The SaaS industry is booming. According to Gartner, the industry has grown over 5 times in the last seven years. This segment has seen tremendous growth of thousands of outstanding SaaS products serving various industries. No wonder, the SaaS market is rife with competition.
Considering the constant tussle to grab attention and market share, SaaS businesses must think differently and amp up their marketing strategies. Digital PR is one of the most effective marketing tactics that is being largely leveraged by SaaS brands all around the world. No wonder the global PR market revenue is expected to hit $129 billion by 2025.
Digital PR focuses on increasing brand awareness and boosting your company’s online presence. It aims at skyrocketing your brand’s identity and online visibility by combining traditional PR media with digital channels, such as social media, SEO, influencer marketing, and more. The right SaaS PR strategy can take your business to the next level.
Press releases, newsjacking, guest blogging, podcast interviews, influencer marketing, and more are some of the best digital PR strategies that SaaS businesses are implementing in their organizations. In this post, we will share examples of how leading SaaS companies are leveraging these strategies to attract millions of customers and position themselves as an expert in their respective niches.
Semrush is an all-in-one SEO and marketing software that helps businesses run digital marketing strategies to boost their online visibility. This software offers a suite of tools, such as keyword research, keyword rank tracking, website SEO audit tool, link-building tool, and more that are specialized for monitoring content creation and content marketing efforts.
Semrush leverages webinars as a part of its digital PR strategy to build brand awareness and set itself as an authority in the content marketing industry. Webinars provide a great platform for Semrush to provide valuable industry insights, promote products subtly, and interact with customers and prospects while increasing audience engagement and boosting brand awareness.
The Semrush team regularly organizes various educational webinars that are open to all. It invites the top digital marketing experts to deliver informative sessions about various aspects of online marketing. By inviting these niche experts, Semrush manages to tap into the guest speakers’ following to widen its audience base and promote its product to highly-interested individuals.
Here is a snapshot of the webinars hosted by Semrush in the past. Notice how Semrush invites industry experts to deliver talks, hold discussions, and share experiences with the webinar attendees.
HubSpot is an inbound marketing and sales software that helps businesses align their sales and marketing efforts to promote and grow their ventures. It offers a suite of tools, such as sales CRM, marketing software, customer service tools, content management software, and more to grow any business.
Speaking of digital PR, HubSpot is one brand that has turned content marketing into a gold mine for generating leads, acquiring customers, and boosting brand recognition. HubSpot developed a comprehensive and well-researched blog that covers everything about marketing and sales. Due to its excellent content strategy and amazing content quality, the HubSpot blog has become a go-to resource for many marketers, sales professionals, and PR representatives.
Through its content marketing efforts, HubSpot has presented itself as an expert and amplified its brand reach. With the help of organic PR outreach, HubSpot has made its data-focused and tangential content reach relevant journalists, marketers, bloggers, editors, and other professionals.
Here is a snapshot of the HubSpot resources page that contains hundreds of blog posts, podcasts, videos, eBooks, certifications, and more.
The top-notch content quality and word-of-mouth appraisal has helped HubSpot promote its content to large audiences. You will find numerous blog mentions about HubSpot, its tools, resources, and more, and online discussions which are fueling HubSpot’s organic reach. It is HubSpot’s content and audience that does most of the marketing and PR work for the brand.
Zendesk is an excellent customer service software and supports a ticketing system that helps you craft the best customer experiences. It lets businesses offer conversational support to their customers in multiple ways, such as live chat, chatbots, email, phone, and more. By bringing the entire customer communication in a unified place, Zendesk helps in boosting your agent efficiency thereby helping them work smarter and increase productivity.
Zendesk boosts its digital PR efforts via social media. To create incredible awareness about their products and foster better engagement, Zendesk leverages social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more to reach out to their ideal customers. Besides digital PR, this active presence on social media helps Zendesk to build lasting relationships with their followers, identify any PR threats or social media crises, reach out to relevant industry influencers, and more.
Social media empowers Zendesk to connect and converse with its desired target audience to persuade them into buying its products. It presents an opportunity to listen to the customer’s wants and offer a customized solution that streamlines their work.
Here is a snapshot of Zendesk’s Facebook page.
Better Proposals is a proposal management software that helps businesses create, manage, and share custom proposals with their customers to streamline their sales processes. By eliminating the mistakes encountered during the proposal creation process, such as manual errors, poor writing, and more, Better Proposals offers you professionally-written proposal templates that help you impress your customers and close deals faster.
Better Proposals leverage podcasting for their digital PR strategy. By placing its brand in front of highly engaged leads, podcasts are helping many SaaS brands like Better Proposals to gain immense exposure. It helps Better Proposals to connect with the hosts’ audience who shares similar interests to that of its customers and boosts its brand awareness thoughtfully and compellingly.
Better Proposals researches relevant podcast opportunities on the web for guest podcasting. It helps them tap into the hosts’ loyal group of followers without requiring them to create their podcast channel in-house. Adam Hempenstall, CEO of Better Proposals, has been a podcast guest in over 20+ podcasts so far.
These podcasts are mostly centered around starting a new business and boosting sales with the help of epic sales proposals. Here are some of the podcast channels on which Adam Hempenstall has been a guest.
Better Proposals has also created a roundup of all these podcasts and compiled them in a post on their company blog.
Guest appearances on podcasts have helped Better Proposals present itself as an industry expert and strengthen its brand image.
TalentLMS is an online learning platform that helps businesses develop training courses for customers, employees, and more. It brings all the training tools and resources, such as quizzes, tests, eBooks, videos, and more on a centralized platform and helps businesses deliver great learning experiences to their desired target audience across all devices.
