Growth
The SaaS Marketing Strategy That MAXIMIZES Earnings
A company without marketing is a company destined to fail. To generate strong leads, increase revenue, and maximize profits, SaaS (Software as a Service) providers, especially, need a marketing strategy that works. Too often, SaaS founders, owners, and executives are overwhelmed. They’re burdened with operational responsibilities and struggle to scale up.
Dallin Cottle
Fortunately, ROAR CMO is a leader in fractional CMO services, utilizing a high-velocity marketing framework to drastically improve businesses’ marketing strategies, sales development, growth trajectories, and leadership aims.
ROAR CMO has successfully engineered a 7-figure marketing agency, one that has worked with national marketing directors and corporations as prestigious and large as the US Airforce. Infused with leading global talent, ROAR CMO offers a Free Consultation, initiated with a painless Clarity Call.
For a SaaS marketing strategy that transcends all others, SaaS companies rely on the expertise and experience of providers like ROAR.
Why SaaS Companies Absolutely Need CMO Services
A content marketing strategy is a plan or methodology, designed to facilitate marketing for a given business, organization, or entity. Businesses need content marketing and general marketing services for various reasons. These marketing efforts facilitate a company’s growth by generating quality leads that ultimately produce revenue for the company.
The truth is very simple. It doesn’t matter how exciting a business venture may appear, or how great an idea, service, or product is, if the marketing efforts aren’t strategic.
Don’t Lose Out to a Failing Marketing Strategy
Without the appropriate marketing of a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), even the most promising service and product providers can flounder. If the right clients and customers are not targeted and converted, many companies fail.
Unfortunately, this happens all the time. Companies are unable to scale, diversify, and effectively market what they offer. Despite all the potential in the world, they simply can’t reach their goals.
The lack of a sound marketing strategy is often to blame. Without a robust, functional, and lasting marketing framework, companies cannot communicate or deliver value for customers, clients, and partners alike.
SaaS Companies, Especially, Live and Die by CMO Marketing
SaaS companies live on the cutting edge. They offer technological products and services that deliver indispensable capabilities, functions, and outcomes companies need. Without SaaS providers, many businesses would never be able to expand or succeed.
But how do SaaS businesses themselves expand or succeed?
For a start, many take on venture capital funding to raise money for growth. This means that even if you have the best product on the market, contenders often have the resources to put a more robust and aggressive marketing strategy in place.
Without the competitive advantage an expert CMO can bring to the table, your business risks losing market share which diminishes your potential for growth.
Cutting-Edge SaaS Is Nothing Without Customer Acquisition
SaaS companies’ customers deserve and need competitively low subscription fees, consummate IT expertise, diverse updates and features, and industry-specific management systems offered by SaaS providers.
However, without a strong, tailored CMO to elevate SaaS brand awareness, leadership, and marketing, potential SaaS clients will find someone else. This can prevent poorly marketed SaaS providers from making untold amounts of money.
Why lose out to competitors, when your business could be digging the market’s goldmine instead?
Too Many SaaS Businesses Fail at SaaS Content Marketing
How else will customers remain and customer success sustain? How else will businesses and individuals learn how SaaS marketing and digital marketing schemes can help them immensely?
A seasoned CMO company can immediately address these concerns, assisting SaaS marketers from the very first meeting. Whether a comprehensive content marketing strategy or infrequent marketing guidance, there are many ways in which CMO services facilitate SaaS success.
Without professional guidance, many C-executives, owners, and founders of SaaS companies are too busy to manage effective marketing strategies.
SaaS Executives Don’t Have the Time or Resources for Top Marketing
Oftentimes, SaaS professionals lack the time and resources to properly engage in SaaS marketing. They’re too overwhelmed with handling everything else. They struggle with managing operational inefficiencies, pouring over bottom lines, and dealing with personnel to ever truly take the deep dive into top-notch SaaS marketing metrics.
If you’re too busy to understand the latest B2C and B2B SaaS marketing trends and utilize the latest SaaS content marketing strategies, then you’ll never have SaaS marketing success.
Fortunately, you’re not alone, and a content marketing specialist can provide you with all the help you need. Firstly, however, it’s important to identify the marketing, leadership, and sales development areas in which the SaaS provider is lacking.
Primary Marketing Troubles of SaaS Companies
SaaS businesses rely on consistently functional technologies, programs, and software to provide the services their clients need. These critical tools of the trade can solve numerous problems across industries, allowing a virtually unlimited range of companies to better serve their clients and streamline their services.
Unfortunately, many SaaS businesses do not have their own SaaS marketing agencies. Moreover, these businesses and service providers often do not understand the extent to which a CMO can be helpful.
Content marketing goes beyond attracting potential customers through lead generation. Rather, a CMO is also fully committed to other central and peripheral aspects of a business’s success.
