‘Software as a service’ or popularly called as SaaS is now everywhere. With the fueling of technology, developing new software is now much cheaper and easier. As a result, the potential customers for SaaS have augmented a lot.
Since the popularity of SaaS is increasing, more and more companies are now thriving towards this business model. This has created lots of competition within the industries. It is now very much difficult for businesses to differentiate their offerings from competitors and present themselves as the best in the industry.
But the good thing is that there is an ultimate solution to it which is Implementing best SaaS marketing strategies in your business model!
The tricky part about SaaS marketing is that it does not involve any tangible product, and hence, measuring results is quite difficult. But while clients intend to get smaller payments on a monthly basis, business investors always prefer practices that can generate practical recurring profits so that it becomes easier for them to manage their business health.
To avail of critical business success, you need to implement effective growth solutions. This is what brings SaaS marketing strategies into the role.
Read this post to know about the top proven strategies for SaaS marketing that can help your business grow, let you convince customers, and offer you more conversions.
Best SaaS Marketing Strategies that Will Boost Your Business:
1. Address Specific Requirements of Your Audiences:
Before you begin with selling your SaaS software you must seek out for specific needs of your customers that you want to address. SalesForce, Trello, and QuickBooks are some of the popular businesses that are known for offering a unique service to their customers. This is what that keeps them ahead of their competitors.
You must narrow down your value proposition to win new customers and make sure your solution is solving one or more issues of the customers.
2. Clearly Mention the Price:
Displaying the product price clearly is one of the vital aspects of SaaS marketing. This helps customers to make quick decisions regarding their product affordability. Consider the example of Vimeo, a SaaS provider that is known for its clear pricing plans.
Your SaaS marketing strategy will succeed only if your customers are happy with your offerings. Hence, absolute clarity about the price of products let them make well-informed decisions easily.
3. Attract Customers with Free Product Trials:
Free product trial is already in buzz. Offering customers free of cost trials encourage them to sign-up and use the product. This works great for customer acquisition. This will encourage customers to realize the benefits of your product or service.
Once people use their product and found its beneficiary then it would be quite convenient for you to convince them for a paid plan. This is an effective strategy that let users make a purchase decision later. While practicing this strategy, make sure you offer the free product trial for a long time period so that your customers understand the value of your product.
4. Try Gaining User’s Trust:
One crucial aspect to generate new leads is to build the trust of your users. This is highly important if you are a small business or a startup. Your aim must be to win user’s trust by legitimating your business, meeting high professional standards, keeping your customers engaged and empathizing with them.
One easiest way to win customer’s trust is by displaying trust marks on your sites. You can add visual clues such as the trust seal to win the trust of your visitors.
5. Offer Limited Choices:
A big mistake that most of the businesses make is offering customers a range of choices. But presenting too many options actually confuses them, which can ultimately result in abandoning of buying. Therefore, offer them with 2 or 3 different variants of your product to avoid the occurrence of any kind of confusions.
In addition to this, clearly, list the features of each variant and what makes them different from one other. This way, customers are able to pick a product that best meets their needs. The pricing plan of Unbounce is an excellent example in this context.
6. Keep the Sign-up Process Simple:
Every customer prefers simple and easy sign-up process. If you want a number of people to try using your SaaS product, you have to eliminate all hurdles that may come up in a way of the easy sign-up process. For example, asking credit card details in the free trial will keep most of the customers away.
It is best if you provide a 3-step signup process on an initial basis. Just ask the most important details and mark mandatory spaces with a star or any other symbol.
7. Enhance Experience for Your Customers:
Among all the SaaS marketing strategies, this one is the most essential one. You just have to aim in to offer your customers a rich experience. One amazing way to improve customer experience is by serving them personalized services.
This can range from sending a personalized email to helping active customers personalized support solution. You can even offer a live chat option to your website to resolve queries related to the customers. Offer them solutions to navigate your website better and easily find answers to their queries.
8. Announce Lucrative Deals:
Another proven SaaS marketing strategy is to offer customers with good deals to encourage them to select a longer plan.
Lots of companies use this technique to offer discounts on long-term plans. But the key is to highlight and clearly show the monetary savings that customers can realize with these deals. You must clearly show the comparison in the yearly prices of each plan and highlight the cost-savings for each plan. Also, let customers know how they can select an annual plan for themselves and get benefits easily.
9. Cross Sell as well as Upsell:
Visiting your customers on a regular basis to keep them engaging is not practically possible. You cannot always cross-sell or upsell. A practical and effective solution to this is conducting an email marketing campaign to your present mailing list. The aim of such a campaign is to drive each prospect to the best package price that is specific to their requirements.
