Gartner has predicted that business software spending will increase in 2023 by up to 11.8%, a growth from that last year’s 9.8%. That’s an incredibly massive acceleration in enterprise spending for the SaaS industry and tech companies.
But with so many SaaS entrepreneurs dominating different sectors, how can you make your company stand apart from the crowd? B2B companies, including SaaS, have to pull up their socks to secure leads and generate revenue in today’s competitive landscape.
That’s why we’ve compiled a list of the best SaaS marketing strategies companies can leverage to reach their target audience and grow their business. Let’s hear them out.
Table of Contents
1. Embrace SaaS Content Marketing
Content marketing is one of the most essential B2B marketing strategies that help reach your target audience and generate quality leads. Around 91% of B2B businesses use content marketing as a primary strategy for growth.
Creating content and putting it out there further helps to establish you as an industry thought leader, naturally upgrading your brand image. Unfortunately, it isn’t as simple as posting a few social media posts or blogs. To compete in the crowded content mix, SaaS marketers need to churn out quality, relevant, and personalized content that is keyword-optimized and offers value to potential customers.
One way to ensure that is to understand your ideal audience and market segment to help them solve a specific problem with your content.
Also, creating various types of content pieces is crucial to make a massive appeal. This could include blog posts, flipbooks, e-books, case studies, etc.
2. Free Product Trials
One of the best SaaS marketing strategies is to offer free product trials, typically self-serving, ensuring continuous lead generation with little marketing investment. Nothing beats giving a test drive of your product, and SaaS companies should consider making a trial available via their website or email campaigns.
This opportunity is not just to promote your product but to highlight your fantastic customer service and support. If the product is suitable, you might see a free trial converting to paid subscriptions with no additional effort.
Furthermore, the end of the trial is also the chance to reach out to potential users and acquire feedback about your product. However, it’s essential to practice a few guidelines:
- Depending upon the complexity of the product, even in free trials, provide your users with a lending hand with setup and use. This could be through webinars, YouTube videos, one-to-one calls, etc.
- Make sure your signup process for a free subscription is straightforward. Otherwise, you will lose an excellent opportunity to generate leads. Do not ask for additional information like full address, company details, university information, etc.
- Some SaaS companies often ask for information about credit cards or debit cards before providing a free trial. A valuable suggestion is to avoid asking for such details as it’s a huge turn-off.
3. Practice Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization is also a B2B SaaS marketing strategy that more than often deals with optimizing your website and content for search engines. It helps to attract qualified leads to your brand who are actively looking for your product or services. Additionally, you can build trust and authority with long-term SEO practices, ultimately increasing your website ranking on search engines.
The first step is to understand your primary prospects and uncover keywords they’re using to search about your industry. It is followed by reviewing your content pieces and meta-data, optimizing with keywords to improve ranking.
Also, more unknown SEO tactics, such as link building and SEO-optimized landing pages and page clusters, help to boost visibility around your business.
4. Invest Heavily in Email Campaigns
Around 4 billion people use email daily, making email marketing a must-use tactic for SaaS marketing strategy. In fact, 61% of B2B marketers have stated that email marketing strategy helped meet their business goals. By sending out regular newsletters to your subscribers, you can stay at the fore of their minds and build long-term supportive relationships with your potential prospects.
But SaaS marketers need to understand that email campaigns must not just be used to acquire new leads and generate conversions. It should be a consistent part of their marketing to ensure the retention of clients.
Notably, SaaS products often require assistance. Marketers can increase retention rates by regularly checking in with follow-up and customer support emails.
Some best practices for SaaS email campaigns are:
- According to HubSpot blog research, 2021, B2B marketers have suggested that new product or feature announcement emails have seen the highest click-through rates.
- Share informative resources such as blog posts, whitepapers, YouTube video links, etc.
- Inform your customers via email newsletters about discount offers or exclusive product launches.
5. Interact with Social Media
Whether your business deals with catering to customers, other businesses, or SaaS products, social media is a powerful marketing tool. Often used as a promotional channel, SaaS marketers must focus on building relationships with prospects before anything else. This means posting consistent and engaging content as well as responding to comments and questions.
Furthermore, you can use social media to promote other marketing material, such as infographics, product videos, and blogs. You can also boost this content for more visibility through social media advertising.
