Marketing for SaaS Companies: 6 Effective New Tactics to Test

The global SaaS market is growing 6.5x faster than the rest of the global economy.

With exponential growth comes tons of competition. So how do you get your service in front of the people who need it most? It starts with an excellent growth marketing strategy and a commitment to delighting your customers.

You’ve worked hard to attract more customers and build a lead generation pipeline, but you’re not done yet. You want rapid growth, and you want to do it the right way. To help you plan ahead and leverage marketing trends, we’ve put together a list of opportunities you can start to implement today.

Marketing for SaaS Companies: 6 Opportunities to Embrace

One mistake that many of us in the business world make is falling for shiny object syndrome. If you see another marketer or business owner implement a new strategy that promises exponential growth, you’re going to think about doing the same!

But there’s no need to reinvent the flywheel. Instead, you can gain the edge over your competition with strategies that fit seamlessly into your current strategy.

We’re going in-depth into five opportunities:

#1. Focus on the Flywheel

#2. Delight Your Customers

#3. Offer a Positive Brand Experience

#4. Feedback Loops for Feature Marketing

#5. Embrace Video Marketing

#6. Use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Data-Driven Marketing Campaigns

For Lean Labs, SaaS marketing is the name of the game. We've seen all the ways SaaS marketing is evolving- and we know the best ways to ensure you're staying at the forefront of marketing solutions for your industry.

Let's see how you can meet marketing challenges with innovative and practical solutions this year.

#1: Focus on the Flywheel

marketing-flywheel-for-saas-companies

For many years, the sales funnel was a marketer's best friend. The concept is simple. At the top of your funnel, a large number of people know about your company. Further down the funnel, a smaller number of people engage with your company. At the bottom, an even smaller number of people end up doing business with you.

Once those people are customers, they exit the funnel and have nothing to do with the new people at the top of the funnel. Right?

Not quite. Your customers at the bottom of the funnel have a significant impact on the people at the top. The bottom feeds the top. This is the concept of the Flywheel.

Your customers are your best marketers.

If you delight your customers, they’ll tell their friends. If they have a terrible experience… they’ll still tell their friends.

We’re not saying to drop the concept of a funnel. Instead, we recommend that you adapt it.

A flywheel is a machine that stores rotational energy. It will keep spinning as long as fuel is supplied to it. A funnel needs you to keep adding to its top, but a flywheel keeps going until something slows it down.

Think of the growth of your business like this flywheel. Happy customers provide the energy to fuel growth. They will either buy from you again or tell their friends and colleagues about your service. Unhappy customers who have a poor experience slow down the flywheel.

Pro Tip: Try to ensure customers have a good experience when they leave. You might ask for feedback on how you can improve or offer a goodwill gesture and, of course, welcome them back any time.

#2. Delight Your Customers

64% of clients are ready to pay a higher price if they get top-quality customer care.

Customer care is crucial to building momentum in the flywheel. And customers expect a seamless experience from the time they first engage with you through to the service you provide after the sale.

Delighting your customers is all about a positive experience that leaves a lasting impression and creates advocates for your brand. Think about how you can provide the best experience for your clients, from supporting and empowering them to reach their goals to requesting honest and open feedback.

Personalized messaging that helps solve their problems is crucial. Listen and respond to their questions, and coordinate with your sales and customer service teams to leave no stone unturned in creating a positive brand experience.

A highly effective branding strategy is all you need to get started. The experience a customer has with your brand is essential to get right. Is it easy to make payments? Is the mobile experience optimized? Are your design and technology up-to-date?

It’s cheaper to keep clients than to bring new clients in. Creating positive relationships and exceeding expectations accelerates growth.

#3: Offer A Positive Brand Experience

Your unique value proposition should be a combination of your brand, your service, and the experience you provide to your customers. It should quickly convey what you have to offer.

To distinguish yourself from the crowd, focus on the result your SaaS product gets your customers. Another way to think of it is that you’re selling an aspirational identity, not software. Who will your customers be when they use your product or service? How will they feel?

Your brand is your identity. Commit to helping people through doing business, human to human, sharing knowledge with the world, and aligning with your customers.

The world is moving online more and more. Virtual reality is permeating the mainstream; we work together online, speak to friends worldwide online, and form communities online.

