What You Should Know About Marketing SaaS
(Photo by PixxlTeufel via Pixabay)
The market for software is rapidly moving wholesale to a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. New models, such as infrastructure as a service, are also evolving at a rapid pace.
For marketers, the Swiss Army knife nature of SaaS platforms means the opportunity to reach multiple customer types with messages that speak to the heart of their most compelling use cases. That’s great, right? So many people to reach! So many things to say!
When has a seemingly never-ending cascade of freedom and flexibility been a problem? Every smart marketing professional turns their head in my direction.
What makes marketing SaaS platforms tricky is precisely what makes them attractive, because a SaaS platform’s benefits can be largely in the eye of the beholder. The sales team needs a platform to do one dance step, while the marketing team needs it to move to a different one.
In our experience, the highly mutable nature of SaaS platforms makes developing compelling messaging challenging. By trying to address too many users and use cases at the outset of a campaign, the platform risks being all things and all people, and ultimately ending up as nothing to nobody.
What Exactly Are We Selling Here?
In other words, we need to talk about buying the benefit, not the software. Yes, SaaS platforms are lines of code and user interfaces living on our servers, and we engage with them through a range of devices to solve myriad use cases. Whether or not we recognize it, we’re buying a potential benefit to an organization, not just lines of code.
To market them effectively, we need to craft compelling and durable marketing narrative about how a given platform will make an organization excel (no pun intended!). In our experience, a marketing narrative is a promise that your organization makes to its employees and executive stakeholders that the benefit of the platform is worth the pain of the learning curve to work ultimately smarter and faster than your competition.
(Photo courtesy of Burst)
What Your Marketing Promise Must Achieve
Your marketing must accomplish two goals:
Create champions for adoption with an emotional promise that’s relevant to them: what’s the benefit that’s going make them look like rock stars in their organization?
Help champions drive renewal: how can we them help continue to drive higher organizational performance through the platform?
The Ingredients to a Successful Marketing Promise
One of the biggest challenges we all come up against is acceptance. When it comes to SaaS, accepting that not all use cases are created equal is definitely a necessity.
Yes, multiple user types may derive benefits from the platform, which offer multiple potential marketing targets; however, the primary user is the entry point for adoption of a software platform. Importantly, they are the person who will be an evangelist for the platform if cultivated effectively.
The more use cases that are considered “important” marketing targets, the more diluted your marketing promise will become.
Get tough of your target audience selection
You may identify 5+ potential customers, but which one or two must you reach in a meaningful way first to drive interest in adoption? Once you’ve primed the pump with your most important audiences, then you can help them to be champions with downstream user types who aren’t the key immediate conversion.
Get tough on where you place your bets.
We never have enough money for marketing. It’s unrealistic to expect that we can reach all potential customers or user types with meaningful content. What we can do through a sharply targeted promise is to help our most important users to be champions for the benefit of the platform.
Market to renewal from the beginning.
It’s only a successful sale if the customer renews their contract. Up until that point, they’re still kicking the tires. Renewal means that the organization has adopted the platform beyond the core user, and the platform is helping an organization to succeed. We can drive renewal through continued marketing “touches” that help champions get the most out of the platform, and help others to get the most out of the platform.
(Photo courtesy of Pixabay)
In short, while it may be endlessly tempting to advertise yourself as the can-do, do-all solution, the best thing you can do in a marketing rut is to don a strategic eye. Imagine you had to try to catch as many fish as possible. Would you just sail out to the middle of the ocean and drop out any old net? Likely not. You would figure out which type of fish would produce the highest yield, where they were swimming at any given moment, what time of day would be the best to fish in, and which net would be most useful, among other data points.
Similarly, you need to consider your options when it comes to marketing and choose an approach that will bring you closest to your goals—think of it like “striking while the iron is hot,” or “hitting your opponent where it’ll hurt most.”
Once again, companies hardly ever have enough money to do the marketing they would like to do. The way around that isn’t always to advertise more, but to advertise smarter.