If you’re a startup looking for the best way to acquire customers for your SaaS product, look no further! In this blog post, we’ll cover the top SaaS customer acquisition strategy for success.
When it comes to customer acquisition, there are a lot of options out there. It can be tough to know where to start or what will work best for your business. But don’t worry – we’ve got you covered.
We’ve compiled the top SaaS customer acquisition strategy so that you can hit the ground running and start growing your business today.
Saas Customer Acquisition Strategy: Getting the Basics Right
SaaS companies need to focus on building a relationship with a customer and providing value before asking for a sale. By establishing trust and demonstrating the benefits of the product, customers will be more likely to sign up and use the product.
Other businesses, such as e-commerce, can focus more on making sales and then work on developing a relationship with the customer.
Needless to say, the SaaS sales cycle is a long and complicated process. According to research, the average SaaS sales cycle is around 84 days. This means that if you’re looking to acquire new customers through this method, you need to be prepared for a lengthy and detailed journey.
The lengthy sales process is caused mainly by factors like the high price of your product, privacy concerns, and too many options.
According to the data, here’s how the CAC benchmarks for the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market break down:
If you want to be able to effectively measure your return on investment (ROI), you need to track your customer lifetime value (CLV) and your cost of acquisition (COA).
This data can be extremely valuable in helping you determine which marketing channel to invest your resources in, and which areas your marketing team needs to improve on.
Acquiring customers for your SaaS company is a completely different process than acquiring customers for a traditional business model.
To build a successful customer acquisition strategy, you need to focus on three key areas:
- Identifying your target market
- Creating attractive and compelling content
- Utilizing effective marketing channels.
In the software as a service (SaaS) world, traditional marketing strategies like running a short-term promotion or offering a discount for signing up will not suffice. So what strategies work (and don’t work) for customer acquisition in the B2B space?
In this guide, we’ll cover 5 key steps to building a purpose-driven customer acquisition strategy for a SaaS product. We’ll also provide some insight into common pitfalls to avoid.
Stages of SaaS Customer Acquisition
There are three stages to getting a SaaS client: lead generation, lead conversion, and sales.
Top-of-Funnel (TOFU) lead gen is about getting new people to be aware of your product or service.
Lead conversion is the process of turning prospects who are aware of your product into marketing qualified leads (MQLs). This is done through further engagement with marketing or sales until they convert. Once converted, these leads are passed on to a salesperson.
How to Build a Purpose-Driven SaaS Customer Acquisition Strategy
Before getting into your strategy for acquiring customers, it can be helpful to see what other marketers think.
According to digital marketing expert, Tatev Hackobian, a customer acquisition strategy involves identifying and understanding new customers’ preferences, behaviors, and needs, and using all the available communication channels to reach them and create influential connections.
By doing so, you can create a strong connection with them.
1. Build a Well-Optimized Website
Your brand’s website is the first impression you’ll be creating among your leads and prospects, so it’s important to make sure it’s impressive. Take a look at Proof’s website, whose homepage doubles up as a live demo for their products on offer:
One good example is how Proof’s website doubles as a product demonstration.
The key to Proof’s success is its ability to show social proof through video customer testimonials and the use of well-known brands. This helps build trust with potential customers, which is essential for any business.
The brand’s hyper-personalized user experience is delivered in real-time, with the homepage automatically adapting to the user’s time zone. This ensures that users are presented with strategically-placed CTAs that are relevant to their location.
If your homepage is optimally designed, it can serve as an effective brochure or demo for your product. This in turn can create a more informative, user-friendly, and engaging browsing experience for potential customers.
2. Keep Your Customer Front-and-Center
If you want to be successful, always keep your customers at the forefront of your mind. They should be the center of everything you do in your business. By doing this, you will gain a larger share of the market.
It’s not about selling the benefits of your product but selling the benefits that customers will get from using your product.
There are several ways to do this. You can start by improving the user experience and incorporating the chat feature on your company’s website.
Customers can connect with agents in real-time and get all their questions answered immediately.
Many customer support software platforms allow for the integration of a knowledge base within the chat tool. This can be extremely helpful in providing quick and useful answers to repetitive user questions. Customers can then get the information they need immediately, without taking up the valuable time of a CX agent.
At any point in the customer journey, you should constantly be asking yourself two questions:
- How can we help users to achieve their goals?
- How can we address their pain points and gain their trust and confidence in our offering?
If you want to provide an exceptional customer experience, you need to use powerful tools like live chat. Live chat provides speed, accuracy, and user satisfaction, which are all essential for a great customer experience.
3. Showcase Success Stories
According to recent research, 31% of customers are more likely to spend when a business has positive online reviews.
There are a number of ways you can showcase your customers’ success stories, such as:
- Inserting the brand logos of well-established companies that you have partnered with as a way of showcasing social proof
- Sharing case studies on how your product/solution has helped customers
- Showcasing client testimonials in the form of quotes or videos
Showing proof that other people have benefited from your product can be the push that prospects need to convert.
