Saas Marketing

5 Out-of-the-Box Digital Marketing Strategies for your SaaS Business

Every other article on digital marketing sings praises of SEO, paid ads, and social media marketing. These are important strategies that should not be overlooked. But you already knew that and are probably tired of hearing the same.

The problem is that almost every marketer on the planet is adhering to these strategies. If you want an edge over your competitors, you need to use all the obvious strategies and then some. Well, that’s what this article is about, the extra mile.

These marketing strategies may be well-known but have not become commonplace yet. You can be one of the early adopters to use these out-of-the-box marketing strategies for your SaaS product and succeed.

1. Webinars

Hosting webinars is a great way to attract audiences toward your SaaS product. According to research by Cloud Income, 73% of marketers have found webinars to be effective tools for generating quality leads. It is especially beneficial for B2B SaaS products. In fact, about 61% of the webinars are hosted by B2B companies.

You can host webinars on a variety of topics that are relevant to your target audience. The topics that address customer pain points and provide solutions usually generate better conversion.

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You can also host webinars to discuss market research, technological advancement in the industry, best practices, industry news, and so on. People associate webinars with thought leadership and you should establish your position as such when you host webinars for your SaaS products.

Webinars are also useful for various stages of SaaS product management from audience analysis to product launches and updates.

You can also use Webinars to engage your existing customers with information about the industry, product updates, use cases, success stories, and so on. You can also conduct surveys during the webinars for marketing research, audience analysis, or customer satisfaction.

2. Referral Program

The biggest advantage of referral programs over other forms of digital marketing is that it brings in relevant and quality leads. Your customers act as quality filters for the campaign. Because referral leads come through recommendations, they are more likely to convert into customers. 

Referral programs are not only great for customer acquisition but also for customer retention. Research by Finance Online shows that referred customers are 18% more loyal and offer 16% higher lifetime value compared to other customers. Customers gained through referrals have a camaraderie with the people who made the recommendation. This point of similarity makes both parties more likely to stick to your brand.

To develop an effective referral program, you will need to pick the right incentive for your existing customer and the people who join you through their recommendations. You should also focus on making the recommendation process as quick and easy as possible.

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You can design messages, graphics, social media posts, or emails for the recommender. The message must look like one-to-one communication instead of an advertisement.

3. Marketing with Comparison Pages

This marketing strategy specifically targets bottom-of-the-funnel audiences and people frustrated with competitors’ products. But first, you will need to create impactful comparison pages for each of your competitors.

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You can then use these as landing pages for a variety of high-intent search terms that are intended for your competitors. For instance, your product’s name is X and your competitor’s product name is Y. In this case you can target keywords like “X vs Y”, “Y alternatives”, “X and Y comparison” and “Y reviews”.

If SEO is taking time, you can use paid search ads to target these keywords and win customers from the grasp of your competitors. You can also use comparison pages as a reply to comments, social media posts, forum queries, and reviews about you or your competitor.

4. Meme Content Marketing

Simply put, memes are concepts, behaviors, observations, or ideas that are spread on the internet in the form of images, videos, text, or GIFs. The majority of memes originate from pop-culture media such as films, television, music videos, sports, or news.

The popularity of memes comes from familiarity with the reference. They are usually memorable and relatable. That is why they make such good carriers for marketing messages. Meme content marketing is especially useful if you are targeting a young audience.

According to Global Web Index, Gen-Z and Millennials have expressed more interest in seeing memes compared to videos and reviews from influencers.

You can continue to create serious and valuable marketing content. But adding memes in between will spice up the overall appeal of your content marketing channels. The most important thing to remember is that memes should be funny, relatable, and based on a popularly known reference.

The majority of popular memes also convey acute observations and truths about the behavior of individuals or organizations. You can build memes around the peculiarities of your audience, their pain points, inside jokes about the profession, and so on.

While memes may have a great conversion rate, they are very useful for brand awareness and social media engagement.

5. Micro-Influencer Marketing

While it can be expensive to hire major influencers to promote your SaaS products, micro-influencers can serve as an efficient alternative. Micro-influencers are usually up-and-coming content creators with a significant following, though not as large as celebrities.

The majority of influencers operate in a particular niche and have a dedicated audience. Instead of casting the net wide with influencers, you can target audiences in specific niches through micro-influencers.

