SaaS Marketing Strategy: Best Practices for Your SaaS Marketing Plan

Digital Marketing
SaaS Marketing Strategy: Best Practices for Your SaaS Marketing Plan
Article by Bisera Stankovska
Last Updated: June 24, 2022

SaaS marketing strategy is an excellent way to set your software-as-a-service business apart from the crowd.

Having a solid SaaS marketing plan can be challenging especially since you are selling a service to potential customers instead of a tangible product. However, carrying out a well-structured SaaS strategy for marketing and making it work is rewarding, too.

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What is a SaaS Marketing Strategy?

SaaS marketing strategy is a targeted, specific type of marketing that focuses on promoting, building awareness about, and selling SaaS products on digital channels.

Digital marketing for SaaS makes sure that your company acquires and retains online users in the long-term. Your SaaS marketing plan should include consistent communication with your customers to avoid churn.

5 Best Approaches to SaaS Marketing Plan

The most recent years have seen the emergence of numerous SaaS companies. The constant changes and advancements in technology are spurring this rise in the number of SaaS enterprises. Development of business management software is easier and faster now that there are enterprise software companies ready to develop solutions that fit the needs of any business. businesses.

In this light, as a SaaS company owner or manager, you also have to be quick at going with the rapid flow of transformation and increase of your competitors in the industry.

Here are tested and proven ideas for a SaaS marketing strategy that you can integrate and draw inspiration from to ramp up your next SaaS marketing plan.

1. Content Marketing

Digital marketing for SaaS may be quite different from marketing for other businesses, brands, and products. While this is true, a SaaS strategy still shares similarities with marketing strategies for other forms of business enterprise.

Like for any other thriving brand, your SaaS marketing plan is heavily reliant on a content marketing strategy, too. Content marketing plays a significant role when you are building brand recognition, attracting traffic to your website, driving leads, establishing rapport with your clients, and eventually making a sale.

A major advantage of leveraging content for marketing for SaaS is that it accumulates more value over time, especially if they are evergreen materials. Excellent content is a long-term asset for your SaaS marketing strategy. From repurposing to resharing, you can always get creative in using content in more ways than one.

In addition, content is a measurable component in a SaaS marketing strategy. As an example, you can monitor how well your promotional social post is faring and how much of your conversion is fueled by that post through marketing analytics tools.

Content marketing for SaaS involves content creation and distribution. It is imperative to invest in both processes to ensure the effectiveness and success of a marketing campaign.

2. SEO

SEO for SaaS marketing strategy works hand in hand with content marketing as it helps increase your visibility on search engines.

On the one hand, there is on-page SEO marketing for SaaS that is within your control. It comprises keywords research and strategy, internal linking, and the use of title tags and meta-description. Each of these components contributes to website optimization for an overall positive user experience.

On the other hand, there is off-page SEO you should bank on together with on-page SEO. Also referred to as off-site SEO, this SEO category involves actions taken outside of your business website that still make an impact on how you rank on search engine results pages (SERPs). High-quality link-building and social sharing are examples of off-page SEO tactics.

3. Product Trial Period Offers

Offering a product trial or utilizing the business model called freemium is becoming a great source for lead generation in a SaaS marketing strategy.

If you don’t already offer this, now is the time to make a free trial available for your potential customers. You can offer the basic functionalities of your service or tool to users at zero cost for a certain duration of time. It lets you demonstrate product value without putting unwarranted pressure on users to make a purchase that can lead to a churn instead of a conversion.

During the free product trial period, you enable users to try and experience the system of your service offering. After this, they will decide if they will purchase or subscribe to get premium access to your software’s advanced features. That is why it is crucial for you to make sure that your prospective clients will have a positive experience throughout testing your product.

Trialing your product is a powerful indicator of buyer intent. It is perfectly fitting for you to invest time in introducing more details about your software to trial users, allowing them to be more informed about your platform.

Here are ways in which you can strengthen your freemium offer and guarantee a great consumer journey:

  • Offer onboarding and customer care support
  • Conduct live webinars
  • Automate emails that educate on how to maximize the use of your service

4. Referral Marketing Programs

A referral program, whether with incentives or otherwise, is a cost-efficient SaaS strategy for marketing. Besides helping you reach a wider audience, a referral is a way of telling your target market that the tool or software you are offering is well-trusted that people are supporting and promoting it.

To ensure you get more quality referrals, you can build a landing page or use a popup window on your website where users can key in their company, industry, and role as part of the referral process.

It is vital to keep the referral program SOPs easy-to-follow, making the whole experience uncomplicated and thus, more encouraging for users.

