Smart Marketing Idea 3: Showcase your expertise and become a thought leader

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 3: Showcase your expertise and become a thought leader

Once your website layout is optimised, your next challenge is to perfect the powers of persuasion around your product’s capabilities. It’s highly likely that your software shares similarities to competitor solutions; yes, you’ll have the odd unique feature and hopefully a USP to enable you to standout but differentiation has many facets.

Positioning your organisation as expert thought leaders to your target market is an excellent tactic for building ‘differentiation daylight’ between you and the competition. You need to create content that adds value around their key business challenges and plays to your USP.

EXAMPLE

• If you are marketing a business expenses solution, then create a free expenses policy template for FDs
• If you sell collaboration software, host a seminar on setting up a virtual organisation
• If you sell CRM software, create a guide for sales managers about how they can increase
  sales by 10%
• Equally, change up the calls to action on each website page until you find which
  one achieves most traction.

In striving to become an authority, don’t foster an air of arrogance, aloofness or indifference by being one-dimensional, with the emphasis on highbrow content. You are trying to engage real people not business bots, so remember to soften the messages by using social channels such as blogs and Twitter. The informality helps to promote a conversation on the things that matter to the target market. It’s an invaluable source of market intelligence that helps you to develop more compelling content and focus on real points of concern.

One SaaS customer we work with offers virtual switchboards to the SMB market, so we blog with posts such as ‘Use the cloud to make your home office look like a big business’, ‘How to record a professional message for your Virtual Switchboard’ and ‘3 ways a virtual switchboard can improve your marketing ROI’. These are great ways to open a dialogue and stimulate a conversation by touching on some likely pain points within the target audience.

Also, remember that all activity should map back to your original strategy, so thought leadership should not be a one-off ‘shot in the dark’. The best way to establish your authority is to create a regular schedule of content to publish, and vary the formats to target prospects at multiple points in the buying cycle.

Some may be ready to digest in-depth material; others may just find their attention captured for a few moments by a blog post. It all enhances brand awareness ahead of that crucial decision making moment.

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