After the pandemic hit us in 2020, most businesses have gradually shifted from physical or in-person interactions to a virtual platform. The situation accelerated the demand for better collaboration tools such as Software as a Service (SaaS). As a result, SaaS organizations offering all-inclusive services aim to grow in the coming years. Many organizations are leveraging the advantages of B2B SaaS marketing to sustain and excel at the competitive edge. During a
conversation with Media 7, Stacey Witt, the Chief Marketing Officer at LoadSpring, said, “Our vendors and partners understand the agility and flexibility of our cloud platform and want their applications to be SaaS-enabled.”
SaaS businesses offer services starting from user authentication technology to cloud infrastructure. According to Gartner, Software as a service (SaaS) will remain the principal market segment, which is forecasted to grow to $ 151.1 Billion in 2021. Hence, 2021 is the best time to explore the benefits of SaaS and improve the marketing strategies to occupy a more significant share of the flourishing global market.
What is B2B SaaS Marketing?
B2B SaaS stands for business-to-business Software-as-a-Service. B2B SaaS is a cloud-based software distribution model used by businesses for numerous operations such as accounting, office productivity, customer relationship management (CRM), and other work-related activities. It is licensed software available on a subscription basis from a third-party provider, which hosts the applications and allows access to the customers through the internet. B2B SaaS Marketing is simply the technique used to market SaaS. As a flexible, scalable, and cost-efficient platform, SaaS triggers the attention of businesses to enter the market. Salesforce, the popular customer relationship management (CRM) tool, is the ideal example of a SaaS company.
SaaS companies have experienced a significant surge in client acquisition since the beginning of the pandemic and expect a steady rise in the future. Earlier, the marketers have focused on experimenting latest trends for business growth, but now considering its increasing demand across various businesses, a strategic approach is the need of the hour. Suppose you have not prepared your B2B SaaS
marketing strategy yet in 2021. In that case, it is high time to start now by selecting the technics that are proven and can yield effective results by converting your marketing efforts highest rates possible.
10 Imperative B2B SaaS Marketing Strategies for 2021
According to BetterCloud, today, entrepreneurs of all sizes estimate that 70% of the business apps they use are SaaS-based. However, the forecast says that the numbers will rise to 85% by 2025.
SaaS platforms have made their products more scalable and subscription-based to handle the rising demand. However, if your SaaS
marketing efforts are not up to the mark, your product can get lost in the mass. Here are the ten critical SaaS growth strategies to help you contend, survive, stay relevant, and succeed in the competitive world.
Emphasize Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis is one of the essential parameters for preparing marketing strategies, and SaaS Marketing is no exception. It helps identify the major competitors and study their product, sales, marketing, and customer retention strategies. Competitor analysis will help you to develop better practices than your competitors and expand accordingly. By performing competitor analysis, you can identify the product's unique value proposition and stay updated on the latest trends. It also helps to analyze competitor's actions for better performance. As a result, you can assess and identify areas of betterment and opportunities in the market. Additionally, you can track the customer reviews on the products of your competitors and identify the gaps.
Focus on SaaS Content Marketing
Posting engaging content has a direct or indirect impact on your marketing outcome. A robust
content marketing strategy helps create brand awareness, connect with the prospects, improve ranking, establish domain knowledge, and boost traffic engagement ratio. The tone of confidence in your content can help you gain customer reliance and be a potential gamechanger in a challenging SaaS ecosystem. In addition, you can use reprocessed content to target diverse audiences.
According to the ProfitWell study, SaaS companies that use content marketing experience 30% higher growth rates and 5-10% better retaining capacities. To ensure a robust SaaS content marketing strategy, you should:
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Regularly update your content
Compelling and engaging content helps to nurture leads. To accommodate the challenges and demand fluctuations in 2020, many brands updated their content strategy to accentuate credibility, empathy, and value. Moreover, since social media use has increased noticeably due to the pandemic, organizations have also modified their communication strategy on social media. Updating current blog posts with latest information will benefit your SaaS marketing efforts and boost them on different networks to gain traffic. Insightful and up-to-date content also drives social media subscribers and followers.
