You’ve finished establishing your software as a service—congratulations! Now, how do you get it in front of customers in such a crowded industry?
When learning how to market a SaaS product, then the first thing you need to understand is the importance of your digital reach. How easy your product is to find on the internet is a measurement of the impact it’s made online and helps facilitate your growth. If you want to do well, you need a strong digital footprint, so how can SaaS marketing help?
We’ve put together this helpful guide to lay out what SaaS marketing is, how it can best work for you, and how you can eventually get the growth you’re looking for.
What is SaaS marketing? What makes it unique?
SaaS marketing is how you can bring your SaaS product to the digital world, reach the customers who’d benefit most from it, and start growing your revenue.
However, a SaaS product comes with its own unique set of selling points and challenges when compared to traditional product marketing. What makes SaaS marketing unique is that instead of getting customers to buy a license, SaaS usually involves a subscription, often with a free trial. You’re asking for an ongoing relationship with a customer, and that requires different communication and more trust than a one-off purchase.
The ongoing nature of SaaS products also means customer retention is just as important as acquisition. After all, if you can’t retain the customers you’re bringing in, then you’re just treading water instead of growing.
Your SaaS product also needs to facilitate immediate access, updates, and flexible scaling. When one bug or loading screen can turn a customer away, staying on top of your software’s health becomes vital for marketing, too.
How to market SaaS: 5 essential steps
Now that you understand more clearly what SaaS marketing is, let’s dig into how to do it. We’ve outlined five essential steps that can help you get started.
1. Establish clear objectives
Any good marketing strategy starts with clear goals, which means choosing the right key performance indicators (KPIs).
Your marketing goals should be SMART, which means they should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. You’ll choose KPIs to go along with them to better help you measure your success. For a SaaS business, some of the most important goals would be:
- Goal: Increase brand awareness by 25%.
- KPIs: social media engagement, brand mentions, website traffic
- Goal: Gather 50 high-quality leads
- KPIs: conversion rate, total lead value, customer acquisition cost (CAC)
- Goal: Retain high-value consumers
- KPIs: customer lifetime value (CLV), churn rate, monthly recurring revenue
The point of these goals for a SaaS business is to focus more on the specifics of the SaaS lifecycle. What value can you provide to a customer over the long-term relationship you’re seeking with them? That’s what a subscription-based product is: a relationship.
2. Identify your target audience
More and more major players enter the SaaS marketplace everyday. To best compete in this sphere, it’s important to identify the perfect target audience and get to know them inside and out. The only true way to get your product to stand out is to know exactly who you’re talking to—but how exactly do you do that?
Start by building your ideal customer profile (ICP). This is a detailed, research-based profile of the customer or client you think would be perfect for your business. Building an ICP involves collecting a wide range of information from basic demographics to more in-depth psychographic info. The purpose is to outline in great detail all the consumer needs you’re fit to meet and what kind of consumer would make the highest-value long-term customer for you.
Once you have your ICP, you can drill down further into your buyer personas. These are more specific than the ICP and you’ll have multiple. For SaaS, your buyer personas would probably be categorized based on individuals, businesses, and influencers.
3. Perform extensive competitor analysis
When the average person already has at least 12 subscriptions, convincing them to sign up for one more can be a much tougher sell. Doing extensive competitor analysis is especially important for SaaS marketers. If you don’t understand what else the market is offering, it’s impossible to know how to stand out.
You’ll want to think about your SaaS product in two key ways: how it fits among your direct competition and how it fits into the wider SaaS landscape. The second point is important because if your ideal customer already has a ton of other subscriptions, it’ll be all the more difficult to get them to subscribe to yours.
When analyzing the market you should pay special attention to:
- Product features
- Pricing
- Customer support
- Branding
When you’re ready to dig into the real research, you’ll want to use Google, other search tools (Ahrefs, Semrush, etc.), review sites, social media, and your competitors’ websites to see how they position themselves. These references inform SEO decisions, which will increase your visibility in the long-run. Learn more about how to optimize for search engines.
4. Provide a unique selling proposition
In many ways, all the competitive research you’ve been doing has been to narrow down your unique selling proposition (UPI). Your UPI is how you can cut through the noise and stand out amongst a dense industry niche. Your value prop should be clear, concise, and intriguing for the customer. For SaaS companies, the difficulty here is that your product isn’t tangible.
