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They say that one of the most constant things about life is change, and nowhere does this statement hold more true than in the world of B2B SaaS business, where the landscape and customer needs are constantly evolving. But as challenging as keeping up with the regular changes in the business is, it is not the only thorn in the flesh of SaaS business owners. As the world moves deeper into the attention economy, competition for patronage is becoming increasingly fierce.
Businesses rely on sales and new users to remain in the mix. Still, given the rapidly evolving landscape and intense competition, you may be implementing a strategy that is either obsolete or otherwise does not allow you to compete favorably with other businesses. This is why having an agile tactic that is easily adaptable to change is crucial. This article will lay out everything you need to know about making marketing plans and what constitutes a successful B2B SaaS marketing strategy. But first, what is SaaS B2B Marketing?
SaaS B2B Marketing: Explained
SaaS stands for software as a service and refers to businesses offering an intangible product. Usually, the SaaS product is a cloud-based software that offers a specific service or solves a particular user problem. An ideal SaaS business will be one where the user is on a subscription and must pay a fixed monthly or weekly. Some SaaS companies offer annual payment plans. A predictable payment structure means the business can make proper plans about their expenditure.
When B2B SaaS companies embark on a marketing campaign, they try to promote their services and how they would benefit potential users. As SaaS businesses depend on recurring subscriptions from their users, they must continuously justify their relevance. Hence, users always perceive their products as valuable and are motivated to make subsequent renewals. They also want to reach the market and attract new customers to take on subscriptions.
Hence, unlike traditional businesses that deal with one-time payments and are more focused on acquiring new customers, marketing strategies in a SaaS business are often two-pronged, dedicated to retaining old customers while attracting new ones. You also want them to refer your services to those around them.
Questions to Consider When Planning Effective B2B SaaS Marketing Strategy
Indeed, running a business will often boil down to your willingness and speed of agility. Nowhere is this more crucial than in the swiftly changing landscape of SaaS businesses. Before planning your digital marketing strategies, there are certain things you need to consider before making plans:
Your Customer
You want to consider the customer and what your product means to them. Most importantly, you want to understand their journey. Although other marketers may not label it a different way, the customer journey essentially comes down to the following four distinct stages:
Awareness
This is the stage when they realize they have a problem they intend to fix and are triggered to find a solution. An aware customer either be actively looking for a solution, or the search may be passive; that is, he is not necessarily searching but is on the lookout.
Consideration
At this stage, the customer is actively considering their options, possibly having stumbled on more than one appealing choice. Most businesses with a recognizable brand are usually at an advantage at this point.
Onboarding and Adoption
Having chosen an option, the customer has decided, paid for the first subscription, and is actively familiarising themselves with the software. This is where a good product with good UI/UX will win the day.
Renewal and Advocacy
If the customer enjoys their experience with the app and feels it is valuable, they may renew their subscription when it expires and, more importantly, feel confident in the product.
Understanding the Customer Journey is essential as it influences your focus point during your marketing campaign.
Your Business
In addition to understanding your customers, you also want to know the strengths and limits of your business. Some things you want to consider about your business include:
What is Your Business Model
Your business model is crucial when planning a marketing strategy because it determines the market you target and how you do that targeting. For example, freemium software allows customers to use their products without involving their cards. This model affects how they market their products, causing them to focus on scaling and acquiring a vast net to sell special software features to. Businesses that sell their services directly will work with a sales team and a marketing one.
What is the Amount of Funding?
Marketing online is not cheap; the more reach you wish to have, the higher your budget will be. Which is why one of the most important questions you want to ask yourself is, How much am I willing to spend on marketing? Know that less marketing investment will usually mean less reach and less growth. Still, some businesses have been able to plan a successful marketing campaign on a stringent budget.
What is My Ultimate Goal?
In a marketing campaign, there has to be a measurable target in mind, which will direct your strategy and give you something to measure against during the campaign so you can know when you're on track. A measurable goal also helps you tick all the boxes and hit the intended targets that mean more to your business.
What Channels Work Best for Me?
You want to know what marketing channel works best for your product; this can be helpful when trying to create a long-term lead generation channel. It also helps you combine your marketing efforts with a sound SEO strategy to build an online presence. You can even garner more revenue with a robust Pay-Per-Click strategy using social media or Google Ads. Popular channels include:
- Landing pages
- Email Marketing
- Events and Webinars
- Podcasts
- Review sites like G2, Capterra, and Clutch
- Influencer Marketing
What is my Brand Positioning?
This refers to positioning your brand in the market about your competitors. In doing this, you must consider your unique selling proposition (USP) and overall brand identity. All these, however, should be based on your customer's needs, competitor analysis, and your unique strengths.
Components of a Brilliant SaaS Marketing Strategy
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Planning a marketing strategy can get daunting, but you don't have to be overwhelmed. The critical thing is understanding the components of what makes a good SaaS marketing plan. There are four things you want to take into account.
Goal Setting
Clear goals and operational framework are vital for sustainable growth. When setting your goals, you want to include:
Marketing and Sales Alignment
You want your sales and marketing team's defined sales and revenue commitment. Define how many marketing-qualified leads you want to be converted to sales in a month and how big a team you need to accomplish that. This clear definition will give your team proper focus.
Marketing Budget
After deciding on marketing and sales alignment, you want to decide how much of your annual budget will go into marketing. This will often depend on the size of your company. Usually, businesses spend between 12 -and 20% of their annual budget on marketing.
Tactics
The next component of a good marketing strategy is your marketing tactics to implement it. This part has four stages:
Audience Targeting and Segmentation
This part involves thinking up strategies that are specific to your preferred audience, of which you have already created a well-researched persona. Your Customer persona will greatly affect many of your marketing decisions.
