Marketing or selling Software as a Service (SAAS) or Platform as a service is a different ball game. For one, it’s not a transactional relationship; it’s ongoing and is value-generating over time. Meaning, SAAS customers grow with the company and, in return, generate more returns/revenues for a SAAS company. So, how does a SAAS company engage and retain its customers? How do they keep up to ensure that they are omnipresent in their customers’ minds? As with all forms of marketing, there are a few elements that SAAS companies specialize in. They have perfected the art of segmenting and talking to customers at scale.
Marketing for SAAS companies is serious business. For them, it’s never brand, and they will come approach but an approach that’s system and process-driven. The idea is to build a marketing process to scale and automate tasks wherever required.
Let’s take a look at those strategies that define the top SAAS companies.
Going beyond SAAS branding
Go beyond the logo, color palette, mood boards, etc., to elements that define your engagement on a day-to-day basis. For instance, your communication palette – tone of voice, choice of words, visual communication elements (like buttons, borders, lines, etc.), play a vital part in communicating brand values. Successful companies have deployed this successfully to ensure that your brain processes little or no information regarding their brands.
Think about it, companies like Intel, Google, Facebook, and the likes thrive on consistency to give you a sense of assurance, quality, promise, and brand presence. Every visual element is carefully crafted to ensure that you get the same feeling when you look or experience the brand.
For instance, every visual element in, say, a company like Google has a specific language. Graphs, data tables, separators all have their place; all have their place in bolstering the overall brand imagery. Now, these companies did not get this right the first time. But I’m sure they invested a significant amount of time trying, testing, and re-testing what’s right with several customers.
Crafting SAAS User journeys based on personas
Branding on its own is not enough. A deep understanding of the customers’ journey to experience your brand becomes a crucial element. But before going into user journeys, it is essential to talk about user journey’s how users discover your brand, and what they do from thereon. Defining customer personas of customers is a pre-cursor to developing user journeys. But why do you need to do this? For one, you can come with a unique experience per customer per touchpoint.
Now, that’s an ideal case, but with segmentation techniques, you could break up these personas into, say, 5-6 different personas and then craft unique communication payloads based on their interaction with touchpoints – user journey moments of truth. Communication payloads can be emails, push notifications, text messages, banner ads, offers, landing pages, etc.
Being rich and actionable in content
For a SAAS company, content is undoubtedly the king. But it’s the kind of content that is generated that makes all the difference. If your content is “push” driven with no meat, then it falls flat and slips into oblivion. It does more harm than good. Customers are likely to ignore it, and worse, push it to the realms of spam. So, how do you make your content engaging?
The idea is to think small and thinking of value. Review every piece of content that goes out of your company for three things. 1. Is this information of any value to my customer? 2. What action can they take with this piece of information? 3. Is this piece of content a ‘save for later’ piece of content? 4. Will it improve or accelerate his current thinking about a particular concept that we care about?
If the answer is yes to even a couple of the above questions, then push it to the customer. But here again, it’s essential to know what worked and what didn’t.
Grammarly is a cross-platform cloud-based writing assistant that reviews spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, engagement, and delivery mistakes in real-time. For example, Grammarly has a unique concept of engaging its user. Not only its ads are a class apart its content is deeply engaging.
For all its users, Grammarly mails its user once every week about their writing stats. The email is slick and pits the user’s language prowess against thousands of other users. Apart from many other things, Grammarly ensures its stays on the user’s mind once a week. More importantly, it tells the user about his progress. Therefore, it instills some motivation to write better and do better. In all this, Grammarly also stands to gain. As more users use Grammarly, the better Grammarly gets! So, Grammarly’s strategy to engage checks more than one box in our checklist above.
Probably the objective of Grammarly’s email is to motivate. But companies like HubSpot, Ahref take the concept of actionable content higher than most other SAAS companies. For instance, HubSpot is a treasure trove of information. With marketing templates, giveaways, educational content on inbound marketing ( they invented the concept), and even certification, HubSpot is a one-stop portal for all that is to marketing.
Leveraging the power of communities
Leveraging the power of communities is perhaps the holy grail when it comes to SAAS marketing. A community can take various shapes; for instance, it could be users, developers, evangelists; however you want to put it, communities wield tremendous power. The diffusion rate of a marketing program by way of communities is way faster than a traditional route ( i.e., without a captive group). A characteristic of a community is its collective product-level knowledge which SAAS companies leverage.
The creation of communities is not an overnight phenomenon. Again, like in any economic relationship, the value of being the community needs to be established. What is in it for the participant to be in a community. There has to be a value exchange in the equation else; the community is just another gathering. Companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft have leveraged the power of communities to enhance their products and services and take them to markets beyond traditional borders.
Get jiggy with tech (martech)
To sum up, a data layer is a crucial component for any SAAS company. A technology-enabled inbound marketing program is vital to propel customer engagement to scale. According to a Harvard case study, companies have poured money into marketing analytics – last year, according to Gartner, the study adds that CMOs invested more in this category last year than any other.
That said, the ultimate idea is to link these inbound/marketing metrics to revenue generation. A robust data layer enables this kind of transformation where every exposure and interaction needs to be measured, tested, and calibrated – only to be tested again. It’s a loop.
For this to happen, automation and designing systems to scale becomes imperative. To scale, SAAS companies often rely on automation. And this requires tools like HubSpot – a marketing automation platform – that takes care of acquisition, retention, and sustenance.
Endnote
Marketing SAAS is like running a marathon. You are in it for the long haul. A focused customer-centric strategy along with the right content and engagement tools should steer your SAAS ship to glory.
Thank you for reading!
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