To start, try boiling your product down to a single main benefit: reducing costs, increasing revenue, or improving productivity. Use this as an umbrella from which to drill down into specifics. Your ICP, buyer personas, and competitive analysis can all work together to help you see how you can stand out.
Try using that research to answer questions like:
- What do you do that your competitors don’t?
- What are your ideal customer’s biggest problems?
- What do your ideal customers most need?
It might be tempting to stay really broad here in the hopes you can appeal to more people, but in such a crowded market this would be a mistake. Only by getting specific about what you have to offer can you speak more honestly to your target audience and seem more appealing.
5. Take advantage of the right marketing channels
When it’s finally time to choose where to market your unique value proposition, you want to be extremely thoughtful about it. Running ads everywhere you can think of isn’t necessarily your best bet. Remember: you’re going after high-quality targets who might be the most receptive to your messaging and be the most high-value customers in the long run.
Return to all the research you did in crafting your personas and ICP, and then tailor your marketing channels to where you have the best chance of reaching them. Here are some of the channels we recommend for SaaS marketers and why:
- SEO & Content Marketing: By crafting original, interesting content like what we create at Ranq that’s specific to your target audiences interests, you’ll be able to speak more directly to their concerns and even begin building trust. Even better, by incorporating SEO best practices, you’ll have an even better chance of your target audiences finding your content.
- Influencer Marketing: Influencers have become a key part of many businesses marketing plans and for good reason: it’s a smart way to reach specific demographics and build brand recognition among them! By leveraging an influencer’s audience and their rapport with their fans, you can grow more quickly.
- Paid Search Advertising: Paid search is part of the bread and butter of many marketing strategies. It can help boost the pages you most want to be viewed, which is critical when you factor in that click-through rates decline an average of 32% for each position on the first page of search results.
We’ll get more into detail about these soon.
What challenges does SaaS marketing face?
The world of SaaS is not without its challenges, even when you have a great strategy locked down. Let’s take a look at three of the most common challenges many SaaS marketers face today as well as some potential solutions.
Brand awareness
The Problem: Because SaaS is so crowded and dynamic, and because new services pop up every day, brand awareness is extremely difficult to establish. There are more than 30,000 SaaS companies as of 2024 and 60% of them are in the US—that’s a lot of competition and a lot of noise in the marketplace to overcome.
Companies that struggle to distinguish themselves from the competition are more likely to have a rocky road to success, especially when almost 90% of SaaS startups fail. That figure can be daunting, but it’s not all bad news.
The Solution: Pairing your marketing efforts with brand consistency and engaging storytelling can help set your SaaS business up for success. Your marketing efforts should feel in line with your company and its products as a whole.
With the goal of consistency in mind, you should work to create content and strategies that clearly communicate what you have to offer. It’s important not to get hung up on showcasing why what you have is great that you forget to make sure audiences understand exactly what you’re offering. If you can strike that balance, you’re well on your way.
Customer loyalty
The Problem: With SaaS, it’s hard to prevent churn. Customers are subscribed, but they can end it to switch over to a competitor if there’s a better deal or better features. They can start and stop the service as they choose, or even look for loopholes to try and squeeze out more free trials. Churn rate can be measured at several different levels which are: customer level (customer churn), subscription level (product churn), and recurring revenue level (MRR or ARR weighted churn).
This can cause your CVR to fluctuate wildly, making it hard for you to predict everything from revenue to active user base. It also means that a great deal of time, money, and energy put into acquiring customers isn’t seeing a return on the investment.
The Solution: Luckily, there are a few different ways to tackle the problem of churn rate. FYou can do something simple like offer yearly pricing rates. If there’s a discount for subscribing for the full year versus paying monthly, it can help steady your churn rate.
You can also look at the actual customer experience. Are there hiccups that aren’t being addressed? Are customers encountering a disconnect between what was promised in the advertising and what you can actually deliver? Do your best to make everything on the customer’s end as seamless as possible.
Technical difficulties
The Problem: Bugs and performance issues happen, which is normal for just about any business, but without constant updating and maintenance, customers can become quickly dissatisfied. You’ll also want to pay close attention to how often you’re needing customers to update the product and how much time your team has to resolve issues. The frequency of updates can be a serious impediment to retaining customers.
