If you’re not getting the results you want, it might be time to rethink your marketing strategy. It’s not enough to just have a good product anymore. In these days of digital disruptions, good marketing is a must!
The best SaaS operators know that user acquisition is the most important part of the business. It’s the lifeblood of your company!
Here are 9 ways to make sure you’re getting the most out of your marketing efforts:
Understand your customer
There’s a big difference between the number of active users your company has and the total amount of money you’re spending on SaaS marketing strategy. That means you have to define your target audience, build profiles of who your customers are and understand who they are trying to reach. If you have the wrong audience profile, you’re going to waste money. If you have the right profile, you can improve your marketing efforts.
Gather customer feedback. Look at your sales and marketing data from the past few months and identify the types of marketing that resonate best with your users. Find out what types of content users want and why they click on your campaign links. This will help you make sure your next campaign is the right fit.
Maintain a balance
According to a study, 89 percent of marketers believe that prioritizing users over conversions is a critical business issue. The report found that digital marketers worldwide spend at least nine hours on each user acquisition channel. Those that fail to optimize their spend, or are overly aggressive, will lose users to competitors. That’s why marketers need to strike the right balance.
You can’t be too quick in b2b SaaS marketing to promote a new feature on your website, or else you’ll lose traffic to your competitors. And don’t be overzealous in pushing a promotion. Consider how many users you will actually get back. And if you’re not careful, you’ll get a lot of spammy signups.
Go offline
Most people now access the internet through their smartphones. That means your company needs to target your marketing on mobile. But don’t just target anyone who’s using the internet via their phone. Look at demographics, who your audience is, and where they go on the web. Once you have an understanding of those three things, you can narrow your reach even further.
Once you know where your customers are, you can then target your marketing to them in a more meaningful way. Instead of blasting out a bunch of irrelevant emails to people who’ve never heard of you, give them something that’s relevant to what they’re looking for and send a highly personalized marketing email. One way to do this is to use a technique called location-based marketing.
Use your data
According to a report, 73 percent of SaaS business model companies don’t have a marketing strategy in place. In light of that statistic, it’s vital for companies to know what they’re doing with data. The most successful SaaS companies go a step further, taking their data-led marketing approach further than just gathering customer information.
Brands use their data to make hyper-targeted marketing decisions. However, in most cases, that data is incomplete. As companies continue to collect more and more data, they’ll be able to establish patterns and tailor their marketing efforts more precisely. There’s another side to this. Manual marketing is no longer sustainable. There is no time to handle it manually.
Quality of marketing is more important than quantity
Getting lots of visitors to your site can be good, but quality is far more important. If you want to attract quality visitors to your site, try focusing on what’s most important: engagement. Engagement takes more time, so people tend to spend the most time on your site when they’re really engaged. So measure engagement consistently to maximize your visitors’ time on the site.
This is a key example of the 80/20 rule. It’s also a great example of how the best SaaS operators get the most out of their marketing efforts. Have a clear vision of your users’ needs. It might be easier to try and convince people to try your product, but try to make sure you’re targeting the right audience. Try getting an insight into their user base to find out what type of product will be most beneficial.
Don’t forget about the basics
There are many ways to make sure you get the most out of your marketing efforts. It doesn’t always have to involve a whole lot of money or a big time commitment. However, with so many SaaS apps, you have to pay attention to the basics. If you use email, make sure you take advantage of every message from your sales team. Don’t keep these messages to yourself and let the marketing team do all the work. Instead, make sure you understand every line of the email and incorporate it into your marketing strategy.
If you run ads, the first thing to do is read them before you run them. You’ll see what works and what doesn’t for the SaaS sales. There are a lot of tools available to help you make more effective marketing decisions. You’ll want to take advantage of these tools to optimize your marketing efforts.
Consider your cost-per-acquisition
Just like you look at other metrics like cost-per-clicks, cost-per-acquisition, and cost-per-click to make sure your ads are running efficiently, you need to look at your cost-per-acquisition and make sure you’re getting the most bang for your b2b SaaS product.
- How long is the average acquisition cycle for a customer?
- How many people are coming back to the site, and how often are they coming back?
- Is the majority of your customers churning?
- Are they buying from your competitors?
These questions can help you pinpoint the best time to run an ad, and the best way to run an ad, to reach your customers. Ad formats matter because your customers are increasingly mobile, you need to consider that your ads should run in mobile browsers, and not desktop browsers.
Make use of your team
While you may have an amazing sales team, they’re not the ones that will make sure your customers stick around. Consider having other team members involved.
Is there someone on the marketing team that can help with lead generation or engagement? How about someone on the sales team? They’ll be able to cross-sell a SaaS and improve your bottom line. Use surveys, SaaS providers use surveys a lot.
Why not use them to gain feedback from your users? Try sending out a questionnaire to your user base before they’ve left. Have them rank how valuable they found the product and how much they’re paying per month. Ask them a couple of follow-up questions right after they’ve signed up. This will give you some very useful insights. And if they’re happy, encourage them to pay for the service.
Experiment with different channels
The traditional marketing models for SaaS are broken. They take months to generate traffic, and it can be difficult to get them to convert. But consider adding influencer marketing to your marketing mix. An influencer is an expert in your niche. They have millions of followers and can be huge advocates for your brand. Pitch an influencer a custom challenge that will help promote your product.
Make sure you’re selective about who you pitch, and ask for plenty of research beforehand. Research what’s working for other brands in your niche. Once you find an influencer, negotiate a fee and focus on getting content to them for free. This frees up resources so you can focus on getting your customers to convert.
Conclusion
There’s a lot of talk about personalization in marketing, especially with digital media. But personalization comes in many forms, and here we discussed just 9 ways SaaS operators can get more out of their marketing strategies.