Use this checklist to hone and reinvent your marketing strategy after launching your SaaS. This checklist can and should be used both shortly after launch, and on a regular basis indefinitely afterwards.
- Evaluate Launch Performance Expectations Vs Reality
- Which ideas, tactics, and strategic approaches outperformed your expectations?
- Which fell flat?
- How is the SaaS being used in ways that are different from your expectations?
- Which metrics are stronger indicators of compliance with your goals than you anticipated?
- Which metrics were less meaningful than you believed?
- Identify Bottlenecks In The Lead’s Journey From Interest To Purchase
- Which pages on the journey have the highest exit percentage?
- Which pages on the journey are distractions that could be removed or placed somewhere, where they will be less of a distraction and only found by those who are looking for them?
- Brainstorm and directly investigate reasons for exits on these pages, such as:
- Failing to overcome objections
- Failing to identify the Unique Selling Proposition
- Using the wrong Unique Selling Proposition
- Set up A/B tests designed to directly address causes for these exits, so that the failure of a new landing page is strong evidence that the proposed explanation for the exits would be shown incorrect.
- Identify All Points Where Customer Retention Is Leaking
- Identify when customers are most likely to stop using the SaaS
- Pinpoint any differences in customer journey between those who leave before the free trial ends and those who leave after
- Invite customers who quit to answer a survey that will answer why they decided to stop using the SaaS
- Look for correlations between features, which are used (or not used) and customer lifetime value.
- Look for correlations between content consumed (or not consumed) and customer lifetime value.
- Build An Analytics-Based Predictive Model
- Build a model that predicts, with some accuracy, the revenue produced and costs spent for each of your marketing efforts.
- Estimate the impact of early, middle, and final pre-purchase, and post-purchase content on revenue.
- A variety of models, including simple, statistics-based, and speculative is recommended.
- Clarify How Customers Are Using Your SaaS
- Survey your customers to identify what features they are using, for what reasons, and to solve what types of problems.
- Identify features that correlate strongly with high customer retention.
- Deploy user testing to identify where changes in interface could enhance customer satisfaction.
- Take Note Of What Problems Customers Are Using Your SaaS To Solve
- Identify your actual customer demographics
- Identify actual audience psychographics
- Look for correlations between content interests before signup and customer retention
- Remove Or Relocate Features That Are Not Heavily Used, To Streamline Your Interface
- Refine Your “Growth-Hacking” Process
- Set a regular time for brainstorming new ideas
- Refine your process for testing new ideas quickly
- Assign a role or a process to deal with evaluating the performance of previous ideas
- Regularly re-evaluate successful ideas to brainstorm how they can most effectively be scaled or how their success can be reproduced
- Set a clear definition of what makes an idea “successful,” (which may be different for each idea) and ensure that it is measureable
- Prioritize ideas to test based on:
- How promising the idea seems to be
- How much can be learned from testing the idea
- How definitively the idea can “succeed” or “fail” in such a way that clarifies the value of investment
- Construct A “Link Building” Strategy
- Determine how you will be building, earning, and attracting links and mentions from trusted locations on the web
- Focus on earning links that will send referral traffic, not primarily on search engine value, which is unpredictable and tends to follow referral traffic patterns regardless
- Use methods of earning links which can be justified in multiple ways and which will not be seen as unethical, manipulative, or cynical by your target users.