TalentLMS is known for its excellent PR tactic of creating and launching original industry reports and studies for researchers and marketers who are always looking for interesting consumer trends and insights. It also helps in capturing the attention of journalists and potential customers for getting coverage and obtaining backlinks for the brand.
By establishing itself as a credible source in the industry, TalentLMS has successfully achieved the spotlight to acquire well-sought attention in the market thereby raising awareness about its product.
TalentLMS pitches its original industry reports and studies to several journalists requesting them to include the same in their upcoming articles.
Pitching to journalists, influencers, and bloggers ensures excellent exposure for TalentLMS. It helps them gain backlinks from high-authority websites, organic brand mentions in popular publications, and more that not only helps TalentLMS receive outstanding media attention but also boosts their SEO efforts.
Intercom is a customer communication management platform that helps businesses communicate with their customers using behavior-driven messages, offer excellent conversational support, and engage them with their brand using targeted content. It helps them configure various touch points across the stages of the customer journey allowing them to capture the attention of their customers and prospects and offer them uninterrupted support.
With eBooks helping SaaS brands attract and engage their target audience, they have become an important element of SaaS PR strategy that elevates brand awareness through personalized and interactive experiences.
Ebooks prove to be the best B2B lead magnets that help you grab the attention of your target customers and educate them about your offerings. Further, they can be an excellent resource for transforming your customer onboarding processes.
Intercom has mastered the art of leveraging eBooks to build strong relationships with its potential and existing customers. Intercom’s ebooks offer valuable insights and guidance on various topics, such as customer support, sales, customer engagement, messaging strategies, and more. These eBooks help readers to deliver exceptional experiences to their customers while helping Intercom position itself as an expert in its field.
The screenshot below showcases some of the eBooks Intercom has compiled for its customers.
With each eBook focused on a particular aspect of customer communication, Intercom manages to capture a diverse audience through targeted marketing strategies. This promises a subsequent influx of new customers who benefit from these eBooks and ultimately, sign up for its product.
Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO tool that helps businesses optimize their websites and generate outstanding search traffic. It offers intuitive tools for link building, competitor analysis, keyword research, site auditing, and more to help businesses get higher Google rankings.
Ahrefs leverages press releases and media pitching to get mentions in big publications, share company news, announce crucial product updates, and more. Besides product-related information, it also shares news about webinars, podcast announcements, practical advice, thought leadership content, intriguing industry insights, and more with its readers. This helps them create brand awareness and amplify their position as an authority in the digital marketing and SEO industry.
Ahrefs ensures it sends impactful press releases containing product information, industry insights, and more regularly. Their press releases do not include trivial details that might weaken the content piece but offer valuable information about its product.
Check out the screenshot below to see how Ahrefs distributed a press release about the major keyword updates it introduced in its tools.
This news was picked up and published by a Norwegian website.
Canva is a free-to-use graphic design tool that helps businesses create visually-appealing graphics for social media posts, posters, logos, presentations, infographics, videos, and more in just a few clicks. By simplifying the digital designing process, Canva helps businesses establish a consistent brand image with its professional-looking designs. It offers thousands of ready-to-use design templates for all types of graphic layouts to help businesses create stunning visuals in no time.
Canva has become a popular brand because of its unique product offering, freemium model, and outstanding influencer marketing campaigns. The brand’s digital PR strategy revolves around identifying the professionals who have talked about their product and partnering with them to boost Canva’s brand awareness and credibility. This includes graphic designers, YouTubers, bloggers, and more. These influencer partnerships take Canva closer to the influencer’s audiences and drive further engagement.
During one of their discoveries, they stumbled upon Guy Kawasaki’s post and learned that his social media graphics were being designed using Canva. The Canva team contacted him and got him onboard as Canva’s brand evangelist. It is believed that Guy has helped Canva expand globally and ensure that the product reaches its desired target audience.
Besides, Canva has launched an exclusive program named the Canva Creators program that encourages graphic design professionals to contribute design assets to its ever-growing template library and receive royalties for their efforts. Through this program, Canva has strategically boosted its online awareness and product exposure while paying a minimal amount to the creators.
No wonder, Canva is currently being used by 65 million users across 179 countries around the world.
Subscript is a subscription intelligence platform that offers intelligent revenue metrics to B2B SaaS leaders. It leverages advanced data-driven algorithms to convert data into crucial metrics that can help you grow your business.
Subscript leveraged the newsjacking digital PR technique to rethink its employer branding efforts and attract the best talent to its brand.
So, what is newsjacking? Newsjacking is the technique of hijacking breaking news and piggybacking on its popularity to create engaging content for your brand. As breaking news amasses huge traffic from all around the web, it is ideal to tap into this exposure and market your SaaS brand thereby increasing your brand awareness.
Subscript used Elon Musk’s viral email about remote working for Tesla employees and modified it by adding a unique spin to it. Here is a screenshot depicting how Subscript modified the email and promoted it to boost brand awareness among their existing employees and potential candidates.
The post garnered a lot of attention and engagement on various social media networks. The Subscript team leveraged newsjacking for boosting their employer brand and their overall brand image.
Digital PR is one of the most effective ways to increase brand awareness and position yourself as an authority in your industry. These nine examples of exceptional SaaS brands offer excellent insights into different types of digital PR mediums.
Use these examples as inspiration to get the desired brand coverage from trusted publications, social media networks, podcasts, and more. We are certain this article will help you in your endeavor to boost your company’s PR.
Image sources: Semrush, Hubspot, Zendesk on Facebook, Agency Mavericks, Soundcloud, Better Proposals, TalentLMS, Intercom, Ahrefs, Businesswire, Canva, Prmention
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