All you need to do is find influencers that cater to your target audience and promote your SaaS product through them. For instance, if you are promoting software for medical records, you can employ influencers that cater to doctors and medical students.

Micro-influencers charge less than major ones and many of them might also collaborate with you in exchange for freebies or giveaways for their audience. As their audience count is on the rise, you can develop long-term collaborations at the price of the small audience so that you get the most benefits when their audience grows.

Keep Tracking Performance for Better Results

Regardless of the marketing strategy you adopt for your SaaS product, you must always keep an eye on its performance. The best marketing strategy is to keep optimizing your campaigns based on performance metrics.

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by Nick Loggie

How to Create a Profitable SaaS Marketing Funnel

Without a well-thought-out marketing funnel, your efforts to promote your SaaS product won’t be nearly as effective. The funnel will help you direct traffic, so to speak, and understand why certain users have converted while others have not. 

In order to be effective, every marketing funnel needs to be based on as much business-specific data as possible. If you are just starting out, use industry benchmarks to guide your funnel creation. However, you’ll likely need to tweak your expectations along the way, as concrete data starts pouring in. 

Identify the Proper Stages 

You will first need to identify each stage of your sales funnel. Most of them have three: awareness, consideration, and conversion. Others also have interest, intent, and evaluation stages. 

You will need to know what each stage means specifically for your business. For example, perhaps most potential leads will jump right into the consideration stage if your brand is a household name. Slack, for instance, is such a brand. Even if you’ve never used it, chances are you’ve heard of it. 

Map out as much as you can about each stage and the audience that comprises it. The better you understand them, the more effective the funnel will be. 

Don’t forget that leads can skip stages and that they can also go back a stage, especially if they have not engaged with your brand for a while. 

Understand What Each Stage Needs 

You will then need to create a specific type of content for each stage of the funnel. People who are already familiar with your brand won’t want to hear about what it can do in general terms. They will want to know the specifics and will need a more detailed and information-packed approach. 

Don’t forget to also consider how you will market each of these content pieces and where. Top-of-the-funnel content needs to rank well so that even people who’ve never heard of your brand can find it. Content targeting audiences in the awareness or evaluation stage can be served on your social media as well, for example. 

There will be a certain amount of overlap, as certain visitors in a later stage will also want to read your content aimed at top-of-the-funnel leads. However, don’t make the mistake of trying to appeal to this minority too. Stick to your designated audience and stage. 

Choose Your Metrics and KPIs

In order to measure the success of your efforts, you will need to set certain metrics and KPIs. Monitoring practically all of them will be practically impossible, so always limit yourself to support your business goals (more on that in a bit). 

For example, if you are trying to achieve more on a budget, your ad spend and cost per acquisition will be more important. If you want to raise brand awareness, you will want to monitor your social mentions. If you want to rank better, impressions will matter more. 

Try your best to ignore the metrics that don’t play into your overarching goals, even if they are underperforming. You will need a lot of effort to keep all of them going strong at all times. 

Set Your Goals

If your business is new, try not to set very specific figures for it. Once you see how your pages are performing and how each marketing tactic is working, you can start assigning numbers to each goal. 

What you should do instead is consider goals in more general terms: you want to sell more of a specific product, you want more email subscribers, you want a certain percentage of repeat customers, and so on. 

Align the metrics we’ve discussed above with said goals, and understand how a figure supports the goal. 

Know How to Reach Each Goal 

And now, for the fun part, and the most important part of creating a profitable SaaS marketing funnel: understand how the funnel actually works and what it takes to guide each lead from one stage to the next. 

You’ve set your goals and you have the metrics to support them. You know your stages, and you know what you need to deliver in each. How each stage leads into the lower one is key. 

When creating content for the top of your funnel, make sure there is a clear path forward. An email signup CTA is a good first step. When writing content for the middle of the funnel, ensure that it’s very easy to convert from there. Mention a specific product and link to other pieces of content that provide more information. 

There’s a very useful feature in Google Analytics, called “content drilldown,” which you can use. It will show you the journey your users take on your website. You’ll know where they’ve exited, so you can then improve that page to ensure people move further down the funnel.

Understand Where Sales and Marketing Meet 

Finally, you need to ensure that your sales and marketing efforts are aligned. These two teams are often at odds with each other, and you are missing valuable opportunities as a result. 