- Hone Your Outreach Strategy
- Develop a process for identifying new targets for marketing outreach that can be repeated and produce results reliably
- Put a process in place to accurately measure which outreach methods are producing the most meaningful results
- Keep a complete and easy to reference record of your previous outreach efforts and contacts, so that successful contacts are not lost, and successful strategies are not abandoned
- Routinely review, hone, and evaluate the successes and failures of your outreach efforts
- Construct An “Influencer Marketing” Strategy
- Determine how to reliably identify people who are influential to your target audiences
- Create a list of methods of partnering with influencers in ways which are mutually beneficial
- Assign repeated processes for enacting these methods and evaluating their performance
- Identify And Maintain Existing Marketing Relationships
- Assign successful contacts to a list of relationships that should be maintained
- Regularly identify projects that can be worked on with influencers ahead of time
- Create a list of types of reasons for reaching out to maintain relationships that will be mutually beneficial
- Construct An “Information Gap” Marketing Strategy
- Develop a list of questions and statements that pique curiosity in your target audience
- Test which questions and statements are most effective at compelling clicks
- Identify which clicks are most likely to lead to long-term results
- Develop a process for regularly identifying new “information gaps” to try
- Develop a process for continually testing and placing your “information gap” headlines and CTAs in novel places
- Construct A Video Marketing Strategy
- Identify which features and uses of your SaaS can best be communicated visually
- Identify which challenges related to your SaaS can best be communicated visually
- Regularly re-evaluate whether product-focused or information-focused content contributes the greatest lifetime customer value and prioritize appropriately
- Construct A “Newsjacking” Strategy
- Identify how current events can be leveraged to earn media attention
- Set ground rules regarding brand values and brand responses to current events to avoid being seen as cynical
- Identify ways in which actions can be taken by the brand in response to current events, since actions are more likely to earn media attention than content
- Construct A Remarketing Strategy
- Determine to what extent your brand and your target audiences are comfortable with remarketing advertisements and similar marketing methods, which some may see as an invasion of privacy
- Identify any non-advertising based methods of remarketing that may be deployed, such as lead-magnets coupled with email marketing
- Regularly evaluate which types of messages are most likely to recapture the interest of previous site-visitors
- Identify the level of personalization you wish to deploy in order to re-capture interest from previous site visitors, and methods of doing so, effectively
- Evaluate Traffic Sources Based On Volume And Conversion Rates
- Identify any keywords and topics that have the highest traffic and conversion rates from search engines
- Identify which topics are bringing in the most referral traffic
- Identify which sources of referral traffic and social media traffic are generating the most awareness and the highest conversion rates
- Factor in long-term conversion rates, such as whether a user has ever visited a page, as opposed to merely evaluating which pages were visited on the same visit that a signup took place
- Regularly brainstorm how to recreate the impact of the above topics and traffic sources
- Prioritize Traffic Growth Strategies
- Use the above information to prioritize traffic sources based on traffic, conversion rates, and ease of scaling
- Do the same for content subject matter
- Re-prioritize on a regular basis
- Routinely Weigh Merits Of Investing In Acquisition And Retention
- Estimate impacts of investments on revenue and customer lifetime value before and after testing tactics and strategies
- Consider whether a relatively low average user lifetime indicates a failure of the SaaS or a failure of obtaining promising leads
- Identify which leads have the longest lifespan and identify the reasons why they continue to use the product, and focus on these in your acquisition strategies
- Identify which leads quit early and why. If they are quitting because the product is not a good fit, invest in more targeted acquisition. If they are quitting because they are unaware of ways in which the product can benefit them, invest more in onboarding and post-onboarding.
- Locate Low-Hanging Fruit Keywords
- Identify keywords and topics that are bringing search engine traffic that you hadn’t planned for
- Prioritize these topics based on how likely they are to drive audience retention and conversions
- Develop a process for sorting these keywords into topics for landing pages, blog posts, lead magnets, off-site content, non-text content, and others
- Develop Your Post-Onboarding Content Marketing Goals
- What features are most closely associated with extended customer lifetime value and how can you most effectively communicate them?
- What product uses have the highest correlation with customer lifetime value, and how can these be communicated?
- How can you regularly produce new content that will introduce novel ways to use the SaaS that your audience will find interesting?
- How can you encourage users to share interesting ways to use the SaaS and develop a community around use of your product?
- To what extent should you promote pre-onboarding content to your existing users, weigh the potential benefits of encouraging brand-advocacy and loyalty against the potential pitfalls of content-overload and content irrelevance?
- Develop A Process For Choosing Post-Onboarding Topics And Keywords
- Develop Your Pre-Onboarding Content Marketing Goals
- Do you intend to develop a large audience where only a small percentage of the audience converts to users?
- Do you intend to develop a small audience with a very high conversion rate?
- Weigh the potential benefits of earning a large audience and the associated networking effects against the potential pitfalls of low conversion rates and a diluted brand message
- Consider the potential trade-off between brand stability as a result of a large audience and brand clarity as a result of hyper-focused topic choices
- Consider the fact that diverse audiences from a wide variety of platforms can be told a similar message many times, while a small audience inside a single industry consisting of “power-users” must hear novel messages on a regular basis.
