Marketing and SaaS are two very tricky subjects to get your head around and when they come together become even more complex. Today I’m going to talk you through some of the common differences we see that makes SaaS Marketing more complex than launching an average campaign for a local service business.
You Have More Than One End User
The end user is never the only person you are marketing towards, while a lot of SaaS companies might start off small it’s worth noting that it won’t be just their end user that will be visiting the site. From day one there will be potential employees where an internal brand has to be sold, there are investors researching a potential buyout or investment as well as the end user. All your campaigns need to take these users into account as well as the multiple persona’s you’ll have to juggle
Tracking is Never Straight Forward
I have a rule of thumb that subsequently Google have also said, keep it simple. Unfortunately this is never the case with SaaS companies. They want to push the boundaries of their product and often the sign up processes are never standard from a development perspective. As a SaaS everything needs to measurable, especially your marketing. If it doesn’t have a digit as the output it’ll be hard to scale. You need to make sure your funnel’s analytics is connected from the first time some sees an advert right the way through to becoming a paid user.
Freemium Works Better Than Anything Else
Freemium is the key to success, a free trial or enter your credit card details work but they definitely don’t work as well as freemium. While it requires extra support in some cases and a fine line for up selling it makes your product viral. If your SaaS marketing includes a freemium subscription option makes it very easy for people to recommend and share and will even drive communities to discuss your product.
Agile Marketing Management
Your marketing team needs to be more agile than your development team and your development team need to feed information to the marketing team. Your marketing team don’t need to be experts at what you do but they do need to be able to understand and grasp the main concepts and pick up on trends and industry changes. They need to be able to empathise with your end client and help them achieve success. They also need to be able to change marketing campaigns in a matter of hours as they learn what works and what doesn’t and test different variants.
Scalability
Scalability is one of the biggest differentiators, most SaaS companies become international overnight, while we’d all love to have an online service where we can sell into every country in the world this is often not the case and you have to be very careful what countries you pick and choose, generally starting with English speaking countries and expanding from there keeping an eye on economy shifts that might open up new markets but also close existing ones.
These are just 5 common trends we see that are different from your usual standard marketing campaigns. If you want tips on how to increase leads sign up to our mailing list where we regualrly share tips and experiements we’re working.