For example, if you are currently working on a specific feature of your tool and it may currently be a bit sluggish, don’t let the marketing team promote it. If you have added a new feature, make sure your marketing efforts reflect it. If your marketing team knows your customers have a certain question, let the sales team know so they can address it on time. 

If you are outsourcing your marketing, make sure to only work with good SaaS link building companies. They will already have plenty of experience in managing these two sides of the digital coin, and they can make a project run much more smoothly.

Wrapping Up 

Creating a profitable SaaS funnel can be a challenge. Know that you will need to keep tweaking it as you learn more about your audience and as you monitor how the first one is performing. As long as you are flexible about it, you will be successful in the long run.

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by Nick Loggie

9 Actionable Ways to Increase Your SaaS Product Sales

Do you want to boost the sales for your Software as a Service (SaaS)? 

Here's the thing: The SaaS industry has a predicted global revenue of $113.1 billion this year. Without a doubt, the opportunity is massive, and this is the perfect time to seize that. Otherwise, you are missing out on making your SaaS business grow. 

Nonetheless, the SaaS industry is a highly competitive marketplace. Therefore, there may be other SaaS companies wanting to attract your target users. 

That's why, if you want to work on your SaaS sales, you should create a unique value proposition. You should also be applying the best strategies to grow your current customer base. 

After all, there's no point in selling a software product or service if you couldn't make money out of it. 

In this post, you will discover ten actionable ways on how you can boost your SaaS product sales: 

Allow Users to Use a Free Trial

Offering a free trial is one of the best ways you can sell your SaaS products. 

After your launch, you should keep your free sign-ups and provide a free trial period. As much as possible, do not place restrictions on the functionalities. Nonetheless, keep your free trial period short. 

You should also never force your visitors to sign up using their credit card details. Get rid of all credit card information on the sign-up form. 

The likelihood of losing sign-ups and conversions is high. Simply because prospects won't be interested in sharing payment details at this stage. 

Focus on Design and User Engagement

Most of your site visitors will prefer simple, professional-looking, and soothing-colored UIs. Otherwise, visitors won't find anything interesting from your site and leave and abandon their carts. 

So, come up with a simple web design for your online store and integrate three-click rules. 

Using these three-click rules makes it a lot more accessible for your visitors to find the right place in just three clicks. You can use relevant and high-resolution imagery to make it easier to understand and clearer. 

Also, come up with killer and catchy headings, and well as compelling call-to-actions (CTAs).

Your product should also be fully responsive. That's because approximately 60% of users today are using their smartphones. 

That said, utilize a multilingual feature and make loading pages faster. Doing so ensures that you are keeping your SaaS users engaged, helping you boost your revenues. 

Cite Your Application Software in Blog Posts

Blogging is another excellent growth strategy that helps you improve brand awareness. 

It allows you to create and develop helpful content which connects and resonates with your readers. 

Here are the other benefits of blogging:

• Blogging is a low-cost strategy
• It helps drive organic traffic and boost your SEO rankings
• Generate leads
• Enhance direct sales
• Create a community made up of a loyal audience and attracting potential clients
• Encourage high-quality inbound links
• Build your brand authority
• Blogging is an ideal medium for sharing in-depth materials.

Leverage Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is one of the best SaaS strategies out there. That's because influencers have the power to drive targeted traffic on your site and product pages. It also brings in more leads and sales. 

In the same way, influencer marketing is vital as it's equivalent to modern word-of-mouth marketing. Modern-day consumers will always trust the recommendations of credible people. Meaning, buyers trust influencers. 

Usually, influencers have a better understanding of customers' needs. As such, they can help you get your message across.

Most influencers have already built long-term relationships, allowing them to gain their trust. That's why investing in influential marketing is essential.

But more than that, you should check whether these influencers interact with their followers. Engagement is better than follower count, after all.

Use this strategy as an excellent tool to scale your SaaS business. 

Reduce Churn the Right Way

As a SaaS company, you also need to track your churn rates. Churn rates are defined as the percentage of customers who decide they want to leave your product in a specific period. 

A decreased churn rate means that you have a valuable product, and you have a high lifetime value (LTV). 

When it comes to discussing sales performance, you shouldn't take churn for granted and measure it at a time that will fit you best. 

