Being able to market your products or services is important. Even more important is to do it effectively, meaning that people will actually buy things from you. These days, there’s a lot of competition in every industry. You really need to make sure you know who your audience is, where they spend their time, and how you can get them to buy your products. You have to offer them something useful and valuable. Remember that humans run on emotion, not logic.
What is Software as a Service?
Software as a Service is a software distribution model in which third-party hosts these applications to make them available to customers. Some popular examples are Salesforce, G Suite, Dropbox, and MailChimp. Despite being popular, you still need to promote such platforms. However, when it comes to a specific industry like software as a service, marketing, and promotional strategies might differ a bit.
SaaS is a B2B industry and in such industries, the sales cycle can be long. Buyers tend to really think about the product they are buying and analyze all the alternatives before purchasing. However, this is not the case with SaaS. The sales cycle here is shorter (when a customer needs a solution, they will do a bit of researching and checking online for the best product, ask around and check the reviews, and then try several free trials). Lastly, they will choose a product to buy.
How to Market Saas?
The sales cycle of SaaS is also shorter because SaaS products are less expensive when compared to the majority of B2B products. This means you have a short time to convince your potential customers to buy your products. For that, you need to provide them with lots of useful and valuable information. To be able to provide good information is to provide good content and personalize your marketing strategy. Make sure you write informative blog posts that your clients will find interesting and useful (hint: provide value).
Also, SEO optimization is important here. You want to ensure that people will see your products and that they are advertised in places where it makes sense so you can increase your CTR, engagements, and conversion rates. Also, make sure your backlinks and metadata are working, as well as that your site is indexed. You also want to make sure your site is responsive to all devices and that you provide a good user experience. This can affect your SEO ranking.
Make sure you have a promotions plan. This doesn’t mean just write and share articles on your social media or use Facebook ads to advertise your company and products. You want to make sure you are maximizing the number of people that see your content, engage with it, and share it. Create graphics, GIFs, or videos to entertain your audience. Know your audience and your buyer persona so you can analyze where they spend time, what they are searching for, and tap into that.
Email marketing and newsletters are another popular tactics. You can use email to distribute content. Moreover, your subscribers have opted in to receive your emails (which means they are interested in what you have to say) so use it well. Remember to personalize each email, segment them with specific criteria, and give the people what they want, which won’t be that challenging if you automate it with the proper email marketing software.
When selling your products, don’t forget about the service. Make sure you do everything you can to provide clients with a good support team or customer service. Maintain relationships with your clients and treat them well; nurture the relationship and think about the long-term benefits. This is what distinguishes you in the long-term.
Moreover, customer retention is key. Your repeat customers are the way you will bring in most of your revenue, so increasing your retention rates by even a small percentage can mean a lot in the future.
Also Read: 5 Most Important Metrics for SaaS Business
What if your site is being updated?
However, there is one thing we haven’t really mentioned. It is making sure you have your website up and running well. This is what really matters. Since everything is done online these days, you want to make sure your online presence is top-notch. Thus, making sure your website loads fasts has all of the relevant information, is interesting and eye-catching is what will make your customers stick longer on your site (thus increasing the possibility of them buying your products). Even if your site is being updated, you should still let your customers know about it. There are many plugins designed to make sure you inform your customers of any changes happening to your site and to enable you to collect emails of your subscribers so you can let them know once your site is up and running again.
Coming Soon and Maintenance Mode Plugin
The plugin you can use is the Coming Soon and Maintenance Mode plugin. This plugin is designed for you to create and manage your placeholder sites. You can choose from over 170 themes for your site and you can further customize them. You can add or remove progress bars to show your clients how close to finishing your site you are, creating subscription forms not to lose your potential customers, add Google Maps, and all of this is easily done with the drag and drop option this plugin has.
Moreover, you will have access to millions of images and filters to make the site look great. You can even add videos to entertain your visitors. All in all, you have lots of options for customization. You can control your licenses and sites remotely and track statistics for every page from the dashboard.
This is definitely the plugin you would want to have if you are updating your site.
What mistakes to avoid!
The human factor is always present and having an oversight is something that no professional is immune to. Regardless, being extra careful is a necessity, as any mistake can cost you and potentially drive away clients.
Here are some tips on what to avoid:
Make sure you always qualify your leads. Not qualifying your leads can just lead to more confusion as your sales and marketing team will not know what tactic to use. These tactics need to be well thought out and personalized so that your leads can see what you have to offer.
Not checking what your competitors are up to is another big mistake. You want to know what is happening in your industry. Thus, you want to make sure you are staying up to date with all of the new developments.
Conclusion
There, we have listed some of the strategies you should use to advertise our SaaS to our customers. Overall, make sure your site is up to date, provide your clients with value, and write content that is useful. Lastly, make sure your customer service is great.
Hopefully, this article will help you improve your business.
