As the founder of a SaaS company, I know how important it is to have a solid marketing plan in place. Without one, it’s very difficult to generate leads and grow your business. That’s why I’ve put together this guide on creating a successful SaaS marketing plan. By following the steps outlined below, you’ll be well on your way to driving more traffic and conversions for your business.
What is a SaaS Marketing Plan?
A Software as a Service (SaaS) marketing strategy is a plan to promote and sell a product online. It will include a mixture of marketing channels such as social media, content marketing, and email marketing to engage and convert customers.
Tactics may include content marketing, search engine optimization, lead generation, and lead nurturing.
The importance of a long-lasting relationship with customers is integral to the success of a Saas business. The objective is to build a lasting partnership, not make a one-time quick buck.
We are looking for clients who will be with us for the long term. These deals can take anywhere from six months to three times as long to complete.
With all of this in mind, it’s important to create flexible marketing strategies that can adapt based on market demand, marketing strategy, and more. This might seem like a lot to invest in, but consider the benefits of this for your SaaS company:
- You can capture new users who you can then lead down the sales funnel.
- You can keep your customers coming back.
- You can explain to consumers what your product or service is and what it does.
- You can tell customers about your brand.
- You can convert casual browsers into customers, leads into qualified opportunities, and qualify those opportunities to loyal customers.
So, let’s dive into how to build a scalable, dynamic, and agile marketing plan for your B2B company.
Marketing for a SaaS company is a whole different ball game than marketing for other types of businesses. Software companies need to focus more on acquiring customers, building their customer base, and competing with other tech companies.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t any opportunities for new businesses, but rather that they need to have a great marketing strategy in place if they’re going to succeed.
In the world of SaaS, sales teams typically value retention over acquisition. They want their app in the consumer’s hands (or on their mobile screens) for as long as possible.
When there’s a 60-70% chance that an existing client will purchase from you compared to only 5-20% for a new prospect, can you blame SaaS marketers for wanting to focus more on existing customers?
How to Create a Successful SaaS Marketing Plan
Now let’s try to put together a great marketing plan that will accomplish our objectives.
Get the Right People on Your Team
What roles will you need to fill, and who will fill them?
Don’t forget to include decision-makers on your team. Who’s ultimately responsible for approving projects and initiatives?
When you’re starting a project, it’s crucial to get all the right people on board. This means hiring experts who know what they’re doing and having access to skills and knowledge that you don’t have.
For creatives, especially writers, designers, and video producers, it’s important to find and brief your freelancers early on. By finding and hiring your freelance team now, you can ensure that you have the manpower you need to succeed.
Hiring your entire team at the beginning will help avoid bottlenecking later.
Allocate Your Budget
Now that you’ve allocated your annual budget, it’s time to break down that budget into the individual line items you’ll need for marketing.
How much money are you spending on each of these platforms?
Don’t plan out all of your budgets at once. Instead, do it in stages.
Leave some room in your budget for experimentation. If you see something is working, you have some wiggle room to try new things.
On average, 30% of marketing budgets are spent on brand marketing and 70% on growth marketing.
Get the Right Tools
What software do you recommend for acquiring customers?
Whether you’ve already got them or are in the process of sourcing and onboarding them, now is the time to get everything ready!
SaaS Marketing Plan
How to Build a Killer SaaS Marketing Plan
We won’t let you wait! Here are 7 expert opinions on how to scale your SaaS marketing plan.
Write content that is relevant to your niche.
“First, you should gather your resources. Next, you should figure out which subjects are the most important to your industry and customers. Then, you should set up some landing pages that are relevant for your market.
Next, create some evergreen, generic content. These guidelines can help you plan your content marketing strategy for the whole year.
Incorporating video into my marketing strategy is becoming more and more popular. Adding it to my marketing plan would definitely help.
It is unique in the market. It all depends on how competitive your topics and how much you have.
Kevin Indig, Director SEO at Shopify
Begin by understanding and knowing your target audience.
“In seven steps, you can create an effective and scalable SaaS marketing strategy.
1) Build your ideal customer profile (ICP). Ask yourself: For whom is my product the best match? What are their biggest pain points?
2) Identify the people who are there. Where do these people consume content? Are they at meetups? What do they read? What do they watch?
3)Which are the best ways to reach these people through their places? How efficient can a channel be? Is it scalable? Go to market.
4) Know your CAC for each marketing technique, including outbound, Facebook ads and referrals. This will help you monitor each channel.
5) Let’s define OKRs based on what we know, how much money we have, and what investors ask for… let us set some milestones. We want to get XX new customers at this CAC. What are the OKRs for the team to drive this?
6) Which product positioning will you put in place?
7) Responsibility matrix: What resources do we require? Who does it? What do we have? – More on the human side of things.
Sergi Garcia, Chief Marketing Officer at Red Points.
Learn from your mistakes.
“A key step is analyzing past campaigns and plans that didn’t go so well. What can we do with that information?
It’s not enough to say that a marketing method doesn’t work or is too expensive. There could be a number of reasons why your campaign isn’t performing well. Factors such as landing page and message, creative and design, target audience, local event, tracking and data, and more could be to blame.
When a campaign fails, instead of throwing in the towel, it’s important to dig deeper and figure out why.
These failures are valuable data, which you can use to launch a new experiment.
Holly Chen Marketing Advisor @ Loom
Take advantage of tools to analyze data and segment consumers.
Let’s say we’re dealing with a very early-stage software-as-a-service (SaaS) company. It’s important to consider early on what key performance indicator (KPI) data you’ll want to track to determine if you’re product/market fit.
Then, determine if users are willing to pay and why.
Don’t look at your entire user base from a global perspective. Instead, segment your userbase by cohort to ensure that you have as detailed a view of them as you possibly can.
Your user feedback should make up 70% of your product marketing.
One-on-one sessions with clients, where you talk to them directly, are very useful to gain insights about how people use your product or service.
Manuel Jaffrin Tech Entrepreneur & Startup Investor. GetApp Co-founder .
Get to know your customer better.
“In 1-1 interviews, you need to speak with your target audience or existing users to create a killer SaaS marketing strategy.
There are so many ways that user research can help you. For example, you can gain insights into what product features you should build, what pain points you should address, what big marketing ideas you should pursue, and which language you should be using in your content.
It’s not possible to do it quickly, but you should record them and create transcripts so that you can sort them and get the key insights you need.
Eden Bidani Conversion Copywriter. Company NameGreen Light Copywriter Marketing + Acquisition Strategist
Use the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework.
“My process usually involves researching, theorizing, testing, and iterating. The Jobs-To-Be-Done interview template is especially useful in identifying objections or motivations. I rely on it a lot. Testing is not something I enjoy – it’s about iterating over and over again.
Nikki Elbaz, HEAD OF EMAIL, COPYHACKERS
Get very specific with your data to find out what works best.
“By analyzing smaller sets of the data more frequently, we were able to better identify which areas of our marketing strategy were working and which weren’t.
It’s crucial to understand every step of a user’s journey, from the first time they interact with your brand to the moment they convert to a customer.
We track which marketing channel performs the best at generating opportunities. We also look at how they perform in conjunction with each other. These numbers help guide our investment.
This will help us to continue our growth on these channels and find new ways to optimize them or create new channels that are even better!
Amy Woodward, Digital Marketing Manager @ Alaya
Conclusion: SaaS Marketing Plan
There you have the tips for creating a successful SaaS marketing plan! By following these tips, you’ll be well on your way to driving more traffic and conversions for your business. Now, go and create that killer SaaS marketing plan! You know you can do it!
