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Reasons Digital Marketing is a Must for SAAS Business Growth

By Rajesh Jhamb
October 12, 2017

Every Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company needs to take a strategic approach to digital marketing, even if it thinks it can do without it! Because – as we all know and can easily admit – growing any business is not an easy task and this is especially true for SaaS companies. Digital marketing helps SaaS companies find their feet with some of the most memorable marketing campaigns. These campaigns are capable of driving greater awareness, garnering new leads and increasing revenues. SaaS companies can easily take advantage of all the creativity and innovation that comes with an integrated approach towards digital marketing. And, with things constantly evolving and transforming at speeds not known before, marketers need to remember that just changing software delivery models will not work anymore. As marketers who want to make a difference, you need to delve into decisions that are driven by data when it is about your sales, marketing, and other operations. SaaS marketing is not a cakewalk because you have to look for various means to find as well as attract quality leads, and then try to close the sales apart from trying to increase the lead volume. And – to top it all off – this has to happen on minuscule budgets! So, we’ve compiled some metrics that could help SaaS companies enhance their revenues and performance too.

#1. The Digital Marketing Mantra for SaaS

Marketing should be able to improve awareness as well as attract customers, and also convert the prospective customers to the ones who actually pay.

#2. The recurring revenue per month

You can’t dilly-dally when it comes to your investments for a SaaS business – it has to be upfront. Your product needs to be ready, and the prospects need to be spent on before they decide to spend anything on you. What’s more, the customers do not pay up like they need to for any other normal software business. You’ll have to be ready to collect monthly subscriptions and also brace yourself to survive long enough on that itself, which is why it becomes imperative to regularly track your monthly recurring revenue.

#3. Unique visitors per month

This is the number of individuals who visit your website every month. If an individual visits the site many times, he/she will qualify as a unique visitor. While this particular measure might not lend itself to providing many in-depth insights, it still manages to let you know the impact of your marketing efforts. And, if your numbers happen to grow, it will be a great measure of the efficacy of your top-of-the-funnel marketing. But, at the same time, you need to remember to look at the average time spent on the site, repeat visits, comments, email subscriptions and more. These are metrics that can help you with both quality and quantity.

#4. The number of signups

There are many SaaS companies that offer free trials or other options such as self-service. But, then there are many other SaaS companies who do not offer any of these options. So, for these companies and the ones that offer just self-service, signups present themselves as one of the most important metrics. Whichever plan you’re offering, your marketing goals should aim towards driving signups, and there are myriad ways to augment signups. By presenting content that is both appealing as well as educational, traffic can be grown to your site.

#5. You need to look at the churn rate

If you can manage to retain customers for the long haul, you will know that you’re here to stick around. On the other hand, churn lets you know the number of people you’ve lost. If you consistently and continuously have a high churn, then you need to know what is wrong with your product. Talk to your customers and figure out where the problem lies. Get in touch with people who upped and left and ask them the reasons. Likewise, get in touch with the people who have around for long. Know what’s the reason behind that as well. It’s about time you knew what is working with your product, and what isn’t.

#6. Cost per acquisition will work well

Opting for the wrong marketing channels can bleed you dry. You can know what is working for you if you can track the cost per acquisition of campaigns. In case your spends on acquiring customers is much more than what you are receiving or will receive, you will have to relook your strategy. In case you can manage, you will need to know the cost per acquisition for individual marketing campaigns. This may be a tricky situation, but with the smart usage of customer analytics, you can get all the required data about the customer and know which campaign is bringing in the most profit.

There are many more reasons apart from the top 5 that have been listed above. Some of them are:

#a. Average Revenue Per Customer

Like the name suggests, it’s about the average revenue you get from your customers.

#b. Lifetime Value

This is fairly simple too, and can be estimated by combining the average revenue per customer and the churn rate.

#c. Product Qualified Leads

For businesses that offer free trials or freemiums, PQLs are the new MQLs (Marketing Qualified Lead). It aids SaaS businesses in pre-qualifying prospective customers based on their product usage.

#d. Qualified Lead Velocity Rate (LVR)

LVR lets you know how much you can achieve as future sales, based on the qualified leads.

#e. Viral Factor

Word-of-mouth marketing can do wonders. When your customers become your salespeople, you can grow exponentially.

#f. Cost per Customer

Knowing how much it will cost to acquire new customers, as well as identifying the right sales and marketing channels will help you beyond measure in SaaS.

#g. Create content that’s unique

Create e-books or white papers along with other microtools for informational keywords around your product. Use this tool/content to get email addresses or even social shares.

#h. Email drip campaign

Onboarding is crucial to a SaaS business, and an email campaign can work well in this aspect. It can be utilized to resell the value prop, re-educate and offer incentives.

#i. Integration with other products

Work with some other complimentary SaaS products. The marketing programs, as well as the web assets of the other products, could drive considerable traffic.

#j. Lead Nurturing

Take a shot at executing workflows for creating touchpoints a little differently. Use ideas such as expired trials, CTAs for "let’s stay in touch," and "are you happy/would you refer?" for customers.

#k. Meetups

Hosting meetups can help you to meet a lot of cool people in the tech industry who can come up with ideas that have not been tried earlier.

#l. Industry-relevant Referring Sites

Service provider directories can be extremely effective at lead generation for businesses of all sizes, but they work exceptionally well at generating revenue mostly from small business clients.

#m. Request a quote

Some people are just asking for a price quote from you. Give them what they desire, but in a manner that maximizes the value of your product or service.