Put simply, marketing is not just marketing. SaaS marketing entails any activities and services that impart value to SaaS consumers.
Creative SaaS Development and Oversight
This important category can be handled by a marketing team, but oftentimes SaaS providers do not have a fully functional marketing team that equally understands the creative elements and can communicate them to clients.
A sound B2C or B2B SaaS sales strategy may be lacking if it doesn’t differentiate products and services. With countless SaaS providers in the market, companies need to concisely and precisely convey how they are different.
Are they geared toward accounting and financing software? Do they provide groundbreaking client management systems? Can they help with data analytics, diagnostics, or projective metrics?
Why Creativity is Integral to a Successful Marketing Strategy
A creative SaaS marketing campaign highlights these attributes, targets the appropriate customer base, and provides the necessary sales funnel to convert leads to actual clients.
Interactive, dynamic websites rich with compelling videos, photos, and digital marketing are just one part of a creative strategy. A unique social media marketing stratagem is also an integral part of any creative B2C or B2B SaaS marketing budget.
The trick is always to stand out. Can website visitors and social media users enjoy a memorable experience? Are there real-world examples, like conventions, seminars, workshops, and live training sessions? How about distinct magazine features, newsletters, newspaper articles, and other engaging media?
Combining traditional marketing methods with digital marketing in a creative fashion is key to elevating one company’s SaaS products above a similar company’s SaaS products.
SaaS Marketing Research for Company Positioning
Oftentimes, the average SaaS marketing playbook is outdated. It’s filled with unoriginal or overused plays, lacking in accuracy, relevancy, and completeness. This is no surprise. It’s hard enough to ensure the software is running smoothly and providing what clients want.
Developing the best B2C and B2B SaaS marketing strategies on top of that? This can be a time-consuming, head-scratching process altogether. Truth be told, many SaaS companies may have genius minds when it comes to technical features and technology, but when it comes to building, scaling, and expanding, the marketing framework falls well short.
SaaS companies need leadership. The manager or director may be short on SaaS marketers or simply too busy to fully devote time to organizing effective marketing teams. There might be time and resource constraints, such as budgetary shortfalls. There might be logistical problems.
This is where content marketing strategies from a leading CMO can help.
Using SaaS Marketing Research for Customer Acquisition and Customer Success
With the right research and company pinpointing, SaaS providers can finally optimize the business model right for their goals and dreams. A top CMO will analyze market trends and trajectories, review current performance metrics and current customers, and apply the latest google analytics to help any SaaS company build its brand and foothold in the marketplace.
With CMO analytic services, SaaS companies can take on the SaaS world with a fresh new perspective. These service providers can learn how to enhance their marketing messages, satisfy current customers, generate qualified leads, and most importantly of all, improve revenue and profit.
Data analytics can be a time-consuming process, but with the professional services of a certified CMO, SaaS providers are better able to position for the future. They can learn what moves to make and what moves not to make. They can learn how to advertise their services, how to present the company, how to integrate with clients and partners, and how best to anticipate pivotal changes in the SaaS world.
Optimizing B2C and B2B SaaS Sales Process Collaborations
A SaaS product can vary widely from company to company, service provider to service provider. Some software allows large industrial clients to track resource access and allocation. Other software is for managing client and partner directories. A lot of software, still, is designed for web-hosting, e-commerce, human resource management, and more.
All SaaS providers are different, and every SaaS product is different. Even if a SaaS product is of a similar type to that of a competitor, a SaaS marketer must make the product seem entirely unique.
The average SaaS business may have a great SaaS product and believe in that great SaaS product, but none of these things matter if the SaaS provider cannot communicate just how great that SaaS product may be.
How SaaS Marketing Teams Benefit the SaaS Sales Process
A seasoned CMO can help a SaaS business do just that. More importantly, a CMO can provide the expertise to differentiate all aspects of a given SaaS product. This includes how the product is conceived, packaged, presented, communicated, provided, and more.
By working throughout the sales cycle, a leading CMO will identify areas of weakness that limit or complicate sales, reduce revenue, and hurt profitability. CMOs are also highly skilled in communicating to the target audience in a way that streamlines the sales process, allowing for higher rates of customer acquisition, customer retention, and customer satisfaction.
With a strong sales funnel and a deep understanding of the SaaS product offered, any SaaS business can improve its bottom line.
Internal and External SaaS Public Relations Management
Brand awareness and reputation management are critical functions of any SaaS marketing budget. Yet, the average SaaS provider fails to fully capitalize on these aspects. How does the company differentiate itself from other SaaS firms? What public outreach events are scheduled? What is the company’s reputation?
- Is it known as reliable and consistent?
- Is it known as a leader or innovator?
- Is its client base niche and lifelong, or
- Is its client base diverse and changing?
