At the core, marketing a SaaS platform is not that different from marketing any other type of software. But there are still fundamental differences that need to be accounted for. First of all, most SaaS brands focus on very narrow niches and operate solely online, which comes with a fair share of challenges. They also have to deal with ferocious competition and can have difficulty differentiating themselves from the rest. If you are trying to increase awareness for your brand, leads, and revenue, here are some valuable tips for SaaS platform marketing.
Get to Know Your Customer
One of the biggest mistakes SaaS startups make when building customer personas is going by assumptions. Another mistake they make is not having enough buyer personas or not adjusting them as their product and business develops.
Having dynamic buyer personas and truly understanding them is what separates the winners from losers in this field. One Cintell survey found that 64.7% of the businesses that were able to surpass their revenue and lead goals had changed their buyer personas in the last six months and over 47% of the people who consistently increased their revenue considered themselves proficient at managing them. Follow their lead and allow your personas to be as fluid as possible.
Get to Know Your Competition
There is not a single piece of online real estate or branding more important to a SaaS service than its landing page. This is why you need to spend as much time as possible refining it. This can be done with continuous testing, but also by looking at what the competition is doing.
Looking at SaaS examples for your industry will give you a baseline from which you can develop or improve your landing page. Just making a minor change in the font, colors, or layout could make a huge difference. Or maybe you notice that one of our main competitors is using a chatbot and you don’t? These are all things that could give you clues on how your competition is operating and what they’re doing better than you in their SaaS platform marketing.
Refine Your Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing is one of the most powerful tools for any SaaS platform, but it can get extremely tricky as the buyer journey is often very tortuous. A large portion of SaaS solutions address problems that either had no solutions or were solved manually. Having a product that is brand new to the market means that you’ll have to focus on solving your customers’ pain points at the awareness stage and not immediately try to sell them on your product.
Educate your prospects and serve them content at every stage of their buyer journey. The content strategy for your SaaS platform marketing should focus on assisting seamlessly as they become aware, educated, start looking at options, consider your free trial, and become seasoned users. This is what will allow you to increase your acquisition rates while keeping your churn rates low.
Turn Clients Into Advocates
You also have to do everything you can to locate your most enthusiastic clients and turn them into advocates. You can do this by having high social media engagement and searching for those who mentioned your product before. You can then segment your client database and engage these customers directly.
Ask them what they like about the product and what they’d like to see improve. Consider their suggestions and make sure that they are the first to know about updates. You can expect a large number of them to spread the word about these changes, especially if they feel like they had a direct hand in them.
SaaS platform marketing isn’t that complex, but it’s definitely different from any other type of service or product. Thankfully, there are strategies that you can apply today to get predictable and consistent results.
