Competitors are widely growing in the SaaS market, resulting in businesses needing help to get a strong foothold. There are many hacks and strategies for you to ensure the optimisation of your SaaS business's growth stage. With a keen focus on customer acquisition, marketers should channel their sales and marketing efforts to adopt a collaborative approach that ensures success. However, regardless of the strategy you follow, marketers need to ensure that it aligns with the company's vision, mission, and other core objectives. Most importantly, the perception of growth is highly subjective, and each business should always keep its company's goals and timelines in mind before beginning its quest to boost marketing. Here are a few strategies that help you establish SaaS marketing on a budget.
Formulate a Strategic Marketing Plan
Your marketing plan should encompass your SaaS business goals and have clearly defined OKRs and KPIs that fit into the marketing budget. Ensure that the marketing goals, revenue targets, customer retention numbers, and customer acquisition are specific and measurable. Once the goals have been clearly set, you need to do an in-depth competitor analysis and note down the key USPs as well. Make sure that the plans you have framed have the most effective marketing channels to connect with the target audience. Use a mix of channels for distribution and rely on two or three channels for a niche budget-friendly approach. Your SaaS content marketing strategy must cover the entire customer journey, from customer outreach to acquisition and retention.
Focus on Customer Acquisition
The hardest part of SaaS marketing is customer acquisition, but you must not ignore this. Lead generation and conversion are vital to driving SaaS growth. Creating buyer personas, narrowing down the right channel on which your buyers are most active, and developing marketing campaigns for those channels is the first step. These activities will definitely meet your budget requirements. However, in order for you to drive more traffic to your landing page, you need to invest in paid advertising.
Adopt a Collaborative Approach
Innovation and adding new features are the core expectations of SaaS customers. Make sure that you allocate a budget for this, look for features that are popular, and modify them whenever required. Work closely with customers, perform surveys, and understand their core concerns and requirements. This empowers designers and engineers to collaborate and frame an ideation process like rapid test and learn cycles. Here, a new feature or iteration is deployed according to the customer feedback. These features can be adjusted accordingly and are highly beneficial for most B2B SaaS companies.
If your organisation is new to the market, you can build a minimum viable product and allow customers to test it for free. You can later work on the prototype after receiving the feedback. This is a cost-effective approach. You can also consider implementing a SaaS product-led growth model that helps you use your product to drive customer acquisition, activation, conversion, and retention with increased customer lifetime value.
Improve Customer Retention with Chatbots
Customer retention is less expensive and easier than obtaining new customers in SaaS, as it makes your growth and revenue more sustainable. It boosts your customer lifetime value (CLTV) and makes your customers happy with increased referrals for your business. Here are a few quick tips to boost customer retention.
- Implement live chat on your website through a chatbot for instant resolution of queries. A GenAI-powered chatbot ensures better customer retention, quick query addressing, and engagement.
- Share valuable information via articles and blogs and keep your customers hooked.
- Create a communication schedule to ensure that you stay connected with your customers.
- Build a community or forum, and share resources, strategies, and tips with customers to strengthen the brand.
Implement Email Marketing Automation
Did you know that email marketing is one of the most efficient and effective lead-generation channels for SaaS companies? Sending personalised emails to a segment audience based on demographics, preferences, and behaviour is the core component of an effective email marketing campaign. The best way is to use marketing automation software that triggers and personalises emails based on customer actions. This enables businesses to welcome customers, grant them referral bonuses, walk them through the top features of the product/service, and incentivise them to use the product and further spread it. Email marketing automation helps your business host long-form content, retain existing customers, and nurture leads to drive conversations on a large scale.
Invest in Content Marketing and SEO
SEO for SaaS companies is very essential to improve leads and conversions. Attracting visitors and converting them into paying customers is the speciality of SEO. Create in-depth and engaging articles with a clear search intent. Use a mix of different content types like videos and podcasts. Perform on-page and off-page optimisation with a concrete site structure and clearly laid out navigation. Also, focus on guest blogging and create an awareness to improve ranking substantially.
Partner with Other SaaS Platforms
Cross-platform collaborations are quite cost-effective and are the future of the SaaS industry. Did you know that partnering with a non-competing SaaS company can improve your B2B SaaS customer acquisition by making your product more straightforward to use and integrate? By running a cold emailing SaaS product, you can better partner with a data scraping platform and co-run a marketing campaign. This allows both SaaS platforms to acquire more leads as they are exposed to different potential customers.
Implement Generative AI
The current market is embracing GenAI to transform its processes. GenAI can greatly improve your SaaS growth strategy by streamlining the process, surfacing pertinent information, and uncovering insights that may have been overlooked. It can aid in deciding subsequent actions in a SaaS product by suggesting or finishing these activities.
Successful SaaS Marketing Campaigns by Leading Brands
Here are a few examples of companies that have deployed effective strategies that have boosted their SaaS marketing efforts.
Zoho's referral marketing campaign
With a powerful software suite to run businesses, Zoho has used its email and referral campaigns to get unengaged users active and obtain new users who were not exposed to their previous marketing efforts. Their referral campaign gave five free user accounts to existing users who brought new customers. This expanded Zoho's reach within the relevant networks and boosted its customer base at a reasonable cost.
Curious ad campaign by Mailchimp
A leading email marketing company, Mailchimp, increased its organic search traffic by instilling curiosity in its potential customers through funny infographics and display ads. Most of their users mispronounced the brand name and made constant typos, so they ran a campaign of videos and posters that emphasised correct spelling and pronunciation in a funny way.
Budget content marketing by HubSpot
HubSpot provides inbound marketing automation software and is known for its high-quality targeted content. With their inbound marketing automation software and CRM software, they were able to make the relevant changes to their content marketing with an effective SEO strategy using valuable data insights. This helped them gain more traffic and ensure increased conversions at a very low cost.
Empower Your SaaS Marketing Efforts at Vajra Global
As a leading MarTech company, Vajra Global can help you boost your SaaS marketing efforts with a comprehensive suite of services and a team of highly experienced experts. Our team understands the nuances and latest marketing of the SaaS industry and provides in-depth insights and suggestions. We work to provide the right solution for you by keeping your budget requirements in mind. As a HubSpot gold partner, we have access to HubSpot's suite of tools and applications that ensure your success in the SaaS market. Reach out to us for more insights on our services.