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Study your target’s preference
The more you know your target audience, the better way you can design content. Therefore, it is significant to segregate the targets based on their preferences to get relevant information and messages and successfully build subscribed audience database. You can also study their content preferences by collecting customer data to plan an
effective marketing strategy for B2B SaaS.
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Track your SaaS Content marketing performance
After content preparation, tracking the performance of your creation is vital. This performance analysis will help to change your content strategy for better lead generation. You can use Google Analytics to determine the lead generation and conversion path post you have set your goals. You can also use Google Analytics to measure the performance of your content by analyzing the sequence of users' actions on your website.
Implement and Maintain Expert SEO Strategy
A robust SEO strategy is a must for a successful B2B SaaS marketing strategy. That is because more than half of all website traffic comes from organic searches on Google. To ensure your SaaS platform is trust-worthy and index-worthy, you need to consider three types of SEO marketing strategy:
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Technical SEO: Technical SEO refers to optimizing the on-site HTML components to allow Google crawlers to locate and index your website pages easily. It also makes your SEO performance effective by good loading speed.
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On-Page SEO: Creating keyword-rich, compelling, and valuable content comes under the on-page SEO strategy. It helps Google crawlers understand the subject of your page so that they can be precisely indexed for relevant search queries.
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Off-Page SEO: Improving your site's backlink profile is related to the off-page SEO strategy for B2B SaaS marketing so that Google identifies it as a highly authoritative and trustworthy source.
Implementing an SEO strategy is only the primary step. However, the only means to maintain search engine rankings is to constantly optimize your website according to the latest ranking criteria.
Optimize PPC Campaign
Advertising is one of the best and beneficial digital marketing tactics for SaaS marketers. Investing in Google and social media ads is a good idea if you have a decent marketing budget but not enough organic reach. You can target prospects through advertising, and with the right deal, you can get an assured ROI.
To optimize your PPC campaign, you need to run an A/B test for best placement, copy keywords, and target the right audience. Further, your ads should be keyword-enriched for better visibility on search engine result pages. Then, you can use PPC tools to expand visibility. In addition, you need to track your ad performance and reform your strategies if required. Above all, your ads should convey the value proposition and include compelling calls-to-action (CTAs) to drive the visitor's action.
Attractive Website is the key
Your website is one of the most vital marketing assets, and developing a dynamic website is the primary stepping stone for planning a robust marketing strategy. It is the face of your brand and the center of all your activities. Without a good website, your SaaS organization will face issues with conversion rates. As websites play a critical role in promoting the value of your product, it is amongst essential SaaS marketing techniques. Further, when you combine marketing goals with sales strategy, you clarify what will make it best for your SaaS business. If your website is attracting a lot of qualified traffic, it can proportionately increase the conversion list.
Create an ABM (Account-Based Marketing) Strategy
Account-Based-Marketing (ABM) helps organizations to grow in the market. An ABM strategy allows you to identify targets, create an email database, send targeted emails, ads, direct mail, and share success stories. Account-based marketing ensures that the marketers connect with pre-qualified leads and interact with them on a personalized level. With account-based marketing, marketers can gather volumes of information on each business and communicate with them based on their earlier activities.
SaaS Lead Generation and Conversion
Lead generation is one of the most significant yet most challenging parts of any SaaS business. Whatever strategies you implicate should head towards generating workable leads for your business. If your plan is not good enough to generate leads, you will not get new customers, and subsequently, your SaaS business will not grow. The lead generation technique for B2B SaaS is different from other marketing techniques because the product here does not have a physical existence. Hence, prospects have a choice of multiple alternatives on the internet. Inevitably, planning a robust lead generation tactic is crucial for B2B SaaS marketing.