If your customers have the impression that the product they’ve signed up for only works half the time or requires hours of maintenance every week to work properly, they’re going to get fed up and your subscription rate will drop.
The Solution: Start by taking a look at your customer service, product, and tech teams and being brutally honest about if they’re understaffed or undertrained. If you’ve had some shakeups recently and haven’t been able to backfill positions, then filling these gaps should be a priority to protect the integrity of your user experience.
Another possibility is to make sure your security is all up to date. If things like malware or cyberattacks are causing the technical difficulties, beefing up security wherever and however you can could save you a lot of headaches down the road.
What are the best marketing strategies for SaaS companies?
Now that you understand more about the basics and challenges of SaaS marketing, it’s time to start thinking about what strategies to deploy. Get familiar with a few of the best SaaS marketing strategies to get going.
SEO
Getting eyes on a website is impossible without SEO, which capitalizes on visibility and organic reach. Being that brand awareness is so difficult in SaaS, SEO becomes vital for long-term growth. But what is SEO? After doing some keyword (or search term) research relevant to both your product and your audience’s interests, you strategically use those keywords on relevant webpages.
When done well, search engines will recognize your site as having relevant information to the keyword and boost your page in the search result rankings. At Ranq, we understand that the more relevant your pages are to the important keywords, the better your ranking will be. And the better your ranking, the more likely your target audience is to click on your site.
Since SaaS is a competitive marketplace, doing whatever you can to organically capture SEO traffic can really help give you a leg up. That’s because SEO traffic can compound, meaning the more strong SEO links you build, the more your traffic can grow month-over-month. That’s why many SaaS businesses opt to hire an SEO company so they can have experts devote their attention to the whims of search engines.
Content marketing
Content marketing is all about creating intelligent, original, interesting, and SEO-informed content that can help bring in organic traffic. In fact, according to The New York Times, “Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing channels, and of these leads, they are 6 times as likely to convert.”
If you think regurgitating old content or keyword stuffing will fly, think again. Google’s gotten better at docking unsatisfactory results like that, so it’s worth putting in the extra effort to make your original content great, which is exactly what we can help you do at Ranq.
Luckily, software is complicated, and that means there is a wealth of rich topics at your fingertips. Educate prospective customers about the product, its benefits, and how to utilize it effectively. You can also widen your scope to discuss adjacent topics, like diving into common problems your product helps people address. In addition to all of this content enriching your site, by properly using SEO, you can bring in potential customers who’ve never even heard of your company before.
Paid advertising (PPC)
Paid advertising (pay-per-click), while expensive, offers short-term spikes that can help a SaaS company get ahead of competitors at critical moments. It encompasses all the usual channels: paid search, paid social, display ads, and more. These channels should be thought of as supplementary to your overall strategy rather than main channels. They’re not as good at attracting the high-quality leads you’re looking for as a SaaS marketer.
That said, it does give you the ability to calculate your ROI thanks to a defined budget, and you can segment your audience based on the channels that make the most sense for them to better reach the targets you’re most interested in. PPC also allows you to automate some of its functions to respond to conditional statements you set, making it more dynamic.
Social media and influencer marketing
At this point, social media has been the new word-of-mouth for years and its power can’t be rightly underestimated if you know how to harness it. Having influential figures or accounts refer your software to their audience increases your visibility and, importantly, establishes credibility.
But it’s important to be selective about which social media channels and which influencers you partner with because you want them to match your target audiences. For instance, MrBeast might be the most popular YouTuber, but his fans skew very young; if your software isn’t for kids, then using him isn’t going to have the impact you’d hope for.
You’ll want to use some of the intense research you did earlier on your target demos to make sure your SaaS message is reaching the people you want it to reach. You’ll also want to focus more on educational content as opposed to merely hopping on trends or making things for entertainment value.
Ranq specializes in growing your SaaS marketing efforts exponentially
Thanks to Ranq’s expertise in SaaS SEO and content marketing, we have the power to give your SaaS marketing efforts the boost they need. Now that you know just how much heavy lifting those two types of marketing can do for you, allowing an expert team to help you tackle it will take some of the marketing burden off your shoulders and give you a dedicated staff working on your content will help you produce pieces of higher quality that will ultimately be more effective. What are you waiting for? Reach out to Ranq today and get started.