Go After Competitors' Branded Keywords in PPC

A great tactic for driving quick awareness to your SaaS and increasing sales is to come up in search results for your competitors' branded searches. For example, you could go after a branded search for "Basecamp" if you were a competing project management software like TeamWork. This PPC tip is considered to be middle of the funnel and can attract potential buyers who are familiar with your competitors but not you. A good add-on tactic to this strategy is to create versus landing pages where you compare your competitors' features side-by-side with yours to show why you are a better SaaS option.

A/B Test Key Pages

In the same way, you should also do regular A/B tests for all your primary and high-traffic pages. 

There are free, handy tools that you can use, like Google Analytics. This tool can help you monitor all your existing and new users' activity. Set your funnels, and look for any leak points on your page so that you can modify them accordingly. 

Driving tons of traffic via paid promotions and marketing is easier but costly. Instead, you can go with regular testing and analysis of your pages to optimize sales. 

Conduct Short Hyper-Focused Product Demos

One of the biggest mistakes start-ups make is pitch their products in long, incredibly drawn-out product demos. 

Rather than piquing the interest of viewers, they do mundane training sessions that bore viewers. 

Your product demos should provide your viewers a clear and concise idea of why they should get your product in the first place. 

Demos make selling SaaS, or a product or service, much more accessible. 

Invest in SEO and SMO

Investing in both SEO and SMO allows you to boost your SaaS product sales. 

Search engine optimization (SEO) plays a crucial role in bringing in visitors and prospects via keywords. This means that you're giving your SaaS a chance to appear on relevant search terms. And if your SaaS is a mobile app, you should also consider App Store Optimization (ASO). 

Social Media Optimization (SMO), on the other hand, will help you reach millions of users on the internet. Work on your engagement on popular social networks. This can include having an engaging Instagram page, active Facebook group, or a popular Twitter account.

You can also run social media ads, although it can be costly. So, consider your budget first.

Stay Updated

Innovation is the very core of the SaaS industry. That's why you and your customer reps should be able to successfully demonstrate a desire for learning and adapt quickly to change. 

The more fluent you and your team are with the latest trends and technology, the better. 

As mentioned earlier, there is fierce competition in the SaaS industry. Things can move forward and quickly. Use these tactics to help you boost your SaaS product sales. Hopefully, this will help you move your sales rates forward, raising your revenues in the process. 

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by Nick Loggie

How to Accelerate Your SaaS Product Adoption (5 Easy Ways)

Does your software company have a new product and struggle to get consumers to adopt it? Understandably, product adoption is a challenge most SaaS brands face, particularly those new to the industry.

You want users to use your product to increase sales and revenue continually. For this, your primary objective is for consumers to embrace your SaaS product. 

However, irrespective of the business model or marketing strategy you employ, you will accomplish your goal when users find your product delightful and make it a primary part of their daily life.

Thus, how can you make consumers switch products and convert them to product adopters and paying customers? How can you impress users and give them that delightful moment? 

To address those questions, you need to understand the stages of product adoption and the associated principles. You can sum up the process of getting consumers to switch products or services and start to use your brand in six stages. 

What are the Six Stages of Product Adoption?

It takes a multifunctional approach and effort to convince consumers to switch from their comfort zone and start using your product. You have to walk them through the feature adoption stages, or sales funnel to help users understand the values your product brings to the table.

During the final stages of their journey, consumers can decide to buy or reject what you're offering. After that stage, they may renew their subscriptions and extend their customer lifetime value (CLV) if they find the aha moment.

1. Awareness: The user becomes aware of your offerings
2. Interest: He shows interest and researches further to gather more information
3. Evaluation/Trial: Based on the collected data, he decides to examine the product and consider all vital factors. Then, he tests the service and makes comparisons with other alternatives. This stage determines whether he converts (pay for the product/service) or not.
4. Adoption/Conversion: With his understanding of how your product or service works and the value it provides, he switches products and invests in your offer.
5. Retention: Here's the stage where you got people to use your product; they experience the aha moment and become repeat users by renewing their purchase or subscription plans. 
6. Brand Ambassador: After a user tests your offer, experience the aha moment, he invests in your creation. Thus, your new customers will gladly tell others about it. They use various means, including social media, to brag about their new commodity or service.

Why is Knowing the Stages of Product Adoption Important?

