SaaS Marketing Plan

Marketing is not easy. There are a lot of factors to consider while creating your media strategy. You have to keep track of your team, customers, and competitors to create a successful media strategy for your company.

In this article, I will help you understand the basics of SaaS marketing and SaaS marketing planning.

Why SaaS Marketing Planning is different than traditional

There are multiple reasons why SaaS marketing planning is different from the traditional kind of marketing. There are two main reasons for that. The first one is caused by the service you are providing, it being online software and all that comes with it.

The second one is the medium through which you market your services. Unless you are one of the bigger companies like Netflix, your input from your customers and your output regarding your media marketing will be through the internet.

1. Dynamic Content

Unlike a usual product, what you are presenting with SaaS constantly evolves according to your users and your competitors. New metrics and features become important while others become obsolete.

2. Different Demand Cycles

Unlike a traditional company that has usual sale periods, SaaS businesses, unless you are dealing with a very specific industry, usually have no sale seasons. This requires software providers to modify their products according to their users all the time.

3. Importance of User Churn and Retention

Unlike traditional products, SaaS marketing depends on the long-term commitments of its users as most SaaS companies depend on subscriptions to keep the company profitable. Increasing your brand loyalty among your users, creating brand awareness and RoMI is crucial for your SaaS business.

What Are The Key Elements of a Marketing Plan?

To achieve the goals mentioned below, you have to understand SaaS Marketing’s Core elements. Here is a shortlist of them with further explanations below:

1. Landing Page
2. E-Mail Marketing
3. Customer Marketing
4. Inbound Marketing
5. Outbound Marketing
6. Paid Growth
7. Positioning (sometimes referred to as Market Positioning)

Landing Page

There is little point in talking about why a landing page is important. Everybody realizes that first images are almost always important.

There are two main factors that affect the success of your landing page. These are how much info you give to your target audience and the manner in which you do it. It is obvious that listing all the features you provide like a book page will not present a good first image.

A good Landing page example could be given from HockeyStack’s homepage:

It is easy to look at and shows features such as:

• Two highlighted free trial options and another as a banner
• Ratings from a credible website like Capterra
• A video regarding how the product works

However, the information you give to your target audience depends on how you give it, as I mentioned. At first look, one can see the distinctive color pallet, font, and design that separate HockeyStack from its competitors and create brand awareness.

E-mail Marketing

Although its social use has deteriorated with the rise of social media companies like Facebook and Twitter, E-mail marketing is still crucial for appealing to potential users. This is why many companies, whether they deal with SaaS or other services, still offer their users newsletter services.

You can utilize the features provided by specially designed e-mail marketing software to increase your efficiency with e-mail marketing. These tools provide multiple metrics and make your e-mail marketing process both efficient and easier.

Some of the E-Mail marketing software examples are:

• MailChimp
• ConverKit
• ActiveCampaign
• HubSpot

Customer Marketing

According to the researchers “, 77% of B2B Marketers are Failing to Profit from Existing Customer Relationships” meaning that there is a 77% potential among the customers you already have. Customer Marketing is directed at your already existing customers and how efficient your relationship is with them.

The first step of Customer Marketing is directed at increasing your user retention while reducing your user churn rate. Customer marketing aims to achieve this by offering benefits to your customers.

These benefits could lead to User Generator Content (sometimes referred to as UGCs). User Generator Contents could include a gift box that includes products that are related to the service you provide.

If you are a streaming platform, you could offer a glass of tea, some tea herbs, some cookies, and a pillow for them. Your user, who is probably happy about your gift will surely share it on their social media.

You can also determine how these gift boxes will be given out. You can create social media campaigns that will require your users to share a certain post and increase your brand awareness.

Referral programs will also encourage your users to invite new people to gain benefits like special discounts. This will not only create a stronger relationship between you and your customers but also within the customer base itself.

Inbound Marketing

Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing’s main purpose is to get the ideas and feedback of the users that have not voiced their opinions or have not become acquainted with your product so far.

This can be done by sending emails on a regular basis to possible customers, cold-calling them, utilizing billboards, and buying ads. For this reason, Outbound Marketing is often called as “traditional marketing” since it follows the methods of marketing that have been around since the dawn of marketing.

This method has multiple problems. Since this method is utilized by most companies, you have to pay more than others to gain an edge over them. However, even in the case of paying more than others, it is not guaranteed that you will gain an edge over them, since everybody is used to “traditional marketing” for a reason.

Another problem with outbound marketing is that its results are not easy to measure. One can not keep track of how many customers have arrived through billboards, TV ads. etc. Even in the case of asking customers where they heard of your company first, most of the time, the answer will be indecisive since this sort of marketing requires a lot of exposure.

Before ending this part, I want to present you with a comparison table for Inbound Marketing and Outbound Marketing.

