A B2B SaaS marketing plan can guide your efforts if you seek paying customers for your SaaS application through digital marketing monthly. Fortunately, this article discusses four steps that secure your path to acquiring paying customers, as recommended by B2B SaaS marketing experts at GetUpLead.
Step 1 – Understanding Your Customer Profile
Although tactics involving content creation, social media use, or building a marketing funnel are great, they have their place, which is definitely not the beginning. Instead of making the mistake of using these tactics, the first thing you should do as a SaaS company is defining your ideal customer profile.
When defining your ideal customer, you should ask several pertinent questions, including their problems and needs and their common traits. It is also best to know where your potential customers gather together.
For instance, a customer problem or need could be that their marketing team has high customer acquisition costs. Their trait could be posting questions on Reddit to know how to manage their user-generated content or optimize their content strategy. Furthermore, your potential customers could gather at online events.
Step 2 – Acquiring Attention by Choosing Digital Marketing Media
Every B2B SaaS marketing company should consider content marketing a key strategy. A content marketing strategy establishes a company as a thought leader to its customers. Consequently, the conversion rate increases over time, increasing qualified leads.
You can choose from two strategies to reach your lead generation goals while making the most of your marketing spend. If your marketing team consists of more than five members, you can add more marketing channels.
The two recommended digital marketing strategies for SaaS companies are a content marketing strategy and allocating some marketing budget for paid content and promotion.
A content marketing strategy includes content creation and email marketing. This strategy involves using several techniques, including publishing answers to common customer pain points and customer success stories.
Marketing budget allocation to paid content and promotion may be in the form of money or time. Your strategy could involve paid advertising, content creation, content syndication, and link building. Regardless of the process, it is best to have an employee or contractor in charge.
When your website is known for its exclusive content, it becomes easier to attract links.
Step 3 – Having Your Leads Focus on One Task
Your call to action should focus on one task. It could be signing up for a demo or free trial. It is easy to lose many potential customers if you don’t feature your call to action in your content.
Tips for making your call to action more effective include giving your free trials a deadline, using social proof, and following up with an email after signing up.
For instance, you can encourage users to take action by adding expiration like “sign up for a 7-day free trial” to your call to action. Also, using social proof like “join 100,000 other users” encourages your users.
After signing up, always follow up with a welcome email guiding your prospects through the next stages of performing a task.
Step 4 – Using A Sales Process to Convert Potential Customers to Paying Customers
This step is essential in every business model. It is necessary to have a sequence of steps guiding your free trial or demo users to sign up for a paid account. Because free trials are different from non-free trials, we will consider each path to a paying customer differently.
Free Trial Approach
A free trial approach allows your prospective customer to experience your value proposition by directly using your product. There are several ways of converting them to paid customers in this case. The first strategy is to add an expiration between 7 and 30 days on the free account. After the free trial, you can try out a low pricing plan if conversions are low. For instance, you can offer a low-price trial instead of a free trial.
The Sales Process Approach
A sales-based SaaS process is a high-touch one for sharing your value proposition. Instead of customers purchasing the product with a credit card, this approach involves presentations and discussions. With this approach, your customer can raise their pain points continuously. It is best to have your sales team address the concerns as they come up.
In this approach, pricing matters. You may not be able to afford a sales staff if your SaaS product has a low price, especially when competing in high-cost living areas. It is best to sell your SaaS product at a price that justifies the expense of your sales team.
You can acquire customers for lower-priced SaaS products that require minimal configuration and customization through free trials or freemium accounts.
The Next Step
Building a complete B2B SaaS marketing plan takes time, especially with a small team or limited resources. Nevertheless, you can start by getting to know your target market. Once you build confidence about what your customers want, moving on to other areas becomes easy.
