The SaaS business model is compelling – recurring revenue that is highly scalable and highly profitable.
But, if you want to supercharge growth and build upon your annual recurring revenue (ARR) number year over year, you need a proper marketing strategy to help your SaaS business reach the audience you want.
A well-planned SaaS marketing strategy gives you the foundations for growth and customer retention, both of which underpin SaaS success.
So, how do you write a marketing plan for your SaaS business? What goes into it? Before you do anything, you need to have a clear understanding of what your business goals are. What are the key metrics for success? Is it ARR? Is it Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)? Is it shortening the sales cycle? Or is it top-of-funnel Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)?
The components of a SaaS marketing strategy
Once you’ve identified the metrics that matter to you, here are 10 points on how to build your SaaS marketing strategy.
- Identify your target market: Clearly define the customer segments you want to target with your SaaS product. Conduct market research and gather feedback from team members (Sales, Product and Customer teams) to understand their demographics, pain points, and buying habits. Use this information to create buyer personas to help guide your marketing efforts and better understand your customers and key stakeholders’ goals.
- Develop a value proposition: Create a compelling message highlighting your SaaS product’s benefits and how it solves specific problems for your target market. This message should be communicated clearly and consistently across all of your marketing materials. You can conduct competitive research using tools such as SEMrush to see how you compare against key competitors. If you haven’t done one already, a SWOT analysis will guide the value proposition by identifying where your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are.
- Audit your existing efforts: If you have already been doing some marketing, audit your efforts. Work out how your current marketing strategy is performing by conducting an audit that looks at all the channels and programmes you have executed in the last year and benchmark your performance against industry standards by channel. Your audit should look at each and every channel you use on a channel-by-channel basis (for example looking at your performance across your website, email, LinkedIn, G2, webinars, PR separately). And the output should be understanding how each of these channels contributes to your business goals’ success, and identifying what channels should be prioritised and need immediate action.
- Create your marketing strategy: Following the audit, based on what you have learnt, the areas you have identified that need improvements, or opportunities you have spotted – this informs your SaaS Marketing Strategy. For ease, you want to condense this down to three or four key focus areas and goals. This allows for focus and also to present the strategy to stakeholders you want to bring on the journey with you. Don’t forget that each of these pillars needs to have measurable outcomes, use SMART goals.
- Determine Marketing Tactics – For each key strategic area, you must determine the tactics needed to achieve the result and the time period. The time period will vary from company to company but generally speaking you want to test a new marketing strategy for a minimum of 4-6 months. At this point, it is helpful to also reverse engineer your SaaS business revenue goals right up to the top of the funnel so you know what you need to generate at every step of the funnel based on your conversation rates. This also helps to determine your budget and level of investment in each activity.
- Budgeting – You also need to determine a robust budget that you can split into different categories to cover activities and systems required to deliver your plans, which could range from technology and tools, people and resources, testing and brand programmes, such as PR, and promotional investment.
- Track and measure: Once you start executing your marketing strategy you will need to use analytics to track your website traffic and conversions, measure the success of your content and social media efforts, and adjust your strategy accordingly. Use tools such as Google Analytics, marketing automation software or CRM systems to measure your performance and identify areas for improvement.
- Continuously improve: Test, learn and optimise your strategy based on the data you collect to ensure you are delivering the best results for your business. Be willing to try new tactics and experiment with new marketing channels as technology and customer behaviour evolve.
There are eight points for building out a SaaS marketing strategy. Once you’ve got those elements in place, it’s then over to executing that strategy and creating compounding SaaS growth. Regularly ask for feedback from sales, and don’t forget to look at the data!
About Us
SaaS MRKTING is a dedicated B2B and B2C marketing agency for SaaS businesses. SaaS MRKTING provides fractional CMO expertise and execution services. Based in London, but serving clients around the world. We provide foundational, strategic and execution services for SaaS businesses to help them grow ARR.
