It may seem difficult to choose the best SaaS marketing plan for your business, but in such a cutthroat market, it’s essential. The overall value of the global SaaS market is anticipated to reach $195 billion in 2023, an increase of 17% from 2022.

Since the industry is expanding quickly, there are many opportunities available. However, you’ll need a solid SaaS marketing strategy if you want to keep one step ahead of the competition.

Finding ways to stand out from the competition is the key to any sort of marketing. Understanding who your potential consumers are, where to find them, and how to interact with them effectively are essential for achieving this.

However, employing a typical B2B marketing strategy is insufficient. The marketing mix you employ to advertise your product must be adjusted to fit because the SaaS business model has a lot of very particular components.

We’ll look at various SaaS marketing strategies that have been tried, tested, and shown to be highly successful.

What is SaaS Marketing?

SaaS marketing is comparable to other traditional forms of marketing in that it focuses on reaching out to potential clients through one or more channels in order to increase sales. The nature of the product is what distinguishes it as being slightly unique.

It’s intangible, to start. A SaaS product cannot be purchased off the shelf at a supermarket or sent to you in a package. Since the product is entirely digital, the marketing plan must emphasize employing various digital channels, such as SaaS email marketing and content marketing.

The price structure is also made to produce consistent revenue. Instead of selling software as a standalone item, you instead use an all-inclusive continuous service model.

That means customer retention is just as important as customer acquisition, so your marketing efforts can’t afford to ignore your existing customers.

Overall, companies spend 58% of their marketing budgets on digital marketing—but that rises to 89% for businesses that sell entirely online.

SaaS Marketing Strategies

The marketing of a SaaS product consists of two basic components. The first step is to drive as much natural traffic as you can to your website. Then, you must successfully advertise and showcase your service.

Our tried-and-true SaaS marketing plan points are divided into two sections: attracting more visitors to your SaaS site and turning those visitors into customers.

Generate more site traffic

These are five tried and tested ways to get more traffic to your SaaS site:

• 1. Utilize content marketing

Content marketing is a great avenue for lead generation for any SaaS website, as—when done well—it brings people back again and again. 

Read Also: How to Develop SaaS Application in Java

For this to work, you need to publish high-quality content that aligns with the interests of your target audience. For example, if you had a Facebook marketing SaaS tool, suitable topics for your content could include:

• Best Facebook marketing tactics
• Facebook marketing for SaaS companies 
• How to use Facebook marketing for your startup
• Using influencers in your Facebook marketing plan

The list of suitable topics you can choose is extensive. You can use a tool like Keywords Everywhere to identify suitable topics to write about based on search volume:

You need to optimize the content you create on your blog for both user intent and keywords. This means any content you add should answer a query or resolve a pain point someone has been researching. 

If they’ve come through a Google search looking to purchase a service, they’ll want to see a sales page. On the other hand, if they undertook an informational search, they’d probably prefer to land on a blog post.

It’s important to understand where in the sales funnel these potential customers are coming in, and having the right content available. That could be a landing page, detailed case studies, general blog posts, or something else.

It’s not enough to simply have great content, however, you need to generate backlinks to the content for it to rank. To understand how many backlinks you need, you will have to do a backlink analysis of ranking content. Once your content starts getting noticed your business will develop a reputation as an authority in the SaaS industry.

Writing content is time-consuming, especially for a sales team who are working on other tasks. This is an area worth seeking out partnerships or SaaS SEO companies for, as it will save you a lot of time in the long run.

• 2. Spend time on your site’s SEO

Nothing works as well for boosting site traffic as a comprehensive SEO strategy. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is complex and goes hand-in-hand with content marketing. The basic idea is a simple one: You tailor a site so that it appears as high as possible on search engine results pages. The higher your site ranks, the more traffic you’ll get.

There are a vast number of tactics that combine to make for good SEO. Some SEO tasks and efforts work better for SaaS sites than others. For now, it’s enough to note that investing in top-quality SaaS SEO will do wonders for your site traffic.

• 3. Invest in paid searches or PPC

Paid search or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is another avenue worth exploring. 

As a SaaS marketing strategy, you shouldn’t see it as an alternative to content marketing and SEO. What it can be, though, is an excellent compliment to those two processes. Particularly if you’re looking to achieve some quick traffic wins.

You should always set aside a marketing budget for branded search terms (terms that include your company name). Branded search terms are results that competing software companies are likely to pay for, and if they do, then you need to have a budget to get those clicks.

If you do invest in PPC ads, you want to get as much bang for your buck as possible, keeping the customer acquisition costs low. Your marketing team needs to create engaging and attractive adverts that convey your service’s benefits. 

The best way to improve the conversion rate of your ads is by repeated testing. Create lots of variations of ad copy, research plenty of keywords to target, and monitor metrics. That way, you can mix things up and experiment until you find the right combination.

• 4. Undertake intelligent referral marketing

Referral marketing is like the digital equivalent of word-of-mouth advertising. It involves getting current customers to recommend your service to people they know, both privately or publicly on platforms like LinkedIn.

