as gated content offers.
- SEO - Make sure your keyword strategy is on point, and tune it up on a regular basis. Not sure what keywords you need? Google your competitors. See what they're doing.
- Blogging - Make sure your blogging is on point - as in, use it to address pain points, boost your SEO rankings, and further engage visitors. Don't forget your CTAs that lead to gated content offers, so you can convert the early-stage buyers, and portals to trials and paid subscriptions to those who are further down the buyer's journey.
No matter what stage your SaaS is in, marketing is going to play a big role in your ability to achieve your marketing objectives. The voice and approach you use with your marketing is going to play a big role in how people perceive you. The more you disrupt with marketing & sales (ie, spamming and cold calling), the more your prospective customers will relate that behavior to your actual platform.
Want to learn more about how to apply these digital marketing best practices to your SaaS? Schedule an inbound marketing consultation!
Want to see the playbook that will help you kick off your own SaaS marketing plan today? We got it right HERE:
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