How Specialized SaaS Marketing Agency Can Fuel the Growth of Your Business

In Gartner’s recent forecast, software as a service (SaaS) remains the most prominent public cloud services market segment. It is projected to grow in end-user spending from $176,622 million in 2022 to $208,080 million in 2023.

In such densely competitive markets, only a small number of SaaS companies tend to sustain growth rates above 30% to 40%. In reality, businesses achieve 100% growth YoY in the initial phase. But as they scale up, sustaining it becomes an uphill battle. 

Thus, identifying and executing growth opportunities with agility is pivotal for SaaS companies, considering the below factors:

• The lags between bookings and revenues
• The upfront Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
• The constant R&D spend rate.

That’s why, a powerful SaaS marketing growth strategy remains crucial cogwheels in optimizing the SaaS businesses’ marketing funnel.

What is SaaS Marketing?

SaaS marketing is a type of marketing that specifically builds strategies to create brand awareness, generate leads, and sell SaaS products. 

You can think of it as a specialized marketing that ensures that your SaaS product is relevant and addresses the target audience’s needs. It uniquely positions subscription-based products in a way that makes customers sign up for free trials, eventually subscribe and encourage repeat business.

Since you are selling software as a service, a growth-driven SaaS marketing agency designs strategies that integrate the product aspects with service aspects. Combining the technological needs of the target audience with their preferred service helps SaaS marketers deliver tangible marketing outcomes to the SaaS businesses.   

The flexibility, real-time accessibility, and scalability of SaaS compared to the on-premise software solutions make it a lucrative business model. At the same time, SaaS businesses also face marketing challenges like: 

• Keeping users engaged seems like an endless process.
• New features need to be introduced continuously.
• More decision-makers lengthen the sales cycle.
• Staying ahead of a lot of competitions is an arduous task.

The question is: how do you overcome them?

This is where a specialized SaaS marketing agency shines through and separates from the pack of traditional marketing agencies.

What Do SaaS Marketing Agencies Do?

Signing up with a niche SaaS marketing company, takes you a step forward in building a SaaS business on the foundation of recurring revenue and sustainable growth. 

Here’s what a SaaS marketing agency can help you with. 

Create a SaaS Buyer Persona

Leads are like fuel to grow your business. SaaS lead generation requires you to meet potential customers where they are and show them how your software relieves their pain points. 

SaaS marketers focus on the best-fit leads, offer the information they want, personalize marketing strategies to meet specific needs, and build their trust.

But what would help them reach the best-fit leads? Buyer personas.

SaaS marketers build out the avatars of specific ideal customers incorporating demographics, personal preferences, behavioural data, or psychographics. These buyer persona help you be more strategic and make a massive difference to inbound marketing strategy.

Do the Market Analysis

As technology moves at the speed of light, in-depth market research remains the key to staying ahead of the curve in the SaaS space.

SaaS marketers specialized in market analysis develop research strategies to enable you to understand your playing field thoroughly. It aids in capturing actionable insights on what customers are looking for, your market position, and your competition. 

Moreover, with proven methodologies and first-hand experience, these agencies keep advancing their market research strategies so you can understand what your customers want next.

Create a Go-to-market Strategy

Go-to-market (GTM) strategy dictates how a product will be delivered to customers to gain a competitive advantage. Without a GTM, you fail to identify customers’ pain points and optimize the cost of launching a new product.  

But a successful GTM strategy is never a cookie-cutter approach. It has to be tailored to the specific SaaS solution requirement, targeting the right audience correctly.

A SaaS specialized marketing company can do all the legwork and map out critical marketing plans for you such as: 

• Identify market opportunities and target audience 
• Outline a pre-launch strategy 
• Create a product road map 
• Build buyer life cycle, etc. 

Ensure Organic Growth

For a field that is packed with codes and technical jargon, it’s quite a feat to communicate complex information with their audience in a simple manner. But the SaaS brands who do, can successfully draw qualified traffic, connect with the target audience, and nurture long-term customer relationships.

This very need makes content marketing a backbone of SaaS marketing strategy. Think about Hubspot, Buffer, and Neil Patel—they all derive their ingenious marketing power from irrefutably informative and thought-provoking content.

In my opinion,

“An outbound sales-y strategy is no longer adequate to accomplish SaaS growth goals. You will need effective content marketing that presents you as an obvious choice when a potential customer is intensively researching a SaaS tool.”

An authoritative SaaS content agency like us understands the strategic levers of customer-centric SEO content, from strategy to distribution across all funnel stages. 

SaaS content services helps you drive organic growth and dramatically boost ROI with various content types, including:

• Blogs
• Whitepapers
• Case studies
• Videos
• Infographics
• Webinars
• Software demos
• Testimonials
• Podcasts

Do the Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is the process of using data to personalize messages in a way that helps you cultivate and strengthen relationships with leads. 

It’s about exposing leads to the information that :

• Answer their questions about your SaaS solution.
• Make them willing to engage with you further (probably followed by a “Yes”).
• Shortens the sales cycle.

SaaS marketing agencies devise strategies to nurture leads across customer lifecycle stages so you can convert more leads into free demos, more free demos into paying users, and more paying users into recurring revenue. 

Take Care of Advanced Analytics

SaaS marketing companies leverage various platforms, from social media to PPC ads, to propagate product’s marketing campaigns. But it’s even more vital to validate the effectiveness of those campaigns.

Ensuring that marketing efforts reach the right audience is a whole new ball game. And SaaS marketing agencies do this by deploying a data-driven approach. 

Their first-hand experience with advanced analytics tools and processes enables them to:

• Gather and analyze data from multiple marketing channels.
• Measure KPIs and extract insights.
• Use insights to optimize marketing strategies for the best results. 

