The SaaS industry is one of the most competitive industries, with many companies creating products that perform the same functions. SaaS companies must therefore find ways to stand out from the crowd and establish themselves as industry leaders. These companies need an excellent SaaS digital marketing strategy.

What is Digital Marketing for SaaS Providers?

Digital marketing for SaaS providers involves marketing SaaS products on digital platforms. And since SaaS products are not tangible, SaaS companies must strategize and develop a solid marketing plan. 

Users pay for SaaS products on a subscription basis. This means that customer retention is one of the critical goals of a SaaS digital marketing strategy. SaaS marketers must nurture leads to win their trust and ensure long-term engagement. 

The best way to nurture leads is by providing valuable content that makes SaaS companies win the trust of potential customers. Regular sharing of valuable content establishes the company as a leader in its field. Customers can always come to the company when they need information about anything in the industry.

How To Do Effective SaaS Digital Marketing

Effective digital marketing for SaaS requires the development of an effective strategy. The tactics to help make the entire strategy successful include the following. 

• Inbound Marketing 
• Harnessing the power of free trials
• Turning your website into a conversion machine
• Hitting your audience with a top-notch email marketing campaign.
• Invest in PPC Ads
• Take advantage of affiliate marketing
• Provide top-notch customer service
• Enhance the user experience

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is a strategy that uses content to attract customers. You publish valuable content, and people will find it using Google search. People clicking to see your content are already interested in that information. Inbound marketing involves two aspects:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Content marketing

When creating content for inbound marketing, ensure that the content is relevant and will be helpful to the audience. Research keywords for a given topic and use the keywords strategically.

Some ideas to help you with inbound marketing are:

• Find relevant topics by using keyword planner tools.
• Provide various types of content and market to different audiences. Think about blogging, video content, white papers, and research reports.
• Use a calendar to schedule the topics and keywords to cover over a specific period. Know what to cover within three months, six months, and one year, then review to see what you still need to cover comprehensively.
• Track the performance and see the areas that need adjustment to improve results.

The benefits of content marketing include:

• Affordability: The average customer acquisition cost (CAC) is lower than other advertising forms.
• Build authority: Creating valuable content will help you establish yourself as an authority brand, and people will seek your opinion/ expertise in your field.
• Customer retention: Customer retention is the core of SaaS companies. Sharing valuable content will keep customers engaged, increasing their lifetime value.

Harnessing the Power of Free Trials

Free trials will give customers the actual feel of using your product. They will identify the benefits and interact with your company, helping them rate your customer service. It is the easiest way to win customers because they already know the value of your product.

Identifying qualified leads and emailing them an offer for a free trial is a low-cost approach that can help build trust. Your SaaS business will benefit even if the leads do not purchase subscription after the trial. You can send a survey to the participants during and after the trial period to identify what works and isn’t.

Turning Your Website Into a Conversion Machine

Website optimization ensures compatibility with search engine crawlers, helping to increase the chances of being shown on relevant searches. It also makes it user-friendly so potential customers can find what they want.

You can also work on conversion rate optimization (CRO), which requires the combined efforts of web developers, SEO marketers, and other creatives. It may be complex, but the return on investment is worth the effort. With a clear CRO strategy, your website improves on aspects like readability, loading speed, and navigability.

Various tools can help you identify the aspects of your website that need improvement. A tool like Microsoft Clarity can help you see how people interact with the website, the pages where people spend the most time, and other aspects.

Email Marketing

Most SaaS companies get leads from email addresses. Once you collect email addresses, you should find ways to nurture them. The nurturing process varies depending on the industry, but you should ensure that your emails contain informational content. You can send educational resources such as industry news, product updates, and more.

Instead of sending generic messages, treat each lead individually and send them personalized messages. Segment the emails and send specific emails to particular groups. Remember to use automation and send mobile-friendly emails.

Use PPC Ads

Pay-per-click (PPC) ads can help generate leads, but you should be careful when deciding the keywords to target. Highly-competitive keywords can increase costs significantly, and you may lose the entire PPC budget after a few short ads. Pick keywords that won’t take too much from your budget. 

Try investing on multiple platforms instead for more visibility. For instance, campaign on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn like you do on Google. You can also use sponsored posts to increase engagement in your content marketing campaigns. 

Affiliate Marketing

One of the most cost-effective SaaS digital marketing strategies to help your business generate new leads is affiliate marketing. You only pay the affiliates after someone purchases a plan or signs up for a trial. In many cases, the affiliates are your existing customers. The plan helps you continue to serve existing customers while they work to win new customers for your company.

Provide Excellent Customer Service

Providing top-notch customer service can help retain customers because people like staying where they are treated well. Bad experiences with the customer service team can make customers change their views about the company. 

Make it easy for customers to find your company’s contact information. Ensure that they talk to real people. Robots may not be able to provide sufficient responses in some situations. Give tutorials to help them troubleshoot problems. Add a page to your website with FAQs. 

Enhance the User Experience

Your SaaS digital marketing strategy should involve getting customer feedback to know what aspects they like about software. Seek insights about what they find unimpressive and find ways to improve it.

Best SaaS Marketing Tools and Platforms

SaaS digital marketing involves adopting several strategies to yield the desired results. You must employ some online tools to make things easier and more transparent. The tools help your marketing teams save time and energy and organize workflows. 

