Smart Marketing Idea 1: Build a marketing strategy specifically for your SaaS solution

Our recently published white paper: 7 Smart Ideas to Market your SaaS Business contains leading edge information on how to market your SaaS business. Here we look at one of the ideas:

Smart Idea 1: Build a marketing strategy specifically for your SaaS solution

SaaS marketing is unique, the principles for success remain the same bread and butter basics as any product. A prospects urge to buy is based on your solution solving their business problems, and educating them around that point relies on your marketing activity creating empathy and building appropriate messages about your technology’s capabilities. Add to this a clear call to action and you’re likely to stimulate a response.

However, making the business benefit messages of your solution resonate means understanding the unique conditions of the SaaS market. The value proposition has changed because it’s now less about the IT department acting in isolation. There are more decision makers in the technology acquisition process, and therefore the role of your marketing strategy is to advise several personnel within the company on the best course forward for any required tool. The emphasis is on how your solution can best deliver value to the entire company.

As the audience focus has shifted to the executive level as a whole your marketing key messages have to move substantially beyond finance and technology concerns. This is not something that can be addressed with a simple tweak to your approach – you need to strategically re-think the way your business markets its solutions.

Either developing a strategy from scratch or redeveloping legacy plans, will help you assess your competition, define your target market and establish your positioning and USPs. It will also enable you to define the technology buying lifecycle for your prospects, and map marketing activity against key moments.

This may seem like an insurmountable task, but a good starting point is to plan all the marketing activity that you want to undertake in a month-by-month plan. This ensures your marketing is well thought through and avoids the pitfalls of being reactionary or ad-hoc. Importantly it prevents activity from being perceived as tactical but without direction.

The quickest way to ensure your marketing strategy is effective is to map monthly activity to an overall strategy – and this rests on understanding the cost of securing a new customer.

There are three key metrics you must calculate to create a successful demand generation model:

• CAC – COST OF CUSTOMER ACQUISITION
• LTV – LIFETIME VALUE OF CUSTOMER
• ROI – RETURN ON INVESTMENT

Essentially, working out the cost of acquisition versus a customer’s lifetime value will tell you whether you’re gaining ROI. While there is no hard and fast rule, we recommend our clients aim for a LTV:CAC ratio of 3:1.

Carrying out this calculation will tell you roughly how many leads you need to secure in order to meet revenue targets, however it doesn’t reveal at this stage which marketing tactics will deliver the greatest success. In the next section of this guide, we’re going to focus on what some of those marketing techniques are, and how best to optimise your activity around them.

Do you want more smart ideas? Simply click here to download our free guide.