Some of the prominent tips for successful email marketing are:
- Target your audience by relevance. You can sort them by current plans, profession, subscription, industry, and other things that are relevant.
- Offer them a reason to open your email. For this, you have to highlight the benefits of your product or service in the email subject.
- Deliver free content to your visitors.
10. Feature Your Business on SaaS Review Websites:
Lots of people check online reviews and product ratings before making the final buying decision. Since software is not a tangible product, so it becomes even more important to check online comparisons and reviews.
It is therefore essential to list your site on review websites and get maximum exposure for your product. You just have to reach out to the teams of such websites and send your value proposition and product details.
11. Practice Content Marketing for Generating New Leads:
Another finest strategy for SaaS marketing is content marketing. This strategy works great to generate new leads. When you post high-quality content on your site relevant to your specific audience, more and more people would like to read it.
It is essential to write industry-specific content. Along with this, you must optimize your website content with relevant keywords so that you can attract the correct audience. For this reason, lots of SaaS websites have their own blogs which they keep updated with the latest content. A popular example of this is Moz.
12. Use Off-Page SEO:
A large number of people consider off-page SEO solely as link building. But SEO is a lot more than this. It’s true that links are vital, it is the quality of these links that matters the most. You must always seek for high-quality links from authoritative and trusted sites.
You can even use social media to share links and influence links from your social accounts. The finest solution to gain more links and shares is by planning an effective distribution strategy.
13. Use On-Page SEO Techniques:
In addition to off-page SEO techniques, you must use on-page SEO techniques to improve search engine rankings of your site. Using such practices will also bring more visitors to your site and ensure that your site is visible to customers making search queries related to your business.
14. Conduct a PPC Campaign:
PPC campaign is a paid strategy to generate new leads. You can practice this if your website is not receiving enough organic traffic.
You need to test distinct variations of ad copies and assess what works best for your business. Make sure you use appropriate keywords related to your industry in your ads. This way, they will be displayed in search engines relevant to your industry. Furthermore, make sure that these ads clearly define your business value proposition. This is a slightly costly affair but it is highly scalable and if done correctly can boost your business to a great extent.
15. Co-marketing:
One of the newest SaaS marketing strategies is to collaborate with other companies and conduct a co-marketing strategy. You can pair up with companies that complement your offerings or follow an approach similar to your business.
Though you can practice co-marketing in your preferred way, some of the popular ways are creating a piece of content like an eBook, publishing some research work, and hosting a webinar. The cost incurred and leads generated, both are shared by the participating companies.
Both the participating companies have the chance to leverage each other’s visitors and reach to a distinct audience. This strategy works well when both the teams are aligned. It is best to sign an agreement between the two companies. You can succeed in your SaaS marketing strategy by co-marketing with a reputed and renowned company.
16. Announce Great Rewards for Customer Referrals:
Also known as referral marketing, this practice is extremely effective for generating new leads for your SaaS software. A lot of brands and businesses consider it as a primary source for generating leads.
But if you want this strategy to work for you, it is essential to offer your clients with incentives that are referral-worthy. One of the best ideas is to conduct a loyalty program, which rewards referrals or offer some incentives to customers who refer your services or products to others.
17. Include Strong Call-To-Action:
- What is your ultimate expectation from your visitor or customer?
- Do you wish them to sign-up for a free trial or do you intend to let them purchase your product?
Once you have a clear idea of your ultimate desire, you can then take the necessary action and plan a strong CTA accordingly throughout your site.
To find out which call-to-action works best for your final desire, you can experiment with distinct CTAs in terms of colors, wording, fonts, and sizes. The best form is to conduct an A/B testing to identify a CTA that brings you most conversions.
18. Retargeting:
No matter what your ultimate expectation is, the truth is that most of the site visitors never take the action, which you intend them to do. In this situation, remarketing also known as retargeting is the best way to increase conversions. Here you have to re-engage people who have left your site without taking any action.
Remarketing lets you track visitors of your site and display online adverts as they visit other websites online. The good thing about this strategy is that it can be practiced for every industry and product. It is a highly valuable tool that gives your brand another chance to gain customers trust.
So we have listed some of the best and most effective SaaS marketing strategies. By practicing these strategies you can boost lead generation and acquire more customers for your business. Hence, start practicing these strategies right now so that your SaaS marketing campaign turns out to be an immense success.