Effective marketing is key to standing out in a competitive market and growing your customer base. For SaaS organizations, this rings especially true as more and more platforms emerge to cater to various needs in the digital world and remote workplace. While there are many angles to take and activities to consider when it comes to taking marketing to the next level, focusing on the foundations can help elevate your SaaS marketing. Use these five tips, one for each core components of SaaS marketing, to enhance your organization’s marketing strategy, activities and overall effectiveness.
1. Get Clear on Your Target Audience and Buyer Personas
At the core of effective SaaS marketing is the audience the product is intended for. A business needs to be clear on who they are trying to reach as this determines what marketing activities are planned and executed. To effectively create buyer personas, you need to identify their key characteristics, pain points and goals. Ensure that they are as in-depth and accurate as possible as they are representations of who your buyers are. In SaaS marketing, buyer personas generally include:
- Company information: Size (by people or revenue), industry segment, location(s), their end customer profile
- Demographic information: Gender, age, location, role in the company, involvement in purchase/decision making
- Key drivers: Responsibilities in their role, common goals, key challenges in their role
Accurate buyer personas drive messaging and marketing efforts because when you have a clear picture of a prospective buyer’s needs and pain points, you can tailor your messaging and marketing to reach them.
2. Ensure Messaging is Consistent and Impactful
Effective B2B messaging and branding can help your SaaS organization differentiate its product from the competition and connect with prospective customers by highlighting what makes the product unique and valuable. Then, using messaging points consistently across all marketing channels guides the target audience to the behavior that you want them to engage in and helps them find the specific product they have been looking for.
Messaging and content work closely together. When your messaging is consistent, informational and has a purpose, it will connect with your audience. In fact, organizations that present their brand consistently across platforms can increase revenue up to 23%.
3. Outline and Document Your Content Strategy
Content marketing is a tried-and-true mainstay for generating leads and a must for any SaaS business in the digital age. For many SaaS organizations, it is a cost-effective gateway to introduce potential audiences to an organization and the product addresses needs and pain points. It is also extremely impactful in supporting marketing and sales efforts all the way through to driving increased business.
As shared by Demand Metric, content marketing generates over 3x as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less. With content providing such a key role in marketing, having a clear, outlined content strategy and plan can help your organization focus on the content efforts that will deliver the most value.
4. Create Various Types of Content for Effective Content Marketing
To support marketing efforts, there are many types of content that can be created. From blogs to articles, videos and eBooks, several options can help to generate leads. While some are more essential than others, it’s important to know what your specific audiences enjoy. Determining a few types of content to convey product and organization information and benefits will be valuable in the short- and long-term. Here are key categories of content to consider in the mix:
- Ungated Content: Content that is accessible to anyone at any time without restrictions (blogs, infographics, podcasts and short videos are examples of this type of content).
- Gated Content: Content that requires completion of an online web form or similar step to capture users’ contact information before allowing access to it (eBooks, guides, whitepapers, webinars, research reports, benchmark studies and product demos are examples of this type of content).
5. Generate and Nurture Leads
Capturing the attention of audience is the first step in forming a valuable relationship. Strengthening that relationship relies on how effectively you nurture, or engage, them. Here are some tips to help with lead generation and lead nurturing:
- Turn Site Visitors into Leads: Social media posts, blogs and webinars are great ways to generate awareness of your brand and product. This awareness can bring more people to your website and get to know you. Once on your website, having forms to download gated content, or to subscribe to a newsletter can help turn a site visitor into a lead, allowing continued marketing.
- Nurture Leads Consistently: Lead nurturing is the progressive process of building a relationship with leads through different interactions over time to ultimately convert the leads into buyers. Nurture activities are based on where a lead is in the buyer’s journey.
- Awareness Stage: Periodically emailing thought leadership and educational content like blogs and articles is useful. The goal is to extend opportunities for each lead to deepen their interest and strengthen the relationship.
- Consideration Stage: Here people are often beginning to evaluate options for addressing their needs or pain points. At this stage, in-depth content that talks about how your product addresses common paint points, or a white paper showing key considerations when making a purchase decision are appropriate.
- Decision Stage: Here people are evaluating and finalizing their selection for their product. Providing a case study that showcases the success of others who use your product or sharing product comparisons that show how yours stands above others is useful.
Building on The Foundations of SaaS Marketing
It is crucial to understand that building a strong SaaS marketing foundation can be a difference-maker in the future. Establishing a content marketing strategy and plan, implementing authentic, consistent messaging, creating accurate buyer personas and generating awareness and leads are all foundational elements that help elevate the effectiveness of marketing, making your SaaS product one to remember.
Do you want to accelerate the effectiveness of your B2B SaaS marketing? Contact us today or request a free marketing consultation. For over 20 years, we have helped SaaS organizations launch their product and achieve measurable marketing and business results.
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