Along with other marketing strategies, encouraging referrals and optimizing freemium strategy bring highly impactful results. When people decide to make a purchase, 88% of consumers trust the recommendations from family, friends, and colleagues. Viva-voce publicity can earn you many referrals and increase your sign-ups. In addition, freemium products always gain attraction. According to the global IT workforce management and optimization company, Blue Tree, 44% of SaaS companies offer a free demo. You can provide a core understanding of your product, yet you don't want to share so much away that most of your audience loses interest and drift away. Also, you must ease it out for freemium users to submit suggestions or report bugs, and you can utilize that information to optimize your overall marketing strategy.
Improve Your SaaS Pricing Structure
The pricing structure is one of the significant elements in SaaS marketing. It would help if you experiment with the prices based on the best for your business and audiences. With the evolution of your business, you need to consider the types of entrepreneurs who use your service and the features that they emphasize.
A well-structured pricing page is beneficial for SaaS marketers that clearly shows the required information for the target audiences to complete the conversion process. For example, if you offer a discount/deal/money-back guarantee, make sure it is in bold terms on the top of the page. Further, you can also include time-limited clauses to create urgency and intensify conversions.
Get Reviewed on Top Third-Party Review Sites
According to G2 and Heinz Marketing, 92% of B2B buyers mostly purchase after reading a trusted review. B2B SaaS marketing teams must pay special attention to this because customers rely on crucial reviews for efficient decision-making before investing. Businesses refer to sites like G2 when they are researching products. These sites provide reviews from similar entrepreneurs and attract high-intent buyers who will eventually make a purchase decision. These sites let them learn about their experiences so they can find the best fit for their brand. Make sure to list your business page on any relevant review site and optimize your information and meta description with keywords related to your brand.
Collaboration is Critical
Merging your marketing resources with a peer entrepreneur can increase business growth for both of your brands. Collaboration in the B2B SaaS marketplace can be a cost-effective way of enhancing your business and reaping long-term benefits. Here are some ways of collaboration:
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Co-marketing: When two or more brands jointly promote a content piece, special offer, or an event, it is known as co-marketing. This form of collaboration helps you to expand your reach to new communities through new channels. Further, it allows you to gain more social media followers or newsletter subscriptions.
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Partner or reseller: Partnering with businesses with similar customer bases can be risky if your organization has a limited number of internal sales resources. The successful SaaS partner programs must include free joining, co-marketing support, and a partner portal to manage relationships. If your partners are satisfied, they might just become your most active community members.
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Event Partnership: Due to the impact of the pandemic on social gatherings, the events space has experienced more disruption since last year. Although event partnerships existed before Covid-19, the protocols and formats have changed, in 2021. It is vital for businesses to either organize or participate in an event to reach audiences. An event partner can promote your brand through their marketing channels.
Conclusion
The SaaS marketplace is a competitive arena, and with robust B2B SaaS marketing techniques, you can elevate your business. Deloitte says, 93% of CIOs have adopted or planning to adopt cloud SaaS. Further, due to the pandemic, SaaS marketers are about to witness advanced ways of connecting with target audiences. With the 10 SaaS marketing tactics discussed in this article, you can amplify the number of visitors to your website and enhance the possibility to produce a higher ROI and expand the client base. Tracking the performances of these strategies is also significant to optimize them for even better results in SaaS marketing and customer retention.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is SaaS so effective?
SaaS is a cost-efficient, easy to maintain, flexible, agile and scalable cloud platform. SaaS applications consume less bandwidth enabling optimum time-management capability. Further, the SaaS vendors handle the maintenance responsibilities, which reduces work hours and downtime. Additionally, web-based usability allows access to SaaS easily from any location with internet connectivity.
How do companies use SaaS?
SaaS, or software as a service, is a cloud-based centrally hosted software delivery model. SaaS applications are licensed to customers via a subscription plan. A SaaS company allows the application to be accessed over the internet by maintaining servers, databases, and software. The users can access the software from anywhere in any device.