The #1 SaaS Marketing Trick - What 17 experts have to say about it

Change the way we sell our product has been our largest revenue multiplier. I don't mean changing the product. I mean changing the pricing, period, and incentives associated with the product.

I call this changing the "packaging" of the promotion. For us it usually means combining special limited pricing for a single day, for an annual membership, and there is a free gift that comes with the packaged sale event.

This has had the greatest effect to our revenue than any other single change or series of changes. Period.

Building a welcome drip email marketing campaign is key to a great user onboarding. It will help you with user retention, user engagement and you can also integrate viral tactics to boost your customer acquisition as well. It is also a great opportunity to create discussion with your users which is key to better understand their needs. Drip email marketing campaign also have the advantage of being pretty affordable to create!

My #1 marketing trick is actually a product trick! Tiny Reminder is a client-facing web application, which means constant exposure to new people (clients of our users). Combined with freemium pricing, this creates amazing ground for fast organic growth.

As for actual marketing tricks, I'm employing some Twitter automation (basic following and unfollowing of relevant profiles). But I don't have any solid data on the results.

A good landing page is everything. Be sure to share some alarming statistics as to why it's important that the person or company start using your service right away.

Keep the onboarding process super simple as well. There's nothing worse than signing up for something and having to fill out every personal detail about your company or yourself. Get the payment for the service, then work on collecting personal and business information.

Do more with the traffic you are already getting. Most SaaS businesses focus on getting more traffic. But the biggest wins can often be found by increasing conversion.

Consider this - for most SaaS businesses, as many as 9 out of 10 of their free trial users (no credit card required) never convert to paid customers. If they could convert just one more of those, they would DOUBLE their business.

So my advice to is focus on the first experience your trial users have, and get them as quickly as possible to their AHA! moment, where they solve a painful problem and through that, they understand the value of your solution.

A Customer Data Platform, hands down. A CDP allows you to track your customers whether they go to your website, click through and email or interact on social media. CDP's combine customer data that would usually be trapped in silos and give you a full 360 degree view of your clients. This allows the marketing team to be much more sophisticated and granular in their targeting and ad creation. I have found we get much better ROI when all our data is current, connected, and easily accessible.

Build deep integrations into your ecosystem partners. These types of integrations tend to bring very highly qualified signups since:

1. You know for sure they are already in your space.
2. They have already proven willing to spend money to fix their pain points.
3. There is a in-built sense of trust passed from the referral. You don't have to start from scratch.

Even complementary services that don't have an add-ons marketplace or other formal referral program will often be willing to work with you as the partnership is something that makes both of your offerings more valuable to prospective customers.

Content roundups, live webinars and bootcamps for building a demo with the SaaS product live with the audience. When combined with some social media marketing and affiliate programs, this could convert a good percentage of the people who've enrolled for the live event.

At the end of the event, a limited time discount offer should be announced (within 24-48 hours) which would motivate some of the attendees to pull the trigger right away.

Focus on the product. That's probably one of the most overlooked aspects of getting to grow your Saas startup. Most marketers today are so focused on promoting the product on as many channels they could find, they sometimes forget that their most useful marketing asset is having an amazing product. So before you go out there and do link building, SEO, advertising campaigns, email marketing or any other form of marketing, make sure you have a great product which is easy to use and has a great value proposition.

You can do this by getting in front of your active users and asking them about their experince using your product or by using more advances ways like A/B testing, HeatMaps and surveys.

Create whitepapers that differ based on the size of the company and the role of your target market (e.g. a whitepaper for a Software Engineer will be very different to that for a CTO).

The more you do this, the higher the quality of your leads will be.

Remember that your prospects have different positions, authority levels, and they come from different industries. You'll need to able to adjust to that.

Listen to your users, implement and then market your SaaS product/s to look-a-like audiences.

Make sure you make it easy for your users to give feedback, listen to their feedback and implement changes if it's feasible. You can then use these new "features" to sell your SaaS product/s to look-a-like audiences, who will most probably have the same problems as the user that suggested the feature / change.

Bonus Tip: Facebook has great options for targeting and making sure a specific message reaches a specific audience type.

This a retention trick.

After working with many SaaS companies, I noticed that Churn is a consistent problem once it starts being tracked. There are tons of ways to get users back into your app, but how do you keep them from discontinuing their subscription?

Well, we implemented an unsubscribe funnel that asks a few simple questions about why a customer is leaving. What I have run into time and time again is missing features (these tend to be early stage companies), so we create a list of features that are coming out next that match or are similar to the feature need and display them on the final unsubscribe screen. I also, create Clickbait style How-to's that offer a workaround for that customer, and in the future, we email that to the churned customer with a discount offer if they sign back up and give us another try.

A bit long winded, but it has cut down on churn immensely.

Consistency.

When you're marketing a SaaS product, the most important thing you can do is be consistent. Consistent in your voice, your content, and your outreach. This is important not just to gaining new customers, but also in retaining your current customers. Churn can make or break your company, so ensure that you stay top of mind with current customers and continue to highlight the value your product brings.

Create product comparison content. This is a great way to showcase your software, and how it is different (aka better!) than you competitors. If SEO is going to be a top driver of leads for your company, then these types of product comparisons should be an essential part of your digital marketing plan.

Having pages like this should also allow you to run search ad campaigns centered around alternatives to your competitors and take top positions for searches that include the word “versus”.

My #1 marketing tactic that many SaaS companies aren't leveraging is internationalizing your content. By simply translating content on your website, app (we use POEditor) and Adwords campaigns you can reach whole new markets with a fraction of the work. Not only that, but many of these markets are undeserved and less competitive than the English market. People worry about customer service but we've found that Google Translate does a fantastic job. Internationalizing our software has been one of the best ways we've found to scale our marketing.

I don't believe in tricks but what really works is a solid well-designed product, comprehensive self-service FAQs and a very very responsive customer support team. Your team needs to WOW your early customers so they talk about your product and service on their social and offline network. Another idea that works is to gather testimonials/stories from your initial customers and showcase them on your site to create credibility.

Marketing SaaS products effectively comes down to one thing: a modern SEO keyword strategy.

Google is heavily invested in reading the user’s mind. There is a specific question or need behind every search query, and their machine learning program is monitoring user behavior 24/7/365 to figure it out.

When a user Googles “management information system,” for example, does he want to buy software? Get a free trial? Compare vendors? Define the phrase? Google breaks user intent into four “micro moments”:

• Know—The user wants information.
• Go—The user wants to navigate to somewhere or something.
• Do—The user wants instructions on how to complete a task.
• Buy—The user wants to make a purchase.

The only way to know what the user wants is to Google “management information system” and look at the organic results—because those results are the product of endless research. Today, the 10 blue links I get break down like this:

• 9 “What is?” pages
• 1 college degree program page

That means there is a very strong “know” intent for my keyword, and a sales page for my MIS software is never going to rank highly. Targeting the keyword “management information system” well means creating the best page of content that clearly and thoroughly defines the term.

Conversely, if I’m creating a content strategy for a SaaS company that provides cloud backup services, user intent research would demonstrate that half of the organic results for “cloud backup” are branded sales pages. Thus, a product page could very effectively target that term.

User intent research is the secret to effective SEO and content marketing, and will help SaaS companies structure websites and design content that delivers the right brand experience every time.