Knowing these journey stages enables you to accelerate the adoption and sales techniques to establish good business bonds with prospects. It also helps you move users forward in their journey and amplify their adoption stage.

With knowledge of a user's journey, you can use customized marketing content to walk him down the funnel to conversion and advocate.

Moreover, understanding the adoption stages is essential because it lets you visualize the buyer's journey from the first touchpoint of awareness to the final conversion point. As a result, you can segment users according to their adoption stage.

That way, you can provide personalized messages and support to each group stage with better ROIs. Besides, with knowledge of the settings, you can seamlessly examine your marketing strategy, pinpoint your strength and weaknesses, and make improvements where necessary.

How to Speed Up Product Adoption for Your SaaS Business

Accelerating product adoption enormously influences consumer engagement, sales, and retention. But it would help if you put effort into getting users to the aha moment as soon as possible to achieve your goal. This article shares five practical marketing strategies to accelerate the adoption of your SaaS product.

1. Make first-time User Experience Impressive

A user's first-time experience is critical because it defines the entire experience for the user after the first encounter. The first impression is the deciding factor to whether the prospect develops a habit of using your product or services daily or not.

Thus, you must prove the value of your offering asap to get consumers coming back to your products or services daily. So, demonstrate the importance, user-friendliness, and efficiency of using the asset to meet your objective compared to other alternatives.

You can create different marketing content, including in-app tutorials, how-to guides, or onboarding emails to demonstrate the importance of using your product. Even if the subject matter is complex, use tutorials to create a straight path that illustrates the product's value proposition and ease of use.

It helps simplify customer onboarding and gives first-time users impressive experiences (the aha moment) that lead to adoption and conversion. 

2. Refine Customer Onboarding and Make it Constant

There's no guarantee that if users purchase your product, signup, or pay for your services, they will keep using your merchandise. There's every likelihood that some users may not find the aha moment in the onboarding.

Product onboarding is a crucial part of speeding your SaaS adoption process. It enables new users to learn about a product's features and lets the existing customer understand how to use new features. 

So, you need to enhance customer onboarding and keep it constant because the first signup or subscription is not the end of it. Your product or services continues to evolve; as one feature becomes obsolete, your company develops new ones and gets users to adopt them. 

In other words, your onboarding must evolve to improve the user experience (UX). So, let consumers seamlessly walk through your onboarding flow with experiences that speaks directly to their objectives.

For example, Omnisend, a platform for email marketing, SMS, and marketing automation, created a simplified user onboarding system. New customers only need to sign up with their Shopify or email account without a credit card.

Omnisend's onboarding approach smooths out any possible friction point and creates a flawless UX. Since there's no credit card needed during the signup process, more people will gladly create free accounts to try the product or service.

*Important* Consumers may want to adopt your services for various reasons. So, accelerate product adoption by using customer data to personalize user onboarding based on particular needs.

3. Use Blog Post Writing to Increase Product Adoption

What is one of the most effective ways to generate buzz for your products? Blog content writing. Blogging allows you to increase organic search traffic and drive new readers to your blog, thereby boosting search visibility and awareness.

When you put your offer in front of the right people, you will attract new users and retain existing customers. But you must write about topics that relate to your product or service and wisely state your offer. 

It's a win-win content marketing hack because readers get to know what you're offering and learn how it can make their lives better. For example, you can write a "guide on how to use your product" or develop related topics and gently mention how your service can help users. 

That way, you're covering a topic that connects with what you're selling and incorporating your product's value. In other words, you're using tactical content marketing to promote your product. For instance, Ty Magnin's blog post about how HubSpot carry out product launch is an ideal example of how to mention your product in blog articles. 

While discussing how in-app announcements are vital for a successful product launch, Ty disclosed that HubSpot uses his product (Appcues) to get consumers to activate its new features. 

Thus, he indirectly promotes his services by telling readers the value of his product. You can use a similar approach to increase adoption via article writing. Show how others benefit from it and how it will help your audience. But to achieve your product adoption goal via blogging, it'd help develop a reverse outline.

A regular outline guides your processes and content structure to engage readers. But according to Writers Per Hour, a reverse method will generate much better ROIs. Therefore, use these tools to drive product adoption.

