Plan your business strategy better. Tackle top marketing challenges in selling SaaS products using this guide.

Marketing SaaS products is different from marketing other software products. For SaaS products, you need to ensure that the customer understands that your product is essential. You need to show how it solves a major problem for them. And, that the product in no way will create further issues for them. You need to communicate the value of your product as well as its ease of use.

Main Challenges For New Businesses

Many innovative SaaS products aim to provide a solution to an unsolved gap in the market. These products are particularly harder to market. Some SaaS products provide an alternative to competing solutions existing in the market. These may be relatively easier to market. The challenge for these products is to break into the competitor’s market and poach sales, or to find a new market segment altogether. However, you can simplify the process for yourself.

Here’s a walk-through on how to achieve your marketing goals in any case.

1. Creating Brand Awareness

Many tech businesses get their product specifications and technicality right. However, they struggle with showcasing them. Garnering a reputation as a reliable and effective solution is important. This starts with creating literature about your brand. You then need to share it on the right platforms and places where the customer is most likely to see it. Communicating brand values and demonstrating product quality through content is imperative.

2. Building Market Authority

Once you have posted your content on all relevant mediums you are likely to wait for an audience. But, gaining traffic and capturing customer attention is not a passive task. It is an active one. You will actively need to monitor customer or traffic response. Your content should reflect your knowledge of the issues present in your industry. You must address the challenges your customers face and then offer your solution as a way out. Do this without coming across as spammy.

3. Building A Community

Your brand should come across as a force trying to impact the industry long-term. Marketing should be aimed at impacting an entire community, not single one-off customers. Incorporating promotions on referrals and creating loyalty plans can boost the results massively. Sharing insightful, problem-solving tips and success stories are promising initiatives.

4. Converting Leads

Track your leads, and have effective lead management systems in place. This should be done for every potential customer, at every step of the marketing funnel. Understand what is stopping customers from moving to the next step in the funnel. Then work towards removing that barrier.

5. Reducing Customer Acquisition Costs

If you are taking a unique approach to getting a new customer every time then you are investing too much time. Having an effective CRM and sales management system to help you can solve some of your problems. You can automate some of your market and process customers in batches. This reduces the paid time invested in getting sales. However, in the beginning, you must push in every way possible to gain traction.

6. Managing Complaints

Your product may not be as good as you think it is. It should be a red flag when you hear it from a customer. Get buckled up to incorporate the customer feedback into the product then. Managing complaints with small perks can be helpful as well. Being prepared for the next complaint as you work to resolve the inconvenience is smart as well. You must adapt your product and devise helpful marketing materials to enhance the user experience.

You must ensure that no unresolved complaints or negative sentiments are lingering online. Often new customers will look at your online reputation before buying your product. Having a positive reputation online saves you from a loss of sales.

7. Retaining Customers

A reliable business will establish a knowledge base and ensure proper information support for customers who already bought the product. This can be in the shape of user manuals, help guides, and diagnostics. Ensuring easy access to this information beforehand allows the customers to enjoy your product stress-free. It can save you from bad reviews. You will also save yourself from customer loss from poor after-sales service.

Ensure all customers can reach your designated help contacts for their concerns and queries. Not having a system in place for the customer to reach out to you will yield angry customers. Angry customers rarely stay with a business. Aim at building long-term, friendly relationships with your customers where they feel free to share their concerns with your team. Also, your team must effectively resolve their issues to avoid reoccurrence.

The Right Marketing Approach

Selling software-as-a-service is a two-fold process. It requires you to first explain the problem that your product aims to solve. Then you should communicate how your product works as a solution to this problem. So, you must explain the software functionality and why it’s essential. Also, you must establish ease of use and adoption as you go.

All SaaS products are different from other products in the market. So, there is no cookie-cutter strategy to go forward. But, you can break down your marketing strategy into high-impact attainable goals. Here is a brief list of elements to incorporate into your marketing strategy:

  • Getting the right information out there.
  • Profiling customers effectively.
  • Building an effective website, product literature, digital presence, and an IMC (Integrated Marketing Communication) policy.
  • Designing the sales approach based on marketing psychology.
  • Adapting promotions to the customer needs.
  • Ensuring proper lead tracking and conversion.
  • Building reach and momentum further.

Having the right information out there for a product that significantly solves a market pain point brings you one step closer to gaining traction. Knowing who to market to is quintessential to market successfully. Profiling your ideal customers correctly allows you to focus more on converting them.

Similarly building a knowledge system allows customers to learn everything about your product. As and when they need to. Ensuring nothing is confusing them will eradicate disruption in the customer journey.

Using proven sales and marketing tricks that leverage customer psychology can enhance results. A UI/UX manager may help you in doing so. Constant improvements in your customer approach, offering, and product add to the success.

Leave nothing to imagination or forces of nature, use intelligent lead management tools and get converting. There has to be a system in place that prevents your lead conversion processes from becoming a nuisance. Keep doing what works and get rid of what does not. This will help you gain the kind of sales momentum that is every marketer’s dream.

Your checklist

It is easy to divide your marketing efforts into phases and steps. You must have clear and achievable goals for each step. Use this checklist to navigate smoothly.

  • We have defined our product, its features, and its need effectively.
  • We know who to target and where to find them.
  • Our team is accessible on multiple marketing mediums and channels.
  • The information about our brand and product is available readily on these places and platforms.
  • Our website is effectively attracting people from these platforms.
  • We are attracting the right traffic and gaining traction.
  • There are no complicated steps in our customer journey design.
  • We can track user activity on our website.
  • Our team is reviewing and editing any ineffective communication or processes across our sites.
  • We have lead management software in place to track and manage leads.
  • Our team is collecting the contact information of all interested warm leads.
  • We are able to offer enticing offers to get cold leads interested.
  • Our entire team including technical and non-technical members onboard and communicates using the same language, message, and candor.
  • We have found the right tools to manage customer relationships and sales using reliable CMS.
  • There are supporting ways to multiply our reach in places such as paid marketing, promotions, and industry-support initiatives.
  • We are not using unimaginative scripts or overused jargon in our communication.
  • Our brand has incorporated referral programs and a few affiliates to enhance customer attraction.
  • We calibrate our marketing focus to maximize conversions every once in a while.
  • Our team is always monitoring the efficacy of our efforts ensuring no lead is being wasted.

If you are missing out on any of these steps then start there. You now know what needs to be done in order to streamline marketing challenges for your product. Getting these steps right will mean that you have done the bare minimum correctly. You can now increase or decrease your efforts to suit your SaaS product and get better results.

What is next?

If you are wondering what to do when everything is going well then here it goes. You can now work on optimizing the human effort invested in each of these steps. Automate anything and everything that can be done. Use human creativity for areas that need it the most. This will give you a better return on every buck spent on manual labor. It will also get you better productivity than ever before.