5 Strategies for Marketing Your SaaS Business

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Marketers often struggle when it’s time to craft a good SaaS marketing strategy. Even the more experienced ones have difficulties achieving the desired results.

This happens simply because more traditional businesses can follow more traditional methods for customer acquisition and growth. But SaaS brands can’t do that, since they follow a very different business model. That is why these businesses need very different digital marketing strategies.

Logically, that is why your SaaS business needs a unique approach too. If you are in the dark when it comes to SaaS marketing, keep reading.

You can leverage these strategies to start promoting your SaaS business to drive sales. And to test the effectiveness of each strategy, you can monitor the performance metrics of your SaaS business and then tweak the strategies accordingly.

Below you will find some proven strategies used by successful SaaS businesses that may do the trick for you.

Free trials

Every single person loves a free lunch, right?

Well, there is a good reason why free trials are a great and proven SaaS marketing tactic. Free trials work. And if you offer a free trial, that will pay off.

When companies test-drive software, the product value speaks for itself. Even if they determine not to purchase it when the free trial period ends, there is a solid lead for future ad and email targeting.

One great promotion channel that has worked for many in this situation is Facebook advertising. This platform allows users to optimize ads for clicks and set CTAs as ‘Start Your Free Trial’ so that a business can maximize the number of sign-ups.

Facebook ads can also do wonders when it comes to increasing visibility of your offers, since users can share the ad with friends and family who might be interested.

Make sure to include clear and appealing visuals when crafting your Facebook ads. The textual content also needs to convey a clear message with a concise call-to-action.

Even if you are new to Facebook ads, you will easily figure out the concept and start your campaign in no time.

Provide interesting content

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There is a trend among SaaS marketers where every single one of them tries to attract customers through how-to guides and similar content. These guides usually deal with basic tasks that are related to the industry. However, you should not think like that. You need to determine exactly what your audience wants to see.

To provide truly useful content that garners interest among people, you need to combine creativity and valuable insights. So, for a start, you need to do thorough research. Do not ignore this step even if you have your way with words and you are creative.

Good research before you actually start writing anything allows you to see what topics are trending with your target audience. The data you gather should help you determine what will be useful and interesting to people in your industry.

Also, you need to think in terms of SEO. Unfortunately, gone are the days when it was enough that your content was valuable to readers. Nowadays, you need to think about search engine rankings as well. To be precise, every article and piece of content you produce for your website or blog needs to be optimized.

If you are not familiar with SEO methods that can help you write optimized content, there are keyword research tools and other SEO tools that can give you instructions and push you in the right direction.

Optimize your website for conversions

The website is the key ingredient of all SaaS businesses’ marketing strategies and the shop window to your company. Therefore, your website not only has to look great, but it also needs to have a design that stimulates conversions.

It would be good to experiment with techniques for encouraging engagement with website visitors. This is all done with the aim to boost the conversion rate for free trial sign-ups and it should make people book a demo of the software or download content.

Hence, it is important to define what you want prospects to do as a result of visiting your site.

One common misconception is that getting greater results from your website means spending more money. But what if you could double your website conversion rate without spending through the roof?

The way to achieve this is to find out what drives lead generation activity so that you can craft a marketing budget in a way that generates stronger leads as web traffic. Not every visitor is a useful visitor.

But that does not mean you should not try to make them beneficial to your business. For instance, don’t just add a free trial feature to your website, but split test the length of these complimentary trials to figure out which one gets the greatest CTRs.

Also, change up the call-to-action buttons on each website page until you find which one results in more conversions.

Referral marketing needs to be among your main weapons

There are numerous studies indicating that referrals are among the most effective types of leads. However, there’s a lot of debate on whether or not companies should incentivize referrals.

One viewpoint is that a business will not generate many referrals without an incentive, while the opposing view is that if you incentivize too heavily, you may get low-value quality referrals. One of the best pieces of advice we can give you is to test which works for your SaaS business and then optimize for that.

Before focusing on optimization, the key part is launching your referral program. There’s software available that can power your referral program from start to finish, but at a minimum, you should create a landing page on your website where people can make referrals.

To ensure you get quality ones, explain what makes a good referral. This could be the person’s job title, industry, or size of the company they work for.

One of the best ways marketing teams help sales, customer success, and support teams to ask for referrals is by drafting the templates they can use.

Before you start your referral program, take these things into consideration:

• Place people first instead of treating them only as a useful customer for your referral program.
• When setting up a referral marketing strategy, add a contact picker along with your referral program software tool so your users don’t have to leave your website to look up email addresses. Referral interfaces that include a contact picker will usually get three times more referrals than those that make people type email addresses manually, which is especially important for mobile users.

Host Q&As on your social media pages

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To connect better with your current and potential customers, host Q&As. These are meetings where your users can share their concerns. SaaS tools are technical, so people will inevitably have questions.

Answering difficult questions might not sound interesting, but educating customers and resolving their concerns will help you build their trust in your brand.

For example, Facebook Live and Instagram Stories are two great platforms for this kind of interaction with your customers. These are live features where you can have users submit questions beforehand or answer questions as they are posted during the Q&A session.

Logically, you should advertise your Q&A sessions in advance to increase the number of attendees. Post about these sessions on your social media pages and also introduce your website visitors to these Q&As by posting information about it on your business’s website.

If you want to gather questions in advance, give users an email address they can submit their questions to. You can also ask them for questions through your messenger apps (Facebook Messenger, Instagram DMs, and so on).

Final thoughts

Carefully consider the strategies and methods listed above. If you already have a strategy in place, you can either add these methods or come up with a whole new strategy for your next campaign with some of the methods you have read here.

Being unique when coming up with a SaaS marketing strategy is a must if you want better results quickly.

So, give this article another read and good luck implementing these tips!