4. Use Contextual Email Marketing to Re-engage Users 

Contextual email marketing for SaaS is a valuable tool that will help you boost new user activation or product adoption. It allows you to engage new and inactive users outside of the app and get them to adopt your offer. 

According to subscribers' data, savvy marketers customize these emails to recipients' needs. It considers consumers' behavior, location/geolocation, past purchases, and more.

Besides, contextual emails have two primary benefits:

1. Personalized email content: Your contacts' details let you send personalized appropriate email content that targets recipients' pain points.
2. Improved email performance: Targeting consumers' needs enables you to send emails that align with users' interests at each stage of the adoption process.

By sending a fitting email campaign to the target, you stimulate attention and further interest in the service. However, note that this process requires email automation.

Thus, use your desired tool to create and automate a series of emails to educate users and nurture them from the first touchpoint to conversion. The email sequence should include a welcome campaign and a succession of emails to help provoke user interest in the product.

Your welcome email will trigger a succession of supporting emails relative to the user's in-app behavior. Let's see an example of contextual email series.

Contextual Email Marketing Example

For the records, you can also apply this email marketing strategy (contextual email) to other business models, including service businesses. In this example, Karolina (my email address for experimenting with various offers) signed up for Tom's email course on making money on Medium. 

Here's a welcome email from Tom that leads to a series of contextual emails:

The welcome email activated a succession of email campaigns that supported the first one. These messages educate Karolina about Tom's offer and bring her closer to paying for his digital product.

Contextual email string example:

These emails have one primary goal—to convert the recipient from lead to adopter or repeat customer. This email hack is efficient because it lets you set off particular messages aligned with the customer's in-app activities.

Consequently, increase product adoption by transmitting your messages to contextual user operations. It helps boost product acceptance because recipients will likely open emails that remind them of prior activities. 

How to Boost Customer Experience With Contextual Email Marketing

Understandably, users may not find the satisfaction they need from using your product or service during onboarding. This experience may lead to them not coming back to try the offer. Otherwise stated, a terrible user experience (UX) will prevent people from using your services. So, how do you bring them back to have a look and show interest?

For this, contextual email marketing comes in handy. Here's what to do:

1. Select the stage of the adoption journey to focus
2. Concentrate recipients' pressing needs
3. Create a sustained path for your email campaign
4. Establish the tags, events, scores, and other elements for a successful campaign
5. Establish your objective and key performance indicators (KPIs) to gauge your success
6. Create your email sequence and automate your campaigns
7. Split test your emails for optimal results

5. Demonstrate Your Product's Value With Personalized Trials

Free trials effectively onboard users because they allow consumers to experience the product personally. They get to see what's in it for them before converting to paying customers. 

But in most cases, consumers may not find their aha moment during the trial period. Hence, how can you get them back to use your product? For this, you need to employ personalized trials systems.

According to Accenture, over 90% of consumers will readily do business with a brand that recognizes them and provides relevant products and recommendations. Why? Because such organizations use personalized trial marketing based on consumer data and interactions. It makes users feel special. 

When you give users a solid customer experience (aha moment) from the beginning, they're more likely to come back to use your product. Therefore, give users value earlier to boost adoption.

A typical example of a brand that provides value earlier with a personalized trial is Calm's meditation app. The software's onboarding introduces users to the meditation app by asking a personalized chain of questions.

Image source via Calm App

The answers help Calm better understand users and allow the software to segment consumers according to interests, objectives, and other factors. As a result, the meditation app uses the corresponding answers to personalize users' experiences. How? 

Based on consumers' preferences (goals and interests), the app can provide users with personalized onboarding structures that accurately spotlight what they intend to accomplish.

Image source via Calm App

Thus, the meditation app demonstrates its value quickly via relevant queries and customized results that create terrific first impressions. These unique impressions give users the aha moment (satisfying user experiences) that opens the way for sustained adoption. Consequently, people who went through the onboarding system become repeat users and loyal customers.

Are You Ready to Increase User Adoption?

Increasing consumer adoption of your SaaS product is not rocket science. You only need to apply a result-driven product adoption strategy to get more people using your products or services.

The product adoption framework above is a simple structure that shows how to increase user adoption. Therefore, apply these product adoption tips to get more people to switch products. What other tips can you add to this article to benefit our readers? Please, tell us in the below section!

