Successful SaaS Marketing: 8 Proven Ways To Boost Your Business Growth In Less Than A Year
Dominic Tarn
Head of Content
04.05.2020
Are you looking for workable and tested SaaS marketing tips and tricks to boost your business growth? Then you’re in the right place.
In this guide, I gathered eight brilliant SaaS ideas from leaders in the niche. I’m sure some of these tactics will work out for your product, too!
Profitable SaaS Marketing Tactics
1. Leverage the personal brand
Still in doubt about using your personal brand for your SaaS product? You shouldn’t be. A strong personal brand helps you:
Build a reputation as an expert in a particular domain and attract businesses and people.
Make a top-of-mind awareness for your business, so people associate you and your product with a particular need.
Distinguish your business from the competition and humanize your brand.
For Neil Patel, an American digital marketing entrepreneur, a strong personal brand is a way to boost his SaaS marketing efforts. He launched numerous tools for internet marketers and SEO specialists, including KISSMetrics, Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, and Ubersuggest.
Neil has a personal website where he shares useful blog posts, consultations, videos, and a newsletter to gather a loyal audience and promote the software Ubersuggest.
2. Share expert content
It may be hard to believe, but 38 of the biggest 250 SaaS companies still don’t have a blog. This means that these businesses miss the opportunity to organically attract their target audience, educate their readers, and create an expert image among them.
As the core element of an IT marketing strategy, one of the most popular CRM software, Hubspot, uses content marketing to generate qualified leads, educate a vast audience – from digital marketers to HR – with expert content, and reinforce their brand of experts.
In addition to a blog, free guides, and free consultations, HubSpot launched its HubSpot Academy with courses and certifications in a variety of domains. To provide social proof, Hubspot regularly shares its customers’ success stories.
Sharing expert content doesn’t necessarily involve creating new text from scratch. You can repurpose your existing content into whitepapers, Slideshare presentations, webinars, and more.
For example, Moz, a marketing analytics tool, repurposed its content into handy infographics, checklists, and ebooks to strengthen its reputation as an SEO expert and promote software suites they make.
3. Partner with other SaaS businesses
Co-marketing with other SaaS businesses is a win-win IT marketing strategy. You get an influx of a target audience from your partner, boost your publicity, improve your brand sentiment, and cross-promote your offerings.
Besides, co-marketing doesn’t mean that you have to create a brand-new product line with co-branding. You simply join forces with another SaaS business to promote your existing products or services.
Again, let’s mention Hubspot, which has united with an AI chatbot Chatfuel to promote educational content on building a chatbot. This is a good example of a partnership to promote their software and win a loyal audience seamlessly.
4. Launch a referral marketing campaign
Referral marketing, or so-called word-of-mouth marketing, helps businesses acquire new users through existing customers. Referral marketing helps constantly acquire new users, retain them, and grow a customer base. And businesses also consider referral tracking to make informed decisions and build more successful referral programs.
If you don’t know, Dropbox was a pioneer in referral IT marketing. They created sign-up-driven landing pages, shared referral promo codes, and implemented refer-a-friend tactics before they became mainstream.
Today, referral marketing is versatile.
For example, Evernote motivates its users to earn points for every referred friend that can be exchanged for a premium subscription plan.
Another SaaS, Typeform, takes a different approach. The company reduces users’ bills by 10% for every referred friend who upgrades to their PRO and PRO+ plans. Such a restriction allows Typeform to increase its average bill and grow a customer base of pro clients.
5. Provide excellent support
Without a positive customer experience (CX), your SaaS marketing efforts simply won’t work to their fullest. It’s easy to track through SaaS data analytics activities. SaaS companies that invest in CX get a chance to double their revenue within three years. A pleasant customer experience leads to happy customers willing to spend more and recommend the service or a product to their friends.
One of the sure ways to boost your customer experience is to provide excellent customer support. Here are the actionable SaaS ideas for improving your support system:
Support is easy to find. No need to add annoying live chat popups. Just make sure your website has an efficient UX design and is user-friendly enough for customers seeking support.
Self-service is available. Who likes to call or write an email to troubleshoot the issues? Very few people. So, a knowledge base or an optimized FAQ page with frequently asked questions comes in handy. They cut down the user’s path to your support team and help them quickly resolve the issues.
Short response time. The golden rule of customer support: don’t make your users wait! According to Salesforce’s research, 66% of millennials expect real-time responses and interactions.
Product tours. A product tour can help users understand how everything works. Walk your users through the product to answer their questions and eliminate any confusion or uncertainty. By highlighting the product’s features and benefits to its users, you can answer the most common questions to reduce support requests.
That’s how Fastly, a cloud platform, nailed it with shared channels on Slack to speed up communication between users and a support team. Users jump on the channels to simply mention a @support or the point of contact and ask a question right away. As a result, Fastly efficiently reduces friction between users and a support team as well as boosts communication.
6. Optimize your pricing plans
Even though this topic is worth a separate article, let’s try to uncover this one.
Here are a few best practices from savvy SaaS companies to come up with a well-thought pricing plan:
Elaborate on your personas. Pricing plans must cater to your buyer personas. Gather data on your users’ needs, most used features, purchasing patterns, and lifetime value (LTV) to come up with relevant pricing plans.
Ease the choice. Don’t make your users choose, do it for them. How? Highlight the most popular plans, provide concise descriptions for each plan with value propositions, use labels like “Enterprise” and “Team” to narrow down the choice, etc.
Show your competitive edge. Don’t speak features in your descriptions, speak benefits. Show how a user can benefit from a particular pricing plan with bold copywriting, just like Basecamp does.
7. Be careful with free product trials
Free product trials are an essential part of any SaaS marketing strategy. They allow you to let users test the waters first, get valuable user data, and have a chance to convert them into loyal users after their trial is finished.
So, how do you manage users’ expectations with free product trials?
Make sure you clearly state the value propositions. That will help you attract qualified leads sincerely interested in your product and meet their expectations. Wayne Mulligan, a co-founder of Crowdability, says: “Do not offer a free trial when your customer can’t get a complete picture of how your product benefits them during a reasonable free trial period.”
8. Create value-focused product demonstrations
A product demo either closes the deal or breaks it.
Even though there’s no silver bullet for creating a highly convertible product demo, there’s one surefire way. Build your demo around the user’s pain points and benefits rather than features.
Remember Theodore Levitt’s saying, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”
This rule is applicable to product demos as well.
Close.io, a CRM tool, recommends starting your product demo speech with a killer feature to hook a user, and don’t wait till the end to present the most interesting feature. That’s how you’ll be able to keep them focused and achieve your presentation’s goal.
Conclusion
There isn’t a right or wrong way to craft a SaaS marketing strategy. Just like with any type of marketing, you have to build lots of hypotheses and test them to create your own successful recipe. In this blog post, I reviewed some of the most popular SaaS ideas with examples. So, get inspired, and don’t be afraid to experiment!
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