Inbound Marketing	Outbound Marketing
Tailor-made Ads, SEO, Social Networks, etc.	General ads
Relatively cheap	Expensive
Easier to measure results	Hard to measure results
Great for SaaS	Ineffective for Saas

Paid Growth

Paid growth refers to acquiring customers through paid methods. These methods can include advertisements and PPC campaigns. The most important thing about paid growth is that for it to be profitable, it needs to pay for itself. This means that the LTV you gain from a customer through paid advertising should be higher compared to the price of advertising.

However, being higher is not always enough. Depending on the scope of your strategies, you have to calculate how long it will take until you get a return. Putting a million dollars on the line only to get it back in ten years is not a profitable strategy.

Positioning

Positioning, or sometimes referred to as market positioning, refers to the image one company has within a given sector. For example; Lamborghini presents itself as a company for rich people that like sports cars companies like General Motors and Fiat present themselves as car providers for families.

This is also important for SaaS companies. Your company could be for enterprise SaaS companies, which requires you to have a custom pricing plan, a dedicated customer success team, account managers, an enterprise theme across your website and product, and more. On the other hand, if your SaaS is for SMBs, you don’t need these, but you need to price lower, have a self-serve sales cycle, and you need to tailor your marketing & sales strategies accordingly.

Here is a short list of factors that affect your positioning in a given sector:

• Your already existing customers.
• Your website theme
• The service you provide
• The target audience of your advertisements.

Top Things to Start With

However, only knowing the factors that affect your SaaS marketing is not enough. In this section, I will give suggestions regarding what you can do to create a good SaaS marketing plan.

Use a SaaS analytics tool

You can change your web page style, utilize different marketing strategies and offer multiple pricing packages. However, none of these will be useful unless you actually get feedback from your customers, both by listening to their opinions and following what they do.

I have talked about the importance of listening to your user base before. However, a SaaS tool like HockeyStack allows you to track metrics unknown to your users. These metrics can include but are not limited to, your user churn rate, your monthly recurring revenue (MRR), and your bounce rate.

A good SaaS tool not only recognizes these metrics but also suggests marketing strategies that will help you improve your efficiency with your customers and potential customers.

Another important aspect of any SaaS tool is how it allows groupings. Detecting differences in common data is important for understanding your failings.

Let’s say that your user churn rate for mobile is much higher compared to that of your desktop version, this means that you have to make improvements in your mobile app.

As a SaaS company, you have a ton of data stored in different places, which leads you to have a fragmented dataset. Your product engagement data is on a product analytics tool, marketing data is on Google Analytics, sales is on Hubspot, etc.

There is 0 chance that you can connect these to uncover invaluable insights, such as the LTV of a campaign, or the churn rate of each marketing channel- not even with Segment.

Pricing Page

I have mentioned in earlier parts that your pricing and pricing page matter when it comes to creating a stronger relationship between yourself and your customers. In this part, I will get more technical and talk about how the options given on your pricing page can further help your relationship with your customers.

Not every company’s needs are the same. It is understandable that a small company with a smaller user base would not want to have all complex features for a high price while a bigger company would not consider a really cheap package because it does not cover an inch of their needs.

You have to present your pricing depending on the customers’ needs. You should track which features you provide are most utilized while others are overlooked and calculate the importance of your features accordingly.

Positioning

Before changing your positioning, you need to think about why your users would need your product. Do they need your product as a necessity or is it by choice? What is the age group I am appealing to? What is their price range?

If the majority of your users are aged people who use your software to pay taxes, you have to make your product as simple as possible to make their tax-paying process easier. If the opposite is true, and you are presenting a product for tech-savvy people that need to achieve as many features as possible, you can focus more on presenting your features.

Landing Page Optimization

Landing Page Optimization covers the entire process of increasing the efficiency of your website to increase conversions.

There are multiple ways to make your landing page more appealing. These could range from eliminating unnecessary features in your landing page to picking a new font and a color pallet.

However, your landing page optimization is not only limited to aesthetics. You need to monitor your landing page traffic and fix any possible problems while improving your integration with your service providers to provide the best system.

Here is a shortlist of suggestions to increase your landing page optimization:

1. Increase your efficiency with your service provider
2. Improve your color pallet
3. Give a clear message
4. Optimize your page for search engines

Technical SEO

SEO refers to the number of aspects in your website that will enable it to show up in search engines more often compared to its competitors.

There are multiple ways to increase your organic traffic via SEO, one of which is improving your mobile adaptation. With the increase in mobile traffic in the last decade, the search engines have proposed mobile adaptations almost as a condition for websites that want to show up in the first search page.

Deleting any duplicate content that you might have is also important for your SEO, search engines not only look for websites with higher word count but also websites with original and different content. Thus, producing different content is always useful.

Getting rid of any spammy backlinks is also useful for increasing your organic traffic with SEO.

Conclusion

In this article, I have explained what SaaS marketing is, why it is important and how you can improve your SaaS marketing efficiency.

To achieve your highest possible efficiency, you need to utilize multiple methods mentioned in this article like increasing your landing page optimization and making adjustments to your pricing page.

Check out other articles by HockeyStack to increase your knowledge of SaaS marketing and get in touch with the professionals.

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