Use testimonials from your customers to show how your business is improving the lives of your consumers.
4. Optimize the Pricing Page
Not having complete information on your pricing models is one of the biggest missteps that software as a service (SaaS) businesses can make.
Creating a well-optimized pricing page is one of the best ways to show your brand’s user-centric values and save your customers’ time.
No one likes unpleasant surprises, especially when it comes to prices. Optimizing your pricing page allows your brand to be upfront and honest about your pricing details from the get-go. This way, customers know exactly what they’re getting into and there are no nasty surprises down the line.
You can also include discount-related details within the annual subscription plans to help customers save money. You can also showcase pricing plans based on specific user personas for smaller companies to help them find the best option for their needs.
5. Create Valuable Content
If you’re a SaaS company, the majority of your content should be product-led. Promotional content should only make up a small portion of your strategy. Keep in mind SEO best practices when creating your content.
More importantly, the brand highlights product-related videos, making the content as diverse and interesting to watch as possible. By doing this, they are able to keep potential customers engaged and wanting to learn more about their products.
When curating content, make sure to do your research in order to understand if there is a search volume for search queries that your product can help address. We call this the Business Potential Score. This will ensure that your content is valuable and helpful to potential customers.
If there is none, then avoid producing content with a top, middle, and bottom-funnel focus. Rather, focus on creating your product’s value proposition.
This also includes some subtle pitching of the product as an irreplaceable solution to the customer’s problem.
Ahrefs’ blog does a great job of helping its audience understand how they can leverage their tools for effective search engine optimization. The beauty of their approach lies in the fact that the content is as non-promotional, subtle, and as tool-centric as possible.
Plus, the use of a variety of value-driven and clearly-demarcated content categories makes it well worth the read. These categories could include anything from video and case studies to general SEO blogs, each providing its own unique value.
Alex Souchoroukof, Marketing Copywriter at Moosend, explains that as a marketer, your success depends on your ability to connect with the people who buy from you. To do this, you need to understand who they are, what inspires them, and where they struggle. Once you have this information, you can create content that resonates with them.
Only then can you create an acquisition plan that will work for your business.
My best advice for SaaS companies who want to increase conversions is to segment their target clients and create individual conversion funnels for each. This process begins with conducting extensive research in order to get to know your customers and develop customer profiles.
As a SaaS company, you have the opportunity to give your leads a more relevant and personalized experience by providing educational content in various formats (interactive content, emails, blog posts, videos, etc.) at each stage of their funnel. By doing so, you’ll be able to convert more customers in the long run.
You can’t just have a generic consumer acquisition plan – you need to get specific and tailor your strategy to each different consumer category. It’s much easier to do this once you know who your target market is.
Why is SaaS Customer Acquisition So Difficult?
The length of software as a service (SaaS) sales process is typically much longer than that of other businesses. The average length for a software company is 3.2 months.
That’s quite a while to be following up with someone and asking them for their business. If you consider the factors that cause this lengthy sales process, you’ll see that it makes sense for buyers to take their time.
Sustainable growth for a software company comes from continually bringing in new clients and retaining them as long as possible.
SaaS customer acquisition can be difficult because of the competitive landscape. In order to find new opportunities for growth, businesses need to stand out in a crowded marketplace. This can be done by differentiating your product, providing valuable content, and creating a strong brand.
While companies focused on e-commerce sales use quick, temporary marketing campaigns to drive new customers, software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers need a much more long-term approach to acquiring customers.
SaaS customer acquisition can be difficult because it’s hard to convince someone to sign up for a new tool without first building a relationship with them. It’s important to demonstrate how your tool will help them before they make the commitment, and this can take time.
High Cost
SaaS solutions can be quite costly, especially when you factor in the recurring charges that come with the subscription-based payment model. This can really add up to be a lot of money for some businesses.
Privacy Concerns
SaaS solutions are based in the cloud, so new customers might worry about letting an unknown tool process their (or their customers’) personal data on external servers.
The GDPR makes this point an even bigger concern for businesses handling the data of EU citizens because they must ensure that all of their third-party providers are GDPR-compliant as well.
Complexity
Most SaaS tools are built with deep sets of features and complicated use cases to solve complex problems for which customers may not even know the extent of their needs.
Too Many Options
The SaaS industry has exploded in the past 10 years, meaning customers usually have several different choices when choosing a SaaS solution.
All of these factors act as barriers to customer acquisition. This is why SaaS customers require an extra level of care and education (or nurturing) to incrementally move them towards a purchase decision.
Depending on which stage your relationship with a potential customer is in, you’ll want to use different nurturing tactics (both on-site and external messaging) to communicate your value to them.
That’s why you need to map out your customer acquisition cycle to better understand what steps potential customers need to take before they sign up for your solution.
Conclusion
The best SaaS customer acquisition strategy is a combination of inbound and outbound marketing. By creating valuable content and reaching out to potential customers directly, you’ll be able to attract the right people to your product. So what are you waiting for? Start implementing these customer acquisition strategies today and watch your business grow!