SaaS social media strategies that actually work are:
- Collaborate with relevant social media influencers who your audience knows and follows
- Use visual content as it helps to break down complex information about SaaS products and technologies.
- Create groups on social media so users can post queries and get answers to their questions from leaders in the industry.
6. Harness the Power of SaaS Review Sites
A great SaaS marketing strategy is harnessing the power of SaaS Review Sites. Whether your company is new in the market or an established entity, potential customers often look for reviews and feedback before making a purchase. More precisely, 82% of buyers find review websites valuable in their search.
These platforms enable SaaS markets to connect with prospective clients and showcase the quality and benefits of using their solutions. You can also share case studies, product features, and testimonials from other users to supercharge your brand image.
On the side, SaaS review sites also offer valuable marketing tools like web optimization and paid advertisements to help you reach even more ideal customers for your SaaS products.
Some prominent SaaS review sites are G2 and Capterra to gain exposure, website authority, and more insight.
7. Leverage Account-Based Marketing
Account-based marketing is another great B2B SaaS marketing strategy that is often a personalized marketing approach to generate better-qualified leads. This approach is a go-to for B2B businesses that sell to other companies. It enables you to tailor your sales pitches and marketing campaigns to meet the needs of a specific account, increasing the chances of conversion.
At the same time, ABM provides SaaS marketers with insights into what strategy works and what’s not, so you can tweak your efforts to generate results.
The key to successful ABM is to research your target accounts – pinpoint their specific needs and concerns, and tailor content to address them. Moreover, to enhance outcomes, follow a multichannel approach – emails, social media, online ads, and more.
8. Referral Marketing Is Important
Referral marketing is how you encourage satisfied and loyal customers to refer your product or service to someone else. By building a B2B referral program, SaaS marketers can expand revenue, spend reasonably on customer acquisition, and boost sales.
According to a study in the Harvard Business Review, around 84% of B2B sales initiate with referral programs. Further, the same study indicates that B2B accounts that have been referred are four times more likely to buy a product.
With that in mind, here is the way SaaS marketers can develop a killer referral program:
- Use account experience to identify the best B2B candidates
- Contact them and provide them with the material they can use to promote your business
- Reward customers with referral gifts such as free subscriptions, gift cards, conference passes, and more.
- Measure the impact of your B2B referral program to create more opportunities in future
9. Focus On PPC Ad Campaigns
PPC, or pay-per-click advertising, has gained quite a popularity over the last few years as it helps B2B companies generate leads and sales cost-effectively. With PPC, you place ads on search engines such as Google and only pay when the prospect has clicked your ad.
Furthermore, it allows companies to target those leads who are actively searching for your SaaS product or service.
Often, SaaS companies have seen higher results on Google with retargeting and text-based organic search advertisements. However, when it comes to PPC advertising for B2B SaaS marketing strategy, pay attention to the following points:
- Include relevant keywords in your Ad campaign that are being used by your audience to search within your industry
- Make sure to create compelling ad copy and include a persuasive Call-to-action (CTA) that encourages users to click
- A/B Testing is essential to identify what source offers the best conversions to optimize your PPC campaigns
10. Give Importance to Retargeting
An honest fact is whether your lead incentive is a free e-book download, product trial, or coupon code, most website visitors never take an action you want them on the first or probably second visit. Giving importance to retargeting, you can chase the website visitors who might be interested but are hesitating to make a purchase.
Retargeting tracks these people and then displays online ads to them as they visit other places on the web. You can provide them with more exciting offers that lure them back to your website.
Furthermore, some retargeting tools allow B2B SaaS marketers to re-engage prospects beyond website visitors. To that end, someone who opened your email or attended your webinar can also be retargeted.
Summing Up
With these B2B SaaS marketing strategies, SaaS companies can attract qualified leads, generate higher conversion, and increase brand awareness and engagement, ultimately increasing your company’s growth.
However, it is advised that first, before implementing any strategy, you identify your ideal audience segment alongside defining your marketing goals. With that information, you can select from the above strategies the ones that help you achieve your desired results from the above strategies.
Try experimenting with different marketing strategies and channels to ensure the best outcomes.