- Develop A Process For Choosing Pre-Onboarding Topics And Keywords
- Identify Platforms For Long-Form Content Marketing As An Acquisition Channel
- Which platforms are most conducive to the consumption of long-form content such as blog posts, training videos, e-books, and so on?
- Which of these platforms does your target audience frequent?
- Which platforms will allow you to become a regular contributor?
- Consider:
- A YouTube channel
- Guest contributions to media sites
- Becoming a regular contributor to a media site
- Cross-promotion of email lists
- Podcasts
- Interviews
- Identify Social Platforms For Short-Form Content As An Acquisition Channel
- Where does your target audience consume short-form content?
- Which topics related to your SaaS and the problems that it solves are best suited for short-consumption?
- Which bite-size pieces of information can be embedded in your long-form content for two-way promotion?
- Which short-form content is best at creating an information gap that will pique audience curiosity and entice clicks?
- Which of these clicks is most likely to result in a long-term business relationship or a signup?
- Integrate Your Social And Long-Form Content Marketing Strategies
- Embed your short form content for easy sharing within your long form content
- Design your short-form content for maximum shareability, but link it to your long form content
- Promote your short form content to your most loyal long-form content audience (such as your email subscribers) and make it easy for them to share
- Build A Process For Developing New Lead Magnets
- Identify the properties of a lead magnet that are most likely to result in signups, such as:
- The lead magnet solves a problem that isn’t solved on the open web
- The lead magnet solves a problem that a blog post can’t
- The problem the lead magnet solves is directly related to your SaaS
- Identify keywords that indicate how hungry the searcher is for a solution, as opposed to keywords with high traffic and high competition
- Determine how your lead magnets will be promoted
- Integrate Your Social, Long Form, and Lead Magnet Processes
- Guest posts, social media posts, and on-site content should be tailored to encourage your audience to download your lead magnet, naturally, and within the context of the content itself
- Develop A Customer Segmentation And Personalization Strategy
- Segment based on data and results at least as much as on opinions
- A/B test your segmentation strategies
- Identify which tools you will use for segmentation and personalization
- Avoid “feedback loops” in which an audience is segmented to receive a particular type of message simply because they have received that type of message, as a result of segmentation in the past
- Re-evaluate Your Fundamental Goals
- Set a time to regularly re-evaluate the goals of your business and propose new SaaS products or features that might come into play
- Ask whether any brand values or mission statements should be re-evaluated
- Weigh the benefits of a shift in brand values and brand goals against any confusion or loss of brand loyalty that could result from such changes
- Re-evaluate Your Target Audiences
- Which audiences are responding more to your SaaS than was expected?
- Which audiences are not as interested in your SaaS as expected?
- Is there a “power user” segment of your audience, which could be offered more features, more scale, more computing power, more technical content, and so on?
- Is there the potential for a more consumer-oriented version of your SaaS that is more user-friendly, lighter on features, lower in price, and more interested in “fluffy” content?
- Is it possible to take your marketing efforts into new gaps in the market and new industries?
- Identify New Competitors And Perform Competitive Research
- As new competitors enter the scene, how can you continue to differentiate yourself from them on factors other than price?
- As you enter new industries and new gaps in the market, which competition do you now need to consider that you did not before?]
- Evaluate Customer Service Performance And Satisfaction
- Consider satisfaction with:
- Call centers
- Message boards
- Messaging apps
- Social media response
- User reviews and responses to them
- Periodically Perform A Technical SEO Audit
- Remove any internal links to 301 and 404 pages
- Remove or canonicalize any pages with duplicate content or duplicate title tags
- Resolve any HTML errors
- Periodically Split Test Your Landing Pages
- Set up A/B tests with the intent to test core strategic principles, not small design tweaks
- Design your A/B tests for maximum learning potential and maximum impact
- Test “one thing at a time” but in a strategic sense, not in a literal design sense
Author
Pratik Dholakiya
Pratik Dholakiya is the Founder of Growfusely, a SaaS content marketing agency specializing in content and data-driven SEO.