Let’s look at the ten best digital marketing tools for your SaaS business. 

• Google Analytics
• SocialPilot
• Hubspot
• Databox
• SEMRush
• Ahrefs
• Surfer SEO
• Vidyard
• RightMessage
• Unbounce

Google Analytics

Google is the most popular search engine, with over 86% of online searches. You can advance to the top of your sector by incorporating Google Analytics into your SaaS marketing plan. Google Analytics checks all types of traffic to your website and gives you insights about the audience. It also checks the website’s performance, measuring the load time and mobile friendliness.

Google Analytics is the best tool for traffic metrics, giving information about time on site, bounce rate, visitor categorization, and many other aspects. It provides you with the most critical metrics to grow your site. 

SocialPilot

SocialPilot helps with content marketing on social media. It will help you establish the type of content getting the most engagement, measure your social media posts’ overall performance, and identify the best time to post on different platforms. You can also use it to schedule social media posts. 

You can use SocialPilot for content on all social media platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and many others. The comprehensive analytics provided can help produce reports you can examine with your team. With Social Pilot, you can stand out on social media and establish your brand for greater success.

Hubspot

Hubspot helps SaaS businesses in various ways, especially in their inbound marketing strategy. It can help you develop an excellent SEO strategy and design CTAs that most people in your audience will click. It offers a variety of options for content management, lead qualification, and nurturing. 

Hubspot helps you build personas representing your ideal customers. SaaS products are sold to companies that may go through lengthy discussions before purchasing the product. Understanding your ideal persona can help you design an effective marketing strategy before marketing your SaaS product to them. 

The tool also allows you to identify the content type and sources generating the most leads.

Databox

Databox understands that decision-making for companies relies on data from different sources. It collects this data and avails it in a single platform for easy access and faster decision-making. 

Databox also allows creation of custom dashboards to meet every company’s unique needs. For instance, you can create a dashboard to help with your customer retention efforts relying on data from Google Analytics, paid advertising platforms, customer relationship management, etc. You’ll only pull the most pertinent data from each channel to build a useful dashboard for customer retention. 

Databox has many dashboard templates you can modify and customize to fit your needs. You can also set goals for your digital marketing strategy and track them. 

SEMRush

SEMRush is a digital marketing platform that helps businesses with SEO, social media marketing, PPC, and content marketing. The best-known property of SEMRush is its keyword analysis and research function. It can also provide traffic analysis and check backlinks and domains. 

Content marketers can use the tool’s keyword overview function to determine the keywords to target based on the metrics given. It also allows SaaS companies to check user trends and competitors’ strategies to get new customers. You can also compare how your website compares to others on search engines, identifying keywords that cause changes in rankings.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs can help you with link building, keyword research and analysis, and rank tracking. It is one of the leading tools for SEO analytics and can help you establish a solid digital marketing strategy. 

The backlink checker allows you to evaluate the popularity of backlinks, enabling the identification of the most linked-to pages. You can also get insights into the traffic to the site and its sources. 

The rank tracker feature allows you to monitor rankings on mobile and desktop. You can also compare it with competitors’ rankings, analyzing the performance of specific keywords. The best thing is that the tool sends alerts for new links, web mentions, and keyword rankings.

Surfer SEO

Surfer SEO is the ideal tool for search engine optimization. Content marketers can use it to find topics for content, identify formatting problems, and rank higher in search results. It also integrates with other tools to help make content more optimized. 

Surfer SEO has features for content planning, editing, and provision of SEO audits. The content planner uses keywords to generate content ideas. The content editor gives feedback about your writing, ensuring that you only publish optimized content that can help the marketing strategy. 

The SEO audit function checks the details of your website, identifying missing links and any other features that may hinder SEO. It analyzes website speed, word count, keywords, and many other aspects that can help improve website traffic. 

Vidyard

Video marketing has gained popularity, and you can use Vidyard to analyze the performance of your video content. Vidyard makes content marketing more lively since people can see the marketer. Adding a face to the video content can help increase engagement, and people may follow through with the call to action. 

The tool lets marketers know the people who watched the video, the time spent watching, and the number of times they watched. You also identify the engagement on various platforms. All these insights can help your CRM efforts.

RightMessage

RightMessage helps marketers to enhance conversions. It enables content marketers to segment audiences and personalizes content to increase engagement and conversion rates. 

RightMesage allows you to conduct surveys by asking for responses on specific aspects of your SaaS tools. 

Personalization is based on the responses the audience gives. Based on the data, you get a clear understanding of the audience and create CTAs that make them feel heard. RighMessage helps the company win customer trust and loyalty, a factor that helps the sustainability of SaaS companies. 

Unbounce

Unbounce helps marketers build optimized landing pages to improve user experience and make SaaS digital marketing more effective. Because the landing pages impress potential customers, they will check out your products and make a purchase. 

Unbounce uses built-in features like stickers and pop-ups to ensure that the landing pages are optimized to meet the customers’ needs. This makes it easy to convert visitors into leads. You can also conduct A/B testing to identify your strengths and weaknesses and adjust accordingly. 

You get detailed reports about landing pages, providing sufficient data that you can use for strategizing and content marketing.

Get the Right Marketing Tools for Your SaaS Business

SaaS online marketing can help you grow your SaaS business. You need to get the right tools to help you with the job. You can use multiple marketing tools to optimize your SaaS content marketing.