What is the best form of marketing for a SAAS business?
SaaS Marketing. If only there was a “best form” for it. We’d all just do that and lie in our hammocks for the rest of the day. 🙂
The truth is that the success of your SaaS marketing strategies is highly reliant on your product, market, your ability to gauge what your prospects and customers need and respond to… and luck.
Having said that, there are a number of marketing strategies that I believe work very well in SaaS:
Building a tribe
Any SaaS business lives off of recurring revenue. Customers that stick around are the lifeblood of the company. That means you need to make fans out of them – and preferably before they even buy from you.
How do make fans? By being relevant before you ever make a sale. Content marketing is great here. If you can answer questions your prospects are having and make sure they can find answers where they’re looking for it (like right here on Quora) chances are they’ll want to read more of your stuff. Reading more of your stuff means they’ll start to see you as an authority. And that, in turn, will lead to them wanting to try your product, refer it to someone else that could use it, etc.
For existing customers, seeing you move in the market as a force of good encourages them to stay on board. It’s likely that they’ll have several alternatives to choose from – but if your brand, story and “personality” as a business are just more compelling, that’s a good reason for them to stick around.
Now, don’t get me wrong: this might not be the first thing you should do. It’s a long-term play and you do need to make sales from day one.
So with that in mind, you should also try:
Direct lead generation
When I say this, I mean putting out ads and generating sales directly from those ads. There ARE folks out there right now that are wanting to try and buy your product. If you can find the right keywords to bid on (in Google Ads) or the right audiences to target (Facebook, LinkedIn) and place the right ads in front of them, you’ll generate sales.
Lead nurturing
More often than the above example, though, people will need more time from first encountering you to making a purchasing decision. Maybe they’re still researching solutions, still with another vendor or don’t have the budget right now.
Make sure you offer those folks something they can genuinely use (a report, a chart, an email course) and continue to stay in touch with them. Use a marketing automation tool to apply lead scoring to all of those leads that exist in your database, but aren’t ready to buy yet.
Social Selling
This one relates closely to the “building a tribe” topic, but I want to mention it separately nonetheless.
Your social presence is important. Not because of direct lead generation, but because you (and your colleagues) can be engaging with folks online, all the time. Share good stuff on your own pages and company page. Answer questions people ask on Twitter.
People buy from people, not from companies, so building relationships with folks through social media is a great way to drive more sales – again, in the longer term.
