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Growth is critical to the success of your brand, and there is a lot of potential out there for SaaS businesses. If you want to grow your business, you need to start thinking like a SaaS marketing agency. Below, we’ve put together some of the top tactics that you can use to grow your business through SaaS marketing.
1. Content Marketing
One of the most important tactics that a SaaS marketing agency will use to grow a business is content marketing. By creating quality content that speaks to your audience’s greatest challenges, you can work to attract more visitors to your website and generate more quality leads.
Content marketing helps establish a connection with your audience and educate them so that they can make informed purchasing decisions.
The best part about this tactic is that it increases in value over time. Unlike online advertising, which serves as rented space, content marketing works as an asset that your company owns and can use over time.
Though you may initially spend time and resources to create the content, these assets continue to attract, delight, and convert your audience as long as they remain on your website, which provides maximum value for your marketing spend.
While developing a content marketing strategy, consider your audience’s biggest pain points. What challenges do your customers face? How does your software solve these challenges?
What are the benefits of using your software? These are all things to consider as you develop content topics and consider which formats are best suited for these topics.
Once you’ve developed content marketing assets, you are not quite done yet. You will need to have a plan in place for promotion.
Whether you choose to promote this content on your own channels, such as your website or blog, or use paid channels like Facebook ads, you need to ensure that this content is promoted effectively to ensure that you’re delivering your content to the right audience at the right time.
In the example above, Incapsula provides a free guide about how to prepare and respond to a DDoS attack. This type of value-driven content is a great way to get new leads to engage with and trust your brand.
2. Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) works together with your SaaS content marketing efforts. By using both on and off-page SEO tactics, you can help make sure that people can find your content on search engines like Google and Bing.
Though on and off-page SEO work together to increase your reach on the search engines, they are quite different in terms of tactics.
On-page SEO refers to the optimization that takes place within your on-page content. The first step in boosting on-page SEO is creating quality content that is attractive to your audience. In addition, you’ll want to consider your keyword strategy, internal linking practices, and use of meta titles and descriptions.
Off-page SEO refers to what happens off the page. High quality link building is an important part of your off-page SEO strategy. The more high quality links from trusted sites that link back to content on your own page, the better.
Social media also plays an important role in your off-page SEO. Shares and links from influencers in your industry are another indication that your content is of high quality.
One of the best ways to improve both your on-page and off-page SEO is to create and distribute quality content that is valuable to your audience on a regular basis.
Not only do you need to be consistent in producing and publishing killer content that your audience will love, but you also need to have a distribution strategy in place that includes reaching out to industry influencers who may find value in your content and ultimately your software.
3. Google AdWords
Inbound marketing tactics can go a long way in growing your SaaS brand. However, Google AdWords is still a powerful SaaS marketing tactic. Google ads have become more prominent in the Google search results, leading to millions of clicks on search engine ads every day.
To take advantage of the potential that pay-per-click (PPC) ads present, you will want to invest in Google AdWords in addition to your inbound marketing strategy.
PPC ads are effective for SaaS brands for a few reasons. These ads help deliver targeted traffic to your website by bringing in users who are searching for topics that are relevant to your service offering.
This form of advertising is also scalable, making it great for growing SaaS companies. You can increase or reduce your ad spending based on your current business needs. PPC ads are also predictable in terms of cost and results, which appeals to brands with a tight advertising budget.
Google AdWords can be a bit tricky, especially if you are new to the world of PPC. Though you can learn how to utilize Google AdWords on your own, optimization takes time and knowledge of competition within the industry.
For this reason, many SaaS brands choose to partner with a PPC management agency that can help optimize your ads by cutting cost-per-click (CPC) and boosting click-through-rates (CTRs) for maximum results.
Since PPC advertising costs you money every time you use it, you will need to consider whether you need to invest in help from experts or work to test your ads on your own.
Here is an example of an AdWords ad presented on the Google Display Network:
4. Retargeting
No matter what your conversion metric is – online purchase, free trial, or whitepaper download – you will most likely find that many website visitors do not take the action that you want them to on their first visit.
This is quite common, and though there is no way to know for sure why they didn’t follow through with the conversion, there is a way to re-engage these visitors and help guide them in the right direction. Retargeting, or remarketing, is an important SaaS marketing tactic that allows you to reach back out to visitors who have left your page without taking the desired action.
Retargeting works by tracking your website visitors and displaying online ads on other websites that they visit. These ads allow you to stay on top of your site visitors’ minds and remind them of what they have left behind.
For instance, if the visitor ends up on a landing page for an e-book you have created but fails to fill out the form before leaving your site, you might serve a retargeted ad that features a link to the e-book and reminds the visitor of all they stand to benefit from downloading the e-book.
This individual has already shown an interest in the e-book, but for whatever reason they did not fill out the form to get the download.
By reminding them of what they left behind, you can encourage them to go back to your site to finish what they started.
As you re-engage visitors who have left your site using retargeted ads, you can work to establish familiarity, create trust, and build credibility. These website visitors have already shown interest in your brand and what you have to offer. Though they did not follow through with the action for one reason or another, retargeting gives your company the opportunity to encourage them to follow through this time around.
5. Referral Marketing
Referral marketing remains one of the most influential forms of SaaS marketing. This simply refers to when you ask your current users to tap into their existing network and refer their colleagues to your company. Referral marketing sometimes involves a monetary benefit, such as a discount or upgrade for the existing customer who has referred a new lead.
Referrals are often low cost leads as the user is doing much of the work promoting your software before the lead connects with someone from your company.
These leads are also relatively quick to close because they already have an interest in your company and trust your brand based on the recommendation of the colleague or connection who has referred them to your company.
One of the biggest considerations you will need to make before starting a referral program is whether to incentivize referrals. On the one hand, offering an incentive for referrals motivates your current users to reach out to their network and provide new leads for your company. However, you should also consider that heavy incentives may produce low quality leads.
One way to get around this is to provide incentives for referrals that eventually become customers. If you do this, you will want to make sure that you communicate to your existing customers what makes a good referral, such as job title or industry.
Then, you will also need to make it easy for them to refer their contacts and receive their incentive. Consider using a landing page that allows them to provide contact information.
This will make it easy for you to track referrals and conversions. Test out different methods to see what works best for your company. You may consider a referral marketing software to help get you started.
Conclusion
Thinking like a SaaS marketing agency can help your brand tap into the enormous growth potential that exists within this industry.
Using the SaaS marketing tactics above, you can reach more of your ideal customers and work to earn their business. Be sure to test different approaches, analyze the results, and optimize your approach to find what works best for your company.
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