As many industries do, SaaS companies have specific qualities which need particular skills to be handled correctly. As such, if you’ve identified SaaS as the niche you want to work with, and are preparing to launch your SaaS marketing agency, here are some things that you should know.
For one, SaaS companies will need you to be fluent in hyperspeed scaling, aggressive goal setting, and generating various lead types. Because of this, collaborating directly on SaaS marketing strategies that fit the unique needs of a particular SaaS company is the only way forward.
Deep-dive
There is no space for assumptions or guessing here. With SaaS, there are many layers, and you need to understand and navigate them all. A business that is selling sneakers online, for example, has some very obvious search terms, audience, and conversions.
However, with SaaS, there is likely a range of services on the menu that will need to be marketed to the right audience.. As such, creating campaigns that meet targets takes specialized knowledge. There is likely a need for multiple landing pages and numerous campaigns to be run simultaneously.
Unlike with the online sneaker ecommerce seller, where everything you sell serves the same or a similar purpose, SaaS companies have varied subscription models and