Through owned, earned, and paid communications, a CMO can work with marketing teams to make a value proposition to clients current and prospective. If the company takes a hit, or something bad happens to threaten its reputation, how does the SaaS business recover?
A value proposition can guide SaaS marketing efforts in these cases, from social media presence and posts to external outlets that garner qualified leads and advertise SaaS products. Some forms of PR may simply be a free trial or no-cost consultation for prospective customers.
SaaS Relationship Management for Paying Customers and Potential Customers
One of a CMO’s top goals is to elevate brand awareness and establish the SaaS provider as a trusted and reliable provider of the services and SaaS products offered. Because the SaaS space is so varied and eclectic, these offerings can take numerous forms.
That’s why the company must use more than mere advertisements or editorials about the products or services.
Websites, magazines, newspapers, and television can all be useful vehicles for driving brand awareness and reputation. However, it’s what is said in them, and how it’s said, that specifically matters.
Beyond SaaS Marketing Vehicles and Publications
Existing customers and potential customers want to know why one SaaS company should be their go-to. Why should they pay for the service as opposed to buying similar software outright? What is the SaaS company’s relationship with clients like? Is the SaaS business responsive through 24/7 support, online contact forms, phone calls, and emails?
Do they provide members with additional benefits? Are there tiered-service levels and rewards programs? An understanding of customer personas and buyer personas is key to capitalizing on the unique bond between a B2C or B2B SaaS client and SaaS provider.
Without this unique bond, the client may go somewhere else for a lesser product or service, simply based on the perceived value of the relationship alone.
Generating Qualified Leads Through Customer Lifetime Value
What’s often most important, however, is the communicated customer lifetime value. Because SaaS products are usually provided under some form of subscription or membership, the company’s provided value must be clear and attractive.
A top CMO will assess effective and ineffective practices to formulate a marketing strategy that elevates this value.
SaaS customers should automatically, even subconsciously, equate certain feelings, beliefs, ideas, and expectations with a given SaaS company. This is where a SaaS marketing agency can play a vital role in creating an enduring, innovative, and distinct understanding for existing customers and potential customers alike.
By determining the values of these various relationship management mechanisms, a CMO can effectively calculate the customer acquisition cost. In other words, how much does the SaaS company pay to secure a client? How much money, time, and resources?
This is an important baseline factor in any business model, for any target audience.
How SaaS Marketers Create Winning SaaS Marketing Plans
To ultimately boost the bottom line and increase profits, a SaaS provider must understand how to balance many responsibilities and functions. Without the help of a CMO, this can be difficult. Marketing can require extensive hours and resources, detracting from important operations that keep the business running.
For this reason, CMO SaaS marketers optimize their services. Through SaaS marketing, whether semi-regular or comprehensive, marketers can provide a breadth and depth of results that preoccupied executives simply do not have the time or expertise to manage.
A CMO may provide professional services for 20 hours a week, or more fractional advisory services, just a couple of times every month. What is required depends on the SaaS provider, its marketing strategy, and the goals moving forward.
For example, a large B2B SaaS marketing plan may be far more extensive than a smaller B2C SaaS marketing plan.
A SaaS marketing specialist will typically provide various value-rich services as part of their SaaS marketing strategies package.
SaaS Marketing Strategies For Targeted Auditing
A professional CMO will typically closely review all current and prospective processes, procedures, and mechanisms that apply to the SaaS company. Some processes may be convoluted whereas others are straightforward. What matters is how these facets individually and collectively contribute to the success of the company.
If certain marketing strategies cost too much and don’t deliver, they may be streamlined or eliminated. A SaaS marketing agency will undertake an audit to ensure lead generation, customer acquisition, and customer retention.
A crucial and related part of this sales process and the sales cycle is the way data is collected, analyzed, and applied.
Securing & Retaining SaaS Customers Through Smart Data Audits
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are an integral feature of any SaaS marketing agency. The applications and software of any SaaS marketing, whether internal or external, should be versatile and adaptive. All SaaS marketers will want to see accounts that identify issues and report them back for system maintenance and corrections.
Such issues may include inadequate bandwidth, resource allocation restrictions, client management limitations, technical bugs and errors, and more.
In the SaaS industry, tech marketing is typically concerned with lead generation, converting the target audience, and retaining that target audience. There are many ways to optimize these three components, whether through search engine optimization (SEO), software upgrades, or other digital and non-digital improvements.
A targeted audit will help ascertain any of these issues, allowing the CMO to formulate SaaS marketing strategies that address the gaps and shortcomings.
Building Dynamic Relationships with SaaS Stakeholders
Many SaaS marketers are so focused on clients and customers, that they forget to devote critical resources and time to building relationships amongst themselves! This can be a massive mistake, especially if various departments are overly compartmentalized and inefficient.
