Introduction
If you currently run a SaaS company or are in charge of the marketing department, you most likely already know that marketing online software services is much different from marketing physical products. One of the things that make SaaS marketing particularly challenging is the fact that there are no physical products to market. As a result, there is a limitation to how prospective customers can assess your products before getting convinced enough to make a purchase. To combat this challenge, many SaaS companies rely heavily on delivering excellent user experience and customer service.
The software-as-a-service model commonly referred to as the SaaS business model, is one of the fastest-growing cloud-based models as more companies are choosing to offer their services as cloud-based products. With much competition in the industry, you need to be able to stay up to trend with marketing strategies if you plan to stand out from the sea of other SaaS companies.
SaaS marketing is challenging, and you may already be getting frustrated at the lack of results. Before deciding that SaaS marketing is not for you, this article features seven ways you can improve your SaaS marketing strategies to acquire more customers and retain them in the long run.
But first, Why Do You Need a Good SaaS Marketing Strategy?
Groundbreaking marketing results always start with an excellent marketing strategy, especially if you are working with non-tangible products, as is the case with SaaS products. You can’t just wing it; you need a cohesive plan to achieve your marketing goals. You have to be deliberate about every action and executed plan in order to achieve your revenue target. With a good SaaS marketing strategy, you can expand your SaaS business to newer customers, establish your presence in the industry, help your company stand out from the competition, and eventually become a customers’ favorite.
If you are looking to achieve the above-stated goals, then you need the following tips.
IMPROVE YOUR CONTENT MARKETING
Now, you may roll your eyes and silently mutter to yourself, “we already do content marketing.” However, just because you do content marketing doesn’t mean you are doing it the right way to acquire and retain your customers. Content marketing is beyond uploading a few blog posts every month and expecting your visitors to stumble across them and get impressed. Even if you have your SEO in excellent condition, there’s still so much more to making content work for you. Some things to consider when restructuring your next content marketing plan are:
Quality: Content marketing is one of the primary ways to connect and interact with potential clients, and you don’t want your first meeting to be underwhelming for your visitors. You should invest in high-quality content that is easy to read, absorb and digest by your visitors. Instead of a plain, long blog post, you can make it more compelling by inserting visuals such as infographics, pictures, or gifs describing the message you are trying to pass across to your visitors.
Value: Visitors and customers who consume your content across different platforms do so because they hope to receive valuable and educational information from you. You should ensure that every piece of content you publish must be well-researched and expertly tailored to your customers’ needs and pain points. By identifying your customer’s actual pain points, you can create content that provides solutions to their problems and builds their trust and loyalty with your brand. A helpful tip would be to conduct a simple survey around your content topic and provide specific solutions to the most identified problems.
Converting Content: While creating content, you should have it at the forefront of your mind that while the primary aim of the content is to inform, entertain, or educate your audience, the real goal is to turn them into paying customers. With that in mind, your content should be structured in a way that compels your prospective customer to take the next step in the sales funnel. Do you need them to sign up? You can insert lead magnets at strategic locations on the page to attract them. These magnets could be other forms of high-quality content that your ideal customers would want to have. Embedded in those lead magnets should also be compelling content that would contribute to the lead nurturing process and encourage them to make a purchase.
IMPROVE YOUR FREEMIUM OFFER
Perhaps the reason you are still not getting new customers is that your freemium offer is not irresistible. Most people want to get the most out of a platform without having to pay for it. While it is not feasible to offer all your services for free, you can craft your free package in a more enticing way that seeks to solve most, if not all, of your prospective customer’s current problems. You can achieve this by tweaking the copy on your landing page, changing the package’s name to something more exciting, or simply offering more features in the free package for a limited period.
ENCOURAGE REFERRALS
One of the fastest ways to grow your customer base is setting up a referral system that incentivizes your current customers to invite their friends to try out your product. Most people are more likely to sign up for a fermium package if they are referred by a friend who has used the product. There are different ways you can encourage referrals amongst existing customers. One way is to offer a discount on service for every fixed number of referrals that convert. Another way is to provide an extra free service when customers invite their friends to collaborate as a group on your platform. Depending on the service you render, you can tweak the referral system in different ways to benefit both your company and your customers.
GET YOUR BUSINESS ON REVIEW SITES
Unsurprisingly, review sites are gaining more and more popularity in the SaaS industry sphere, and you should use this to your advantage. Before most people decide on a platform to use, they seek out sites where different platforms have been reviewed. This means a lot of traffic comprising of your target audience in one place. If your software has not been listed on any of the top review sites like G2crowd or Capterra, then it is time to include that into your marketing strategy. You should reach out to these platforms with your software specifications for review. Beyond a simple review, you want to make sure that your software is well represented on these review platforms, highlighting your key features.
REDUCE SIGN-UP PROCESS STEPS
For a SaaS business looking to acquire as many customers as possible, it would be helpful to make the sign-up process easier by reducing the steps required for a prospective customer to sign up. Most customers are discouraged when they have to go through more than one sign-up step or if they have to fill a lot of forms before registering. Humans are naturally lazy and would always choose the easier option. If you aren’t recording many sign-ups, even for your freemium package, you may want to review your sign-up process to make it easier and friendlier.
IMPROVE YOUR CALL-TO-ACTIONS
Sometimes the reason visitors are not converting to customers is because there is no clear call to action on your website or landing page. You should never assume that your visitors know exactly what to do when they visit your website. Instead, you should construct your web copy in a way that makes it easy for your visitors to sign up with a clear call to action. Be as direct as possible with your CTA without sounding desperate or being pushy. Also, you can get more people to click on your CTA button by tweaking the wording of your CTA. Instead of the commonly used “Learn more” or “Sign up,” you can replace them with a more compelling phrase that shows your visitor the benefits of signing up. For example, instead of “Register Now, you can use “Register to start planning your day better” instead.
IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE USER INTERFACE
It might hurt to hear, but your website may just not be compelling enough for your prospective customers. Because SaaS marketing relies heavily on user experience, your platform needs to be able to deliver a seamless and excellent user experience to your customers. This may also be the reason you are not retaining as many customers as you should. You can tackle this problem by doing a general survey of your customers’ experience using your platform. The complaints should be noted, and improvements worked into an update. You may even decide to do a complete website overhaul with new content and web copy that your ideal customers would love. However, you should be careful with the restructuring process, as the goal is to stand out from competitors while providing the value you promised your customers.
Conclusion
These tips can be incorporated into your SaaS marketing strategy to take your marketing from bad to good and good to better. You may need to keep testing these tips to see which of them will give the best results.
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