Your company sells a software. It runs on the cloud and keeps iterating. Besides an intangible product, your company doesn’t have a physical presence either. 

How do you build trust and persuade your prospects to buy?

In this article, you’ll get introduced to a few ways for marketing your SaaS product.

Table of contents:

1. How is SaaS product marketing different from every other type of marketing?
2. How do you market your SaaS product? [4 Smart strategies]

How is SaaS product marketing different from every other type of marketing?

The sales cycle is remarkably short:

“B2B sales” is synonymous with “long sales cycles.” SaaS sales is all about rapid sales. When SaaS customers need a solution, they do some online research, maybe ask a colleague, try the solution or watch a demo, and then buy. The whole process might take a few days, maybe a few hours. Customers find it, they see it, they like it, they buy it. Done!

Self-service SaaS is also a quick-pace buying environment. the low price and low complexity of most contemporary SaaS provide for easy decision-making.

The way to increased revenue, value, and profit, is a higher velocity in the sales process.

You’re not selling a product as much as you are a service:

The acronym SaaS stands for “Software as a Service.” I propose that we place the emphasis on service. Yes, the software must be important, flawless, powerful, and awesome. But service needs to be upheld as the paragon of virtues.

When creating your SaaS marketing plan, you must understand that your business model of choice is a fully-integrated architecture where all aspects of the business — product, support, revenue model, and marketing — are tightly-coupled.

How do you market your SaaS product?

• Offer a Free Trial:

SaaS companies have disrupted almost every segment of the market. So even if your product might be better than your competitors’, your prospects need to get a handle on it.

Offering a trial of your product is a great way to generate leads for your business. Indeed, as a software company, that’s your leverage over traditional companies selling physical products. By offering a “free” version of your product that solves the pain points of your market, you lower the barrier of entry. It’s your best shot at getting users to spend time with your product. These potential customers are referred to as product-qualified leads (PQL) and signal high buying intent.

• Plan your Content Marketing strategy and Optimize your SEO:

When woven together, content marketing and SEO can deliver an incredible amount of targeted traffic to your site. Indeed, creating content for prospects is one of the most common ways SaaS marketers generate brand awareness and build trust. Typically, content marketing is about offering free education that solves the pain points of your customers.

Organic traffic is a terrific growth channel for SaaS businesses because the returns of the informational content they create are compounding.

Once traffic starts rolling, you can create lead magnets to convert your visitors into email subscribers. Later, you can pitch a trial of your SaaS product to them.

You can also offer a “free trial” of your product directly to the visitors that come from your content marketing and SEO efforts. That’s what Ahrefs does. They don’t collect email addresses anywhere on their blog and directly try to convert visitors into PQL.

• Setting a budget:

One of the questions that we ask a prospective customer prior to engaging with us it ‘what is your marketing budget?’ This isn’t simply to qualify the prospect, but to check that they have thought through the requirements and that their goals are realistic. So how much should your marketing budget be? We recommend that you should allocate between 10-40% of your desired new revenue growth towards marketing activity.  For example, if you’re looking to add in an additional 1M€ in the next year, then we suggest allocating between 100 000€ and 400 000€. To narrow the spread down, track your numbers in relation to historic marketing. How much did you spend in the last 12 months on marketing activities? How many customers did that get you? From this, you can work out the cost per customer. Then by multiplying the cost per customer by the number of new customers needed to hit your goal, it’ll give you a ballpark figure for your marketing budget.

• Should you hire an agency?

This really depends upon your internal resources, budget and commitment to growing as well as your expectations. If you are looking for a SaaS marketing agency just to action your instructions, you’re better off hiring either a freelancer or employing someone.

A reputable agency will add the most value by working with you to create a marketing strategy that’s going to move you towards your goals.  They should then become an extension of your team to assist the implementation. They will take into account the resources that you already have and fill any gaps in time, skill and knowledge. A big advantage of working with an agency, is that they should have a wide skill set that you couldn’t expect one or two employees to have.  An agency that is going to help you grow will have expertise and experience in many different disciplines.

Conclusion

Getting a marketing system in place is vital for scaling your SaaS business.It takes a lot of time and effort but the dividends are huge.  Getting this right means that you get a predictable scalable source of qualified leads that become customers. 

If you’d like to discuss marketing for your SaaS business, why not have an initial chat with us?