4 Marketing Must-Knows for SaaS Startups
Startup marketing is challenging, especially in the SaaS industry. Building a website, publishing blog posts, and ...
A SaaS marketing plan must address factors most traditional marketing strategies don’t cover. For example, SaaS product marketing must go beyond finding and converting new leads to nurture relationships and increase customer lifetime value (CLV) through SaaS customer retention tactics.
Therefore, a solid SaaS product marketing strategy must consider the entire customer lifecycle, from awareness and conversion to loyalty and advocacy. Let’s explore steps you should take to build an effective SaaS marketing plan and maximize revenue.
Successful SaaS product marketing requires a solid foundation, starting from a big-picture view of your business. Create buyer personas to understand your target audience and define your unique selling proposition (USP) to help you communicate why they should buy your solution.
You may start with a hero statement or message, a phrase combining your "who” and "what”— the customers you serve and the value you deliver. Here’s an example of a hero statement for a personal finance SaaS product:
“[My SaaS company] is a hero to mothers in their 30s who struggle to stick to a tight budget.”
Your hero statement should reflect your customers’ pain points, how they try to address an issue, and how your SaaS product solves their challenges. By understanding what your customers want to achieve, you can build the right features and position your solution strategically to capture attention and gain traction.
When developing your SaaS marketing plan, you must also determine how you measure success by tracking the right marketing metrics. If you want to keep things manageable, focus on growing website traffic, email subscribers, and qualified leads while reducing churn rates.
After defining your target audience, it’s time to get in front of them, communicate your solution’s benefits, and turn them into leads. Let's explore how SaaS content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and paid advertising work together to help you grow visibility, build trust, drive high-quality traffic, and acquire leads.
Simply publishing blog posts isn’t enough to maximize the benefits of content marketing. To set the stage for success, define your content core by connecting the dots between your solution's benefits and the topics your audience cares about. This exercise will help you create relevant content to attract the right audience.
Then, you must identify the best channels to distribute and promote your content to high-quality prospects. Also, build a subscriber list with gated content to support effective B2B email marketing, one of the most effective ways for SaaS businesses to foster trust, nurture relationships, and drive conversions.
With most B2B tech buyers researching solutions online, you must get in front of them early in the customer journey through SEO and paid ads. Start with keyword research to identify popular search terms your target audience uses. For example, Google Analytics shows you which keywords prospects use in their searches to find your site.
Update your website and content with relevant keywords to signal relevance to search engine algorithms. Also, improve technical SEO by optimizing site load time, delivering a mobile-first experience, including a site map, using the correct canonical tags, and improving navigation.
Content marketing and SEO are cost-effective but take time to yield results. Pay-per-click (PPC) ads allow you to hit the ground running and acquire new leads immediately. They also help drive highly targeted traffic to signal relevance to search engine algorithms and jumpstart your SEO efforts.
Your SaaS product marketing strategy must progress leads through your marketing funnel and convert them into paying customers. Here are the top techniques to include in your SaaS marketing plan:
Here’s where you put the email addresses you’ve collected with gated content to good use. Supported by a segmentation strategy and automation software, email marketing funnels help you build relationships with leads, educate them about your solution, and persuade them to sign up for a free trial or connect with a sales rep.
You may also use email newsletters to share industry news, thought leadership content, product updates, webinar invites, special offers, and more. This approach will help your brand stay on prospects’ radars throughout the often-lengthy B2B buyer journey and build authority over time, so that you’ll be top of mind when they’re ready to make a purchase decision
Your SaaS product marketing strategy should prioritize getting visitors to request a demo or sign up for a free trial. Include a banner with a clear call-to-action (CTA) on every page of your website and optimize the registration process to minimize friction (e.g., simplify your forms and include clear instructions).
Once prospects get started with a free trial, your job isn’t over — it's time to convert them to a paid plan. Use case studies to show how other customers achieve results with your solution and provide tutorials to help users overcome adoption hurdles and achieve meaningful outcomes for a seamless onboarding experience.
SaaS customer retention is as essential as customer acquisition in SaaS product marketing. Besides retaining customers, your SaaS marketing plan should include upselling and cross-selling to increase CLV. Here’s how:
Email marketing not only helps you build trust and convert leads. It also allows you to continue nurturing relationships after prospects turn into customers. For example, you may send exclusive tips on using new features or applaud their achievements to highlight the value they get from your solution.
Implement data analytics, personalization techniques, and marketing automation software to promote add-on features or higher-level plans to increase CLV. You may also use email to solicit user feedback and make targeted improvements to boost SaaS customer retention.
Customers will only continue subscribing to a SaaS solution if they can use it successfully to achieve their goals. Therefore, customer success should be part of your SaaS customer retention strategy to ensure users get the most out of your software and stay satisfied with the experience.
Create comprehensive, user-friendly onboarding training, tutorials, a searchable knowledge base, and an FAQ section. Besides self-service resources, make it easy for users to reach a team member via multiple channels (e.g., email, web chat, phone, and social media) to address complex issues to avoid delays and frustrations.
Effective SaaS product marketing involves multiple steps and addresses various customer journey stages. You should leverage multiple channels to build trust and nurture relationships over time to acquire high-quality leads and retain them over the long run.
At Spot On, we help our customers build a solid foundation for an effective and sustainable SaaS marketing plan. We consider every stage of the customer lifecycle and craft strategies and tactics to maximize your long-term marketing ROI. Schedule a meeting to discuss your marketing goals and see how we can help.