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About the author

Moss Clement is an expert business writer for B2B SaaS brands and individual digital marketers. He is also a content strategist at Moss Media and blogger at Writers Per Hour. He works closely with B2B marketers, helping small & medium-size businesses build their online presence and brand reputation with SEO-friendly content that drives organic traffic and converts. Reach out to him if you need help with content writing. You can connect with him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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by Nick Loggie

6 Proven Paid Marketing Channels for SaaS Companies 2021

Top SaaS marketing departments often rely on paid, owned, and earned media for their inbound marketing strategies. This is because paid marketing channels offer a vast and effective channel where great content can bring the desired results. 

This blog has identified the top proven paid marketing channels SaaS organizations can use for their marketing efforts. Alternatively, you can work with a competent software marketing specialist to get the best output possible

1. Paid Search

Most of Google’s revenue is sourced from advertising. This is not strange, considering how effective the system is in directing qualified visitors to your website. Software marketing specialists often rely on paid search because it is cheaper and effective. It usually takes a fraction of the paid media budget while delivering sterling results. 

Auction-based platforms like Bing Ads and Google Ads are easy to use. You can easily set up or modify ads, bids, and budgets. You can check blogs on Google Ads for more insight. 

2. Display Ads

Display ads can help drive a lot of relevant awareness to your SaaS product. It even gets more effective when you can finetune your keywords list to ensure your ads are displayed to only the qualified prospects. Display ads have been around for a long time, but it is gradually losing its relevancy with the advent of ad-blocking software and integrations. If this technology continues to grow in popularity, this digital marketing channel might not be the best for midsize SaaS companies. 

3. Retargeting

Google’s and Facebook’s proprietary retargeting technology displays your ads to prospects even after leaving your website. You only need to set up a tracking pixel on your website. You can also get the most out of retargeting by creating ads suited to the buyer’s journey of your target audience. Similar to the creation of call-to-action (CTA) buttons, you need top-notch ads that convince visitors to return to your website to download your latest offer. However, while at it, do not disturb your website visitors with your remarketing ads. To do this, limit the number of times your retargeting ads are shown to them off your website. 

4. Social Ads

Over the last few years, social media has grown from a networking tool to a marketing gold mine. The growth has been reflected both in the marketing results and the returns of the companies involved. Any top SaaS marketing specialist can easily drive conversions from LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, using social ads. The best part is that these ads require a lesser budget to return impressive leads and traffic. With just $20 or $50 a week, you can get excellent results. However, you must develop a proper knowledge of these platforms to get the best out of them. There are specific targeting tools for Twitter, Linked In, Facebook, and Instagram, which you can use to get your ads to the face of your prospects. 

5. Paid Content Delivery

Paid content discovery is another proven paid marketing channel a SaaS company should adopt. Most websites out there have the “related articles” column, usually at the bottom and sidebar of the website. This widget often contains links to other websites. This setup is essentially a paid content discovery. The primary role of paid content discovery is to promote your blog articles on similar widget types on other sites. There are several top names in this niche, but Outbrain and Taboola readily come to mind. 

The charges for this paid marketing channel are usually on a cost-per-click basis. Experts have accessed the different features of the Moz paid content discovery technology and found out that promoting the highest-converting blog/educational content will guarantee the best returns via this channel. 

You can easily pick out these URLs by running an attribution report or a similar conversion report in Google Analytics and HubSpot. 

6. Video Promotion

Online videos are now more popular than ever. Prospects now prefer to watch videos of products and services to reading ads in newspapers or even on blogs. Most marketers have adopted online video ads as their go-to advertising medium, especially for paid promotion. There are several video ad platforms out there, but YouTube is the most preferred because of its flexibility and rich features.

For instance, YouTube allows you to overlay ads on your videos or boost your own video rankings with Google Ads for video. You can also run your video ads just before your actual video plays on YouTube. You can use Google Ads for video to boost your video post, provided you do not have videos that will keep your visitors watching your YouTube video. With this, you can increase your video views, especially from users searching for a certain type of video. The Google Ads for video platform runs on a setup that is similar to creating a text-based Google Ads. 

Finally, whether you are trying out a few of these proven paid marketing strategies or all of them, you can rest assured of getting the desired results. Are you currently using any of them? Tell us about your experience and results in the comments. 

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by Nick Loggie