Hiring SaaS Marketing Agency vs Hiring In-House Marketing Team

By now, you probably realize that marketing a SaaS product will be too big a commitment to pull off all by yourself. Plus, one can’t deny the reasonable likelihood of costlier errors. So it makes much more sense to rope in experts with niche skills here. 

It’s this point where most businesses hit the crossroad—you can either take your marketing in-house or hire a SaaS marketing agency, both of which have their own plus and minus points.

How Specialized SaaS Marketing Agency Is a Great Ally to Fuel Your SaaS Growth?

Amidst an already over-saturated marketplace, growth-minded SaaS companies can hardly overlook the strategic capabilities a specialist SaaS marketing agency brings to the table. 

Here’s how your business can see a ton of value from deploying SaaS marketing firms.

1. Deep Understanding of the SaaS Industry

To enable SaaS brands to grow, SaaS specialized agencies focus on their technical challenges, collect data to know what works and what doesn’t, and analyze sales funnels. It ultimately allows them to tailor new strategies to meet end buyers’ needs.

That’s exactly why seasoned agencies display a wealth of industry knowledge and in-depth market understanding. Their experienced professionals possess all the resources and prior experience that enable businesses to efficiently navigate the complexities of SaaS marketing. 

What’s more, they are incredibly confident in dispensing their knowledge and showcasing measured success through content and case studies with evident authority. 

2. Tried, Tested and Ready to Use SaaS Marketing Playbook

SaaS brands expect their marketing allies to help them acquire and retain customers for the long haul. It has increased the need for marketers to nail SaaS growth strategies and maintain brand consistency across multiple channels and campaigns. 

An ace SaaS marketing agency will never leave this to chance by having a well-defined SaaS marketing playbook.

The purpose of a marketing playbook is to offer one comprehensive reference point for marketing teams. It maps out everything from marketing strategies, communication, content creation, distribution channels to KPIs to use to maximize ROI for the concerned SaaS brand. 

On a fundamental level, it’s a great way to seamlessly execute marketing efforts and avoid confusion amongst teams. But from a broader perspective, it’s a blueprint that helps you fine-tune future marketing activities.

So, a good playbook moves beyond generic marketing tips and offers some real, actionable tactics. Moreover, it continually evolves as new pain points emerge with each marketing strategy.

3. Optimized SaaS Growth Strategy Formation

Upsurging demand for SaaS solutions brings businesses excellent opportunities and fierce competition. Long-term growth is only possible with the solid SaaS growth strategy that responds well to evolving customer needs. 

An effective SaaS growth strategy should have marketing initiatives that drive customer acquisition and expand reach. So, its optimization requires adequate attention in setting up the sound market, product, and GTM strategies.

With the battle-tested growth strategies in place, SaaS marketers rapidly scale SaaS businesses by:

• Expanding customer reach.
• Developing a comprehensive pricing strategy.
• Leveraging high-quality content.
• Tapping into new growth avenues.

4. More ROI of Your SaaS Business

While SaaS firms growing above the median growth spend, on average, 14% of their revenue on marketing, those in their early growth phase spend far more than this.

With money being poured into marketing to get ahead of the competitors, it is more crucial than ever to spend for the best results. 

When the profit is greater than what you spent on SaaS marketing, you get positive ROI. In other words, your marketing strategies are successful and worth the investment. Although dozens of SaaS metrics help you calculate ROI, the most commonly discussed are customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer lifetime value (CLV), churn rate, etc.

Right SaaS expert’s revenue-shifting strategies help you to:

• Couple the goals you want to achieve with the best-fit marketing strategy.
• Measure the outcomes consistently.
• Track the right metrics using a data-driven approach.
• Draw actionable insights to make strategic alterations.

Key Elements to Evaluate before Hiring SaaS Marketing Agency

It’s too common to see SaaS brands getting distracted by the shiny object syndrome promises sold by not-so-specialized SaaS marketing agencies. So to avoid making bad hiring decisions, it’s essential to do your research. Consider evaluating the following elements while vetting a SaaS marketing agency: 

1. Client Portfolio and Case Studies

The perfect way to assess an agency’s capabilities is by looking at its portfolio. 

• Check out portfolios available on websites to ascertain their experience of pure SaaS projects.
• The agency’s social media accounts give you a pretty good understanding of its credibility as a SaaS marketer.
• Dive into case studies and blog posts and gauge their strategic capabilities. Discover if they have any experience in overcoming challenges like yours.

2. Skill and Expertise

SaaS marketing companies have to don many hats. They have different skills based on their area of specialization. That said, there are specific must-have skills that you would look for in a good SaaS agency in general.

• Excellent authority in domain
• Investigation and research
• Project management
• Strategic planning
• SaaS model understanding
• Data Analytics 
• SEO best practices

3. Effective Expectation Setting 

While many SaaS companies expect massive outcomes in short time frames, oftentimes marketing agencies tend to raise clients’ expectations by overpromising. Unfortunately, it later creates trust issues and retention challenges for both parties.

Thus, it is beneficial to work with the agency having a proven framework for effective goal setting. It ensures that you are not simply going after arbitrary or unrealistic targets that are too difficult or too minuscule to achieve.

Bottom Line

It would be an understatement to say that SaaS is a competitive space and marketing a SaaS product is a tricky endeavour. 

To succeed and sustain in such a crowded space feels like walking through glue if you do not have smart SaaS marketing experts to back you up. With the right-fit agency, you will gain the insights needed to scale customer acquisition and minimize churn. Meanwhile, feel free to reach out to us if you need help with your SaaS marketing strategy. We’ll be happy to help!

Author

Pratik Dholakiya

Pratik Dholakiya is the Founder of Growfusely, a SaaS content marketing agency specializing in content and data-driven SEO.