It’s an effective SaaS marketing strategy, as it increases the chances of bringing in qualified leads, who will already have a level of trust in your business thanks to the recommendation. This is particularly helpful for B2B SaaS brands, who are less inclined to make impulse decisions.

That said, even your most satisfied customers may need a little push to refer you to friends. This is where a referral program with smart incentives or rewards enters the picture. 

Offering access to an extra feature or a higher level of your software in return for a referral is a good example. Dropbox, for instance, gives users extra storage space if they invite friends.

• 5. Generate industry exposure

People put a lot of stock in reviews and testimonials. A BrightLocal study found that 91% of 18-34-year-olds trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. 

It’s critical to get your SaaS business industry exposure on one of the many SaaS review sites that are around. G2 Crowd and Capterra are perhaps the best examples. Getting a positive review on a review site will help with site traffic, so it’s worth trying to get a listing on as many review sites as possible. 

You may not get featured by all of them, but it’s worth a try. Having a (positive) presence across sites helps provide social proof and convince potential customers of the viability of your business.

How to sell your service

The next stage of marketing SaaS is to turn website visitors into customers. We’ve put together seven hints and tips for improving this part of your digital marketing strategy:

• 6. Limit customer choice

At first glance, this piece of advice may seem counterintuitive. Surely you want to offer SaaS customers as many different options as possible? Actually, no. It is better to limit the range of options as this makes it easier to choose.

The email marketing software platform, Mailchimp is a good example. Their software provides users with loads of different features. However, there are only four separate plans to choose from, each with clear value propositions. Prospective customers can see what each one offers and choose between them, rather than getting overwhelmed and looking elsewhere.

• 7. Don’t be coy about pricing

Some SaaS businesses make it difficult for site visitors to see how much their service costs. The idea is presumably to get visitors more interested in the service before revealing the price. 

However, it can hinder customer acquisition, as a lack of transparent pricing can be frustrating. Think about when you head to a site thinking of buying something. What would your response be if you can’t see how much it costs? More often than not, you’d leave the site and find somewhere else to make your purchase. 

This can be a massive source of churn. SaaS marketers need to take this into account. Hiding or obfuscating prices makes prospective customers suspicious, no matter how good the rest of your marketing efforts are. Instead, be open about the cost of your service. Make sure that your pricing strategy makes it easy to show how each plan or package delivers value.

8. Offer free trials and/or a freemium model

Free trials are a mainstay of SaaS marketing. You’ll struggle to find a SaaS business that doesn’t offer one. That’s because free trials are hugely effective in selling SaaS products. 

From CRMs to VoIP, a free trial helps users understand how your software works, and specifically, how it can solve their problems. That’s why leading SaaS companies like Xero feature free trials so prominently on their sites:

Alternatively, you could work on a freemium model. This provides the customer with a free version forever, but they have to be paying subscribers to access many of the features. This model means you’re giving customers a taste of the benefits they’ll get by signing up, as well as encouraging them to rely on your product before deciding to invest in extra features.

• 9. Make it easy to sign up

Speaking of signing up, doing so should be as quick and easy as you can make it. You’ve run great marketing campaigns, and drawn people to your site. You’ve made sure your website sells your service and makes it sound irresistible. And now, you’ve convinced a prospective customer to sign up! 

At this point, a long and complicated signup form is a no-no. People often abandon these when they’re faced with them, even if they had every intention of signing up. 

Make sure your onboarding process is clean and efficient. Don’t ask for information that isn’t critical to getting a new customer registered. Give those prospective customers as few excuses to change their minds as you can.10.

• 10. Enhance user experience

So far, we’ve talked at length about marketing and selling your software. About how to make potential customers aware of it and to best persuade them of its benefits. It’s important to remember that there is another “S in SaaS. 

The second “S” is for service, and delivering excellent service to customers is critical for customer retention.

Unless you’re incredibly lucky (or incredibly talented!), your software will be somewhat similar to that of other firms in your niche. In order to maximize customer lifetime value, you need to find a way to differentiate yourself.

First, show customers how your software will improve their life or their business in your marketing material. Second, ensure it actually does so, by making your customer service top-notch.

As well as the product being great, make sure to offer a fantastic user experience every time a customer interacts with your firm. Host webinars, share templates, and provide informative guides or white papers. The user experience isn’t just about their interactions with your product. It’s about interactions with your brand.

Bottom Line

Any SaaS company must have successful SaaS marketing techniques in order to be successful. It’s crucial to comprehend what SaaS marketing entails and the main strategies that can help you accomplish your objectives if you want to advertise your SaaS products or services efficiently.

Building a strong online brand presence, producing understandable and compelling content for your target audience, optimizing your website for search engines, and utilizing social media platforms to interact with potential clients and stay top-of-mind are some essential SaaS marketing tactics. In order to maximize ROI, it’s critical to track and analyze your SaaS marketing activities and make adjustments as necessary.