Content Marketing and SEO
The bulk of good SaaS B2B marketing often relies on content marketing. You want to create relevant content that gradually alters behavior. A good content marketing strategy can range from a blog to an ebook or a well-thought-out infographic. You just want to ensure that the content contains these three components:
- It speaks to the customer's pain
- It presents what you have to offer, usually the solution
- It explains how they can benefit
Content Promotion and Retargeting
Of course, writing the content is not enough; you have to get them to as many eyeballs as possible. As any SaaS scene is constantly changing, you want to ensure that you keep revising your customer persona and the content you're creating to see if they are still relevant.
Develop Full Conversion Pathways
You also want to ensure that any leads you get from your content can be nurtured and seamlessly transitioned into paying customers. You want to prioritize lead nurturing at the top of the funnel by creating nurture streams and experiences for the customer persona. This will keep them engaged. Also, ensure that the steps to purchasing your product are hitch-free and fast.
Resources
In this stage, you must decide the resources you need to accomplish your marketing goals. Here are some decisions you have to make:
Using In-House or Outsourced Resources
Before starting, determine which parts of the campaign can be handled in-house by you or your staff and which would have to be outsourced to other agencies or freelancers.
Team Structure
You want an organized front, with each member receiving a specialised assignment they must handle. The best way to do this is to organize the team by funnel stage, beginning with the top of the funnel. The benefit of this approach is that a well-organized top of the marketing funnel can make things easier downstream.
Evaluation
At this stage, you want to measure the progress during the campaign. Here are some metrics you want to look out for:
MQL Velocity
MQL Velocity is the amount of indicated interest in the product within an allotted time. They are essential in evaluating the strength of your offer or product and preparing you to adjust your strategies accordingly.
SaaS Metrics
These are the benchmarks you measure to avoid steady growth in the business. They can help gauge the efficacy of your marketing strategy. The specific SaaS metrics you will track will change as the marketing campaign progresses. Some metrics to track during a good campaign include Customer Churn, Conversion Rate, MRR, LTV, and CPA, amongst others.
Some of the Best SaaS Marketing Plans for 2024
Here are some effective B2B Marketing Strategies you can use for the upcoming year. Remember always to re-evaluate them over the year to keep them relevant to your customers:
Growth Loops
This is a SaaS marketing plan to get consistent customers to advocate or recommend your product to their base. To ensure this, they must create features that retain user satisfaction and utilisation for as long as possible. The more customers use the product, the more they are likely to advocate.
You can even include a feature that advertises your product to users whenever they use it in a public space. For example, some photo editing software adds their logo by the side of every photo the user shares, guaranteeing that those who see the photo and are impressed will seek their product out.
Upgrading Your Homepage and Website
Your homepage and website can be your prospective customer's first impression of your product. Hence, you want to optimise them in a way that will attract and spark interest in your product, motivating them to want to investigate further and even make a purchase. Your landing page should address these three questions of any visitor:
- Does this product satisfy my desires?
- Does it work, or would it fulfill its promises?
- Has anyone else used this product? What has been their experience?
A positive answer to all three questions makes them more inclined to trust your offer.
Community Marketing and SEO
This marketing strategy involves creating an online group of people who care about your actions and then advertising directly to them. You can do this via Discord, Slack, or using a YouTube Channel, or an Email list by offering lead magnets like free ebooks or webinars. Keeping them engaged and offering value while selling to them is important.
Sponsorships with Media Sites
This strategy can be beneficial to grow businesses that cannot always afford to compete with more giant corporations in preferred marketplaces. Instead, they can sponsor media sites they know to appeal to their target audiences. You can sponsor them for ads for an allotted time, thus dominating an area where other businesses cannot be bothered to go.
Sponsorships With Micro-Influencers
While many SaaS marketers can chunk out the bulk of their budget by sponsoring mega influencers, you can target a series of smaller influencers. An advantage to this strategy is that they are less expensive, but more importantly, these followers of micro-influencers tend to be more passionate and trusting of recommendations. Sponsoring their programs could lead to a higher conversion rate for your business if you do it right.
Set Up An Affiliate Program
Affiliate programs entitle the influencers or marketers to a small part of your business. It can also incentivise word-of-mouth promotion, as any highly motivated person can push your product to take on a part of the profit. You want to be careful that this goes well with your business model.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is needed to be successful in B2B marketing in the SaaS Space?
One key thing that guarantees success in B2B marketing is an in-depth knowledge of your customer. You want to know their pain and what would most likely solve it. This knowledge will help you create content that will attract and engage your prospective customers and eventually be converted into paying customers.
How do you engage customers in SaaS?
Engaging B2B buyers and communicating meaningfully with them is a great way to nurture them and boost their chances of making a sale. There are several ways you can go about it. You can use email marketing software to constantly dish out content that addresses their needs and a Live Chat option where you can hear their issues and offer solutions in real-time. Survey solutions to gain feedback, amongst others.
What are the four C's of B2B Marketing?
The 4C's of B2B marketing are content creation, campaign, conversation, and conversion. This model is beneficial as it gives you an advantage in finding, nurturing, and ultimately ensuring that your marketing options are converted to sales.
What is the Rule of 40 in SaaS Marketing?
The rule of 40 is a principle in the software business that states a software company's combined revenue growth rate and profit margin should equal or exceed 40%. Businesses that fail to generate revenue up to 40% may soon face cash flow or liquidity issues.
What are the 4 P's of good B2B marketing?
The 4 P's refer to the parameters that businesses have to consider when making decisions about their business. They include product, price, place, and promotion. Considering these four parameters will help you make sharper, more profitable business decisions.