Overall, two types of relationship-building should occur – internal and external. Having clear goals, open lines of communication, and established inter-operational capabilities is critical to ensuring these internal and external relationships work.
Typically, stakeholders include board members, sales heads, operational heads, product heads, IT heads, finance heads, and other executives and high-ranking positions. All groups should understand their individual and collective roles (i.e., how they manage deliverables, manage customers, set budgets, etc.).
Seamlessly Connecting SaaS Marketing Stakeholders
Whether through scheduled teleconferences, personal meetings, or semi-regular phone calls, communication is vital to ensuring the CMO works seamlessly within and alongside other positions and stakeholders. No SaaS marketing framework can succeed without productive communication channels.
Data garnered through these channels is also invaluable to the success of SaaS marketing.
The CMO will incorporate primary and secondary data to better tailor the marketing strategy toward customers. By meeting with existing customers and potential customers, the CMO can gather vital intel. This information includes demographic factors, client expectations, client histories, and prospective client attributes.
By understanding the ideal customer personas and buyer personas, the CMO can then help engineer a particular SaaS marketing strategy that fits a particular B2C or B2B SaaS business model.
Without incorporating knowledge of how customer personas think, behave, and use the products and services, many SaaS marketing strategies will fail.
Establish SaaS Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
One way to measure if customers are receiving what they want is by understanding if the company is meeting certain expectations. Devising and analyzing KPIs is a critical way to do this. As previously mentioned, KPIs are numbers and statistics that measure the performance and health of the business.
As ‘indicators,’ these numbers may indicate a variety of things. They may indicate the company’s adherence to objectives, targets, and goals. They may indicate how the company compares to similar companies. They may indicate how workers, departments, groups, and the company as a whole are functioning.
By evaluating KPIs, stakeholders can work with the CMO to make key changes toward reaching strategic goals. This, in turn, can lead to better and faster results. Better and faster results, in turn, can lead to bigger and better profits.
In short, KPIs are key.
Top SaaS Performance Metrics Every CMO Will Target
Data can be overwhelming. It can be nuanced, complicated, and sometimes totally meaningless. It’s easy to get lost in the numbers and lose sight of the metrics that matter while focusing on those that do not. Spreadsheets are only as good as the numbers they reveal.
A CMO can streamline the data analysis process, eliminating extraneous information while highlighting those key metrics that actually drive growth, revenue, and profit.
Strategic concerns include:
A good CMO can facilitate a B2C or B2B SaaS business with all factors related to KPI. Whether it be the collating, the analysis, or the planning, CMOs understand how to optimize a company’s current trajectory for future success.
Structuring a Budget Fit for ANY SaaS Marketing Strategy
Of course, what good are key performance metrics if the SaaS marketing strategy costs way too much and doesn’t meet its goals? A sound and reasonable budget is a cornerstone of any successful SaaS marketing strategy, and by extension, any successful SaaS provider.
As the company scales, the budget should predictably and proportionately scale as well. Perhaps even more important is the clarity of the budget. Expectations and projects need to be clearly communicated, with all relevant stakeholders informed and aware.
A top CMO can work with the company to determine its priorities. Are budgetary constraints a primary concern or an afterthought? Do they want to gradually expand or are they interested in large injections of capital at strategic times?
What is the SaaS pricing structure? Does the SaaS pricing make sense? What is the return on investment (ROI) based on the SaaS pricing?
All of these questions, goals, objectives, and priorities should be articulated clearly in the SaaS marketing strategy. Whether outlined in a formal document or plan or verbally understood among key stakeholders, the SaaS marketing framework should be understood by all.
What Every Good SaaS Marketing Budget Should Include
Because SaaS marketing is heavily tech-focused, it needs to capitalize on the latest digital and technological capabilities. In other words, SaaS marketing needs to be big online. After consulting with stakeholders and understanding customer needs and expectations, a CMO will help devise the key elements of the budget.
Is the SaaS business focused on e-commerce or web-hosting? Does it specialize in client management systems or data analytics and tracking? Depending on the business focus, budget elements may vary, but generally, all SaaS budgets will include some amount of the same elements.
These include paid media like social media marketing, SEO, email marketing, website development, PR, bandwidth and system maintenance, product development, and more.
Over time, these elements may shift with priorities realigning. A leading CMO can help track these changes, implementing vital changes as necessary.
Using a CMO to Optimize Critical SaaS Marketing Elements
Many important marketing elements help SaaS businesses. Some of them are complex and costly, others are very straightforward but equally effective. The key is knowing which ones are important and how they contribute to overall goals and objectives.
For instance, an e-commerce SaaS provider will likely emphasize a website landing page to showcase product placement and distribution. However, websites will probably be of less importance to another SaaS business providing products that organize client contacts.