Are you creating a community through your brand? If you’re struggling with creating a brand identity and who you want to serve, go back to the beginning and determine who your buyer personas are.

Going above and beyond is a sure-fire way to create a positive brand experience. Lean Labs’ #1 value is value over profit. We’re a co-pilot in your growth. If a project, campaign, or quarter is not achieving the desired result, we add scope at our cost to achieve the result we promised.

Can you see how that feeds into delighting our customers and creates a positive impression of our brand? You can do the same.

#4: Feedback Loops for Feature Marketing

Expanding on the Flywheel model, you can collect feedback from your loyal customers to improve your service and add new features to solve problems. It’s a way to add value to the same audience and provide momentum for your brand.

In his book Lean Startup, Eric Ries highlights that a startup turns ideas into products, measures how customers respond, and pivots or perseveres.

A feedback loop lets you collect customer feedback and improve your product based on the insights. One way to improve your product is to add new features.

Adding new features means you delight current customers, but it also means you might convert free trial users into paying customers or give existing customers a reason to upgrade. You’ll also generate new ideas for customer-centric marketing content such as product launches, how-to articles, and videos to create a real buzz.

It’s crucial to make giving feedback easy. Customer interviews are a great way to learn about needs, problems, pain points, and desired solutions. Customer surveys, especially with 1-10 style responses, are invaluable. The magic in these surveys is the data you receive. Are your products easy to use? Is your customer service team crushing it?

If a customer rates your product or service ten out of ten, you can ask them for a testimonial or review. If they answer between seven and eight, they’re happy, but you have an opportunity to delight them–ask how you can make their experience better. If they answer six or less, they’re unsatisfied, and you have a chance to improve your product or service.

Feedback loops are a crucial tool for improved customer satisfaction and retention.

#5: Embrace Video Marketing

88% of people say they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video. Video helps them understand what your service can do for them.

73% of consumers want to learn about your service by watching videos, compared to 11% who’d rather read a text-based article.

Based on those two statistics alone, you can see why video is integral to digital marketing. Video offers your brand numerous avenues to explore, and the magic is in the endless possibilities that match your brand, values, and mission.

Because videos are so human and interactive, potential customers can see whether you’re the type of company they want to work with.

Don’t get overwhelmed with the many videos you can make. Create a strategy and decide which videos are most aligned with your overall content strategy. Here are a few ideas:

Testimonial videos on your website to build trust

Tutorials
Showcasing new features
How-to guides
Sharing your brand vision
Personalize emails with videos

You must market your videos on the right platforms. Are you customers hanging out on YouTube or TikTok? When creating buyer personas, factor that into your video marketing strategy.

#6: Use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) for Data-Driven Marketing Campaigns

To put yourself in your customer’s shoes used to take a lot of leg work. But with AI and ML, you can leverage data that you’re collecting to create beautiful end-to-end experiences.

AI makes it possible to automate repetitive marketing tasks, freeing up bandwidth for marketers to concentrate on strategy and building an incredible customer experience.

It’s also possible to personalize your interactions with customers using behavioral and real-time data to segment your audience. For example, if a customer clicks a CTA, they’re added to an email sequence.

Now you can create contextual messages and meet customers where they are. Whether they’re in the awareness, consideration, or decision stage, you can craft content to meet their needs.

Creating detailed consumer profiles that you share with your team ensures a consistent narrative and experience across the customer journey. And customers love a consistent experience!

Chatbots are possible because of AI and are already impacting building trust with customers. Voice search and smart assistants are developed through AI. But equally important is the human touch.

Despite the advancements and opportunities AI brings, the human aspect of marketing is as vital as ever. AI and ML should enhance your marketing efforts, not replace the people behind them.

Marketing For SaaS Companies: Adopt and Implement New Strategies

Saas companies must adapt to new trends to achieve growth. Many of the latest trends in SaaS marketing follow a growth marketing model, focused on building genuine, long-lasting relationships with customers.

Using data, video marketing, feedback loops, offering a positive brand experience, and keeping the flywheel model in mind while providing impeccable customer service are just a few ways to delight your customers and create raving fans.

Instead of chasing new trends, include the strategies above in your existing marketing efforts and only implement what makes sense for your business. You need to know the metrics that are the true drivers of growth, and the Lean Labs Growth Marketing Strategy Kit will help you do just that and so much more.