5 Crippling SaaS Go to Market Strategy Mistakes (and how to avoid them)

From targeting the wrong audience, to not optimizing the buyer journey on your website, there are a number of incredibly common mistakes organizations make when developing their go to market strategy. 

We’re here to help you better understand what these mistakes are, how to avoid them, and how to fix them if you’ve found yourself struggling in that department. If you find yourself resonating with a number of these issues, you might want to consider working with a growth agency so they can help you get the right mechanisms in place to ensure your strategy is designed to succeed.

Without further ado, let’s get to it!

1. Targeting the Wrong Audience

A one size fits all approach does not work for a SaaS go to market strategy. Whether you take a bottoms up or a top down approach to your targeting, your messaging needs to be custom tailored to fit who it is you’re speaking to. 

Pain points and issues can be a great way to get end users to chat with you, but decision makers will care more about the return on investment, and benefits to the overall organization. 

It’s important to know exactly who you’re talking to, and why, so that you can develop talking points that will resonate with your audience. An end user won’t necessarily care about ROI, or business goals, whereas a C-level executive will likely want to hear statistics, or success stories. 

Utilizing a customer relationship management platform like HubSpot, or even an outreach tool like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, can help you gather important information on who you should be talking to based on existing product sales. Using these tools, you can develop an ideal customer profile. Important questions to ask can include:

• What are some of their primary problems, or key issues?

• What are they trying to achieve

• What does success look like to them

• What are their blockers or frustrations

Creating an ideal customer profile, or ICP, can really help direct your efforts so that your go to market strategy targeting the right people, and not wasting valuable resources.

2. Ineffective Product Positioning

A core component of any SaaS go to market strategy is your product marketing, and the key to product marketing is knowing what problem your product or service solves. Now that you’ve determined who your ICP, or your target audience, is, it’s important to identify the most effective way to communicate with them. 

A common problem SaaS organizations make is that they focus their marketing and communications on what they assume customers want or need, without doing the initial research. Even with the best product around, this can lead to a gap between you and your prospects, as they won’t resonate with your message, or the problem you’re trying to solve, creating a significant hole in your marketing and sales funnel.

Conducting keyword research, and diving into a platform like SEMRush can help you avoid this mistake by developing your strategy around what audiences in your market are looking for. If there isn’t a clear picture or understanding as to why someone may want your product, doing customer research is a key step in avoiding wasting precious time, resources, and potential customers.

3. Not Knowing Where to Engage your Audience

An effective go-to-market strategy doesn’t use the same marketing channels for every single product launch, feature update, or company announcement. 

While an important product or feature launch may warrant an email blast, a blog, a social campaign, and PR, communications should be tailored to where they may create the most impact.

You might know your target customer, and have great go to market messaging, but if you put your product in places where your audience won’t find them, you’re never going to find success. It’s a common mistake that SaaS organizations make, utilizing marketing channels or tactics as if it’s a one-size fits all solution, and not doing research as to where they can best hit their target audience.

This mistake can be avoided by having a product launch, or feature launch checklist to ensure you’re hitting all relevant channels. Identifying who you want to target as well can help you better direct your message. 

For example, customer reviews and case studies work great on blogs, and new partnerships work best on social platforms. Which social platforms you use, again depends on your target audience. LinkedIn has a completely different user base than a platform like Reddit. Knowing where to place your product messaging is just as important as the message itself.

4. Not Optimizing Your Website's Buyer Journey

Your website is your store front, and not considering the user experience, or design of your website can be stopping you from converting potential prospects into customers. Without optimizing the buyer journey on your website, it doesn’t matter how much traffic you achieve, your prospects aren’t going to have a clear path to get in contact with you. 

Using a cold, warm, and hot approach to align site pages with where prospects are in every stage of the buying cycle is a great starting point for optimizing your website. Making it super easy for audiences to see the product, schedule a call or consultation, or find other resources can help nudge them through the sales funnel. You’ve managed to bring people to your website, now you have to help guide them to where you want them to go. 

Optimizing a website can be a daunting task, especially if you don’t have UX or UI designers available to provide their expertise. Working with an agency or organization that can help you optimize your website can provide a great return on investment, and help you better capture your prospects.

5. Not Developing a Content Strategy

Drawing more people to your business through content marketing and organic marketing is one of the most sound investments you can make, and is an incredibly powerful tool for SaaS organizations. 

Content marketing can serve multiple purposes. Blog posts can drive organic traffic from search engine results pages, pillar pages on your blog can demonstrate expertise on a given topic, and lead magnets provide additional value to your target audience and can drive even more visitors into your funnel. Not to mention content marketing includes case studies or testimonials that serve as social proof to help prospects convert further down the funnel.

A common mistake made by SaaS organizations is not developing a clear content or SEO strategy. Content marketing can provide exponential traffic growth as you create more and more content, and using a tool like SEMRush to develop an SEO strategy can really help boost traffic. 

Without these tools, organizations often rely on sales mechanisms, or lead aggregators, which can be an expensive and unscalable tactic when it comes to lead generation. A well thought out content marketing strategy can help your team find leads that will convert.

If you don’t have the right resources on your team, or experts available to develop an effective content strategy, working with an agency is a great way to avoid this mistake. Our team at Lean Labs is more than happy to lend our knowledge and expertise to help you define your strategy.

Get in touch!

Develop a SaaS Go to Market Strategy Designed for Success

Understanding some of the most common strategy mistakes can help you avoid wasting precious time and resources on a GTM strategy that hasn’t been optimized for success. 

Determining your target audience, developing clear product positioning, identifying where to best communicate to your prospects, optimize your website buyer journey, and create a content marketing strategy are key components of a solid GTM strategy that many SaaS organizations miss. 

While it may seem daunting to build everything from ground zero, you don’t have to do it alone. Our team at Lean Labs is here and ready to help you start laying the foundation for exponential growth.