The SaaS market is estimated to reach over $700 billion by 2028. While it means more opportunities for SaaS companies – it also means fierce competition.

To keep up with the changing market trends and stay ahead of competitors, you must have a solid SaaS marketing strategy.

While crafting this strategy will take time, the returns can be mind-blowing.

Take Chanty, for example. They drew in 70% of their first 10,000 users with SaaS content marketing.

But, what is a SaaS marketing strategy and how is different from other products?

A good and effective SaaS marketing strategy focuses on building awareness of your SaaS product, generating leads, and acquiring and retaining customers.

Most SaaS businesses pick multiple strategies as their focus areas instead of sticking to just one. For example, Slack uses most of the marketing strategies available such as social media marketing, email marketing, SEO, etc.

If you’re wondering how SaaS marketing differs from other kinds of marketing, here are the three core differences:

• SaaS products are generally complex (specially B2B): This means many B2B SaaS companies will have longer sales cycles, and you’ll need to keep nurturing your leads at every stage and pushing them down the sales funnel.

• There’s an equal focus on retention and acquisition: As opposed to the single-purchase nature of traditional products, SaaS products are subscription-based. That means you must keep proving your product’s value and retaining customers for a steady monthly or yearly revenue.

• SaaS generally requires more commitment: Making someone purchase your SaaS is hard and it requires more commitment than any other product. Unlike an info product, it’s usually around $100 or less, and you know it’s value, so it’s easy to purchase.

Put simply, traditional plans focus on per-transaction revenue. SaaS plans prioritize revenue over time.

How to create an effective marketing strategy?

A SaaS marketing plan consists of multiple strategies and tactics to achieve a common purpose.

Usually like:

• Bring more leads and customers

• Increase the paid plan’s conversion rate

• Get more demo signups

• Decrease the churn rate.

#1 Understand Your Customers

The first step to craft a solid marketing strategy is to understand your customers.

You can’t market a product made for agency-owners to people who don’t run an agency.

Understand the word “understand”. I want you to understand your customers, not “identify” them.

First identify who your potential customers are and then understand them.

Learn about their:

• Problems

• Goals

• Pain Points

• And More

#2 Define Your Customer Journey

A customer journey map helps you create strategies for different stages in the journey.

Before you start mapping, make sure you understand the key stages in your customer journey.

Typical stages for a SaaS customer include:

• Awareness: a potential user becomes aware of their problem and begins to seek out solutions. This is when they find and start to explore your website or SaaS product.

• Consideration: the user begins to consider various solutions. They look at product demos, blogs, and other resources to evaluate their options.

• Decision: the user decides to purchase your software, either for themselves as an end user, or for their team, and selects the subscription that best fits their needs

• Onboarding: the end user begins to use your tool, learns about its features, and starts integrating it into their workflow. The onboarding phase is especially important for SaaS companies to focus on, as strong product adoption is the key to recurring revenue.

• Support: when problems arise, the user reaches out to customer support to resolve their issues

• Retention: the user decides whether or not to renew their subscription and considers upgrading for more features.

#3 Give Your Customers Free Stuff

With so much competition in every SaaS niche, it isn’t easy to encourage a customer to buy your product on the first go.

So, what do you do?

You tell them they can use your product’s free trial before committing to it.

Once they try your product, you can show them the premium features they’re missing out on and gently nudge them towards shifting to a paid plan.

The world’s leading SaaS companies, they all have this one thing in common, they have a great free plan, and some really clever strategies to nudge users into customers.

There are multiple free trial models like:

• A free trial

• A trial with no credit card

• A freemium model

• A limited version free plan

When it comes to SaaS, giving away your product for free as long as you have a strategy behind it could be a great customer acquisition approach.

What are the best marketing strategies?

The following SaaS marketing strategies will help you generate more targeted leads, scale customer acquisition, streamline customer onboarding, and reduce customer churn.

You can leverage marketing strategies such as:

• Content Marketing

• Performance Marketing

• Search Engine Optimization

• Email Marketing

• Social Media Marketing

• Split Testing (A/B Testing)

I can’t cover all these different marketing strategies in this post, but I will surely come back to you with one post for each of these strategies.

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So that’s all for this issue, I would just say:

If you are considering crafting a marketing strategy and plan, then knowing all these tips will greatly help you do exactly that.

Now, for you to be reading till this point, I have something special for you:

I am giving away my FREE SaaS consultation to 5 startups (3 SPOTS LEFT!)

This will include:

• Landing page audit

• Marketing strategy breakdown

• Actionable advice

• Just a fun talk with me