Marketing for Software as a Service, or SaaS, companies is not easy. Without having a physical product, it can be tricky to figure out how to properly advertise your value proposition to leads. Because of this, marketers have to get a little more creative to stand out from the competition. In this guide, we go through key challenges that SaaS companies face, and the top marketing tactics that we have seen success from first hand. First, let’s go through the unique challenges that SaaS companies face.
Understanding the Unique Challenges SaaS Companies Face
Before we dive into specific marketing strategies, it’s crucial to understand the unique challenges that SaaS companies face. First of all, SaaS companies rely on recurring revenue from subscription-based models. This means that you must continuously deliver value to retain customers, minimizing churn rates. Alongside this, your product is not tangible. This can make it challenging for prospects to understand and associate value with. Finally, the SaaS market is typically saturated. Standing out requires innovative marketing tactics and a thorough understanding of your target audience. Now, let’s go through how you can position yourself.
Craft Your Value Proposition
A strong value proposition is crucial when it comes to marketing for SaaS companies. Your value proposition is how you describe your benefits and advantages compared to your competition. It also includes how you address and solve the pain points of your target audience. Here are a few things that you should keep in mind when creating your value proposition.
Focus on the Benefits
You’ll want to highlight the specific problems that your software solves, and the benefits that it delivers for users. For example, if your SaaS product streamlines workflow processes, emphasize how it saves time and increases efficiency. If you are able to collect stats on how much time and money your users save with your solution, that can help emphasize the value of your product.
Address Your Target Audience
It’s important to resonate with the specific needs and pain points of your target audience. Before you start any form of marketing, conduct thorough market research to understand their challenges and preferences. This can help you frame your messaging and choose the right ways to target your audience. As an example, your audience may respond better to YouTube or video ads compared to static images, since they are able to understand what your product offers.
Emphasize Differentiation
As I mentioned earlier, the SaaS industry tends to be saturated with competition. This is why it’s crucial to clearly articulate what sets you apart from competitors. Whether it’s innovative features, superior customer support, or a user-friendly interface, emphasize the unique value that you offer. For example, if you know that your main competitor has a tricky software to use that involves a large learning curve, showcase that you are easier and more intuitive to use. Now that you know what to consider, let’s jump into the 10 marketing strategies that SaaS companies should use.
10 Marketing Strategies for SaaS Companies
As a SaaS company ourselves, here are a few of our tried and tested marketing strategies that we have found to be extremely effective.
1. Invest in Your Website
When talking about marketing for SaaS companies, your website is often the most important part. Your website is often one of the first points of contact your audience will have, making it essential to invest in its design, functionality, and user experience. Ensure that your website is visually appealing, mobile-friendly, and easy to navigate. In addition, you’ll need to incorporate persuasive copywriting, clear CTAs, and help users understand what your software is all about. It’s important to regularly update and optimize your website to reflect changes in your software, target audience, trends, and optimizations.
2. Leverage Your Competitor’s Bad Reviews
As I mentioned earlier, it’s crucial to emphasize how your company is different, and better, than your competitors. A great way to do this is to look at your competitor’s bad reviews. If they have reviews that talk about how expensive they are, ensure yours is cheaper (within reason) and advertise this. You can advertise this on competitor landing pages, Google Ads, cold emails, and more. If you’re looking to really stand out, try to use a cheeky tone of voice that would be hard to miss.
3. Educational Blogging
Having an educational blog can help you increase your website traffic, SEO presence, and position yourself as an industry leader. Maintain a blog that provides valuable insights, tips, and best practices related to your industry or niche. Try to address common pain points and offer solutions. A blog can increase your chances of ranking higher in search by 434%. Knowing this, it’s easy to see why blogging can help increase your presence online.
4. Use Case Studies and Success Stories
Showcasing real-life examples of how your SaaS product has helped customers overcome common challenges can help your audience relate and see how they will also benefit from your solution. Case studies and success stories can help your company emphasize social proof, instilling confidence in potential customers. You can use case studies on your website, paid advertising, and on your social channels to help your audience wherever they are. If you’re looking to learn more about leveraging case studies in your marketing, take a look at this article How to Use Client Case Studies to Convert Leads.
5. Improve Your Onboarding Process
Your onboarding process will make or break your customer retention. This process helps your new customer understand how to use your software, provide resources, and feedback to help you improve your software. Ensuring a seamless onboarding process that helps these new customers get up and running is more likely to stay a customer for longer. There’s a lot that goes into building an effective email onboarding sequence. If you’re not sure where to get started, check out How to Create an Email Onboarding Sequence.
6. Create a Referal Program
Encourage satisfied customers to refer their peers to your software through referral programs. You can offer incentives like discounts, freebies, or an Amazon gift card to both the referrer and the new customer. Create a seamless referral process and provide tools or resources to make it easy for customers to share their referral links with their network. There are software tools out there like ReferralHero that can make managing your referrals much easier. Here at Visitor Queue, we have generated some of our best customers through our referral program.
7. Offer a Free Trial
A new software can be challenging to get the hang of and see the value of. So, you can try offering a free trial of your product to allow users to experience its value firsthand before committing to a paid subscription. Pairing a free trial with a smooth and efficient onboarding process is crucial. Offering a free trial can also help weed out leads that may not be qualified or may not fall in your target market, without the headache of providing refunds or dealing with unsatisfied customers.
8. Paid Advertising
Investing in paid advertising, like Google Ads, can help you reach a much wider audience and drive traffic to your website much faster than SEO. Ensure you use precise targeting and competing ad copy to maximize ROI. A great strategy that we see many SaaS companies doing is bidding on your competitor’s keywords. This can be a great way to entice leads who are actively searching for a solution. Below is an example of a company, Omnisend, bidding on Mailchimp’s keywords, and making it fun and enticing. This is also a great example of Omnisend using its key differentiators, price and usability.
9. Identify Your Website Visitors
The majority of your marketing efforts will be trying to push prospects to visit your website. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could see who is visiting your website? With the help of Visitor Queue, you can. Visitor Queue is a website identification software that can help you see the companies that land on your website, how they got there, the pages they viewed, and how long they spent on each page. This can help you see if your marketing efforts are attracting the right people to your website. Additionally, our software can provide you with employee contact information including email addresses, phone numbers, and a link to their LinkedIn page to help you follow up. Integrate with your CRM of choice to seamlessly follow up with these new leads. Start your 14-day free trial of Visitor Queue today and stop losing leads.
10. A/B Testing
If you’re not sure what’s working and what’s not, try to implement A/B testing. A/B testing can help you optimize performance and maximize your conversion rates. Test different elements such as headlines, CTAs, ad copy, and landing page designs to identify what resonates best with your audience. When you test out A/B testing, ensure that the period of time and other marketing strategies are similar for both tests. You wouldn’t want to test one CTA during a slow season, and another CTA during a busy season, or else you would receive skewed results.
Closing Statements
Marketing for SaaS companies presents unique challenges and opportunities. By understanding your target audience, implementing effective lead generation strategies, and prioritizing customer retention, you can position your SaaS company for growth. It’s important to keep in mind that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to marketing for SaaS companies. That’s why it’s important to always adjust based on data-driven insights and market feedback. As always, if you have any questions about using Visitor Queue for lead generation, do not hesitate to reach out.
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