5. Co-Marketing Campaigns

Collaboration or partnership with other brands is another effective and worthwhile SaaS marketing strategy.

You can team up with companies whose product or service offering complements yours, then run a co-marketing campaign with them. A partnership with digital marketing companies for SaaS can be executed through:

  • Creation of a highly desirable piece of promotional content mentioning the collaborators
  • Co-hosting a live webinar session
  • Co-writing an e-Book
  • Co-publishing a research study

Apart from looking at a potential partner’s online presence and following, it is just as important to make sure that your goals for setting off a co-marketing campaign are clearly aligned, consistent, and not conflicting. This is a defining factor for the effectiveness of your SaaS marketing plan.

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5 Effective Ways to Implement Your SaaS Marketing Strategy

Improve your conversions by incorporating these strategies into your SaaS marketing plan:

1. Transparency With Your Pricing Model

A good SaaS marketing plan is always upfront about the pricing and payment schemes available for purchasing or subscribing to your tool. This will help your prospective customers make an informed purchasing decision.

To ensure this, you can build a webpage especially dedicated to mapping out your pricing model and payment plans. The pricing page should also include a clear description and discussion of the pricing options you offer plus the features and benefits that come with each.

2. Fewer Choices or Service Variations

Choose not to confuse your potential clients by providing them with too many options for your software. It is most advisable to limit your system variants to two or three. Presenting users more than these numbers may result in them dropping out amid making the purchase.

3. Simple Steps to Signing Up

When you are persuading clients to try your SaaS product, you will need to remove as much complexities as you can from the signup process. The easier it is for users to buy or subscribe, the better chances you have of making a successful sale. A trouble-free subscription or purchasing process is a crucial SaaS marketing strategy.

If a person is signing up only for a free trial, you may give the option for them to opt out of keying in credit information. After all, asking for credit card details at this early stage may cause them to abandon the signup.

3. Attractive Deals without Compromising Quality and Profitability

Another tactical step to marketing for SaaS is providing discount deals on longer-term plans. If you do not prefer giving away discounts, another SaaS strategy can also be waiving the fees for a month or two.

On your pricing page, make sure you properly showcase the pricing comparison and highlight the cost-savings that come with every pricing option.

For your current product subscribers, you can award badges for the varying levels of users based on their frequency of utilization of the software suite or the time period of their subscription, among other possible criteria.

4. Get Featured on Review Sites for Wider Scope of Exposure

Reading product ratings and reviews are a part of online users’ purchase decision. This is especially true for software-as-a-service products since there is no physical product as basis for their assessment.

Certainly, you first need to have a great product offering. Next up is to make sure you enlist your company on reliable review sites where what people have to say about your brand can be most visible and accessible.

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3 Factors to Consider When Creating a SaaS Strategy for Marketing

Here are the considerations to keep in mind when designing and implementing a SaaS marketing strategy.

1. SaaS Buyer Persona

Efficient strategies for growth and digital marketing for SaaS involve defining your ideal customers and understanding your target market. Learn about your target clients’ needs, demands, and pain points. By identifying these details, you will be able to definitively shape and create your SaaS buyer persona.

Invest in extensive research on what fuels people’s purchasing decisions, and the topmost benefits and features they are looking for in a software solution. You can do this by taking a deep dive into where they usually hang out online and the kind of contents that are most appealing to them.

2. Knowing Your Competitors

In order to keep up with the active and dynamic pace in the SaaS industry, you should keep tabs of what your competition is doing, how salable their products are, and how they are managing their own SaaS marketing strategy.

When you take the time to analyze their marketing collaterals, the messaging on their website, and their positioning on social platforms, you will know what they are executing right and the areas they need to improve. Consequently, your evaluation of your competitors’ SaaS marketing plan can devise a more engaging SaaS marketing plan to help you reach a wider audience.

3. Your Software’s Unique Selling Proposition

Once you have a clear understanding of your tool’s unique value proposition making it stand out from the rest on the market, it will be easier for you to develop strategies for digital marketing for SaaS.

Takeaways on SaaS Marketing Strategy

There are so many moving pieces that drive a SaaS marketing plan to success. While it can be confusing to decide which ones to leverage, you can turn these many strategic possibilities into an advantage.

Begin with knowing your SaaS product, your client base, and your competitors. From here, you can pick the tactics and channels that you think will work most favorably for your SaaS business. Focus on one or combine more strategies – it is all up to you. You can always make adjustments in your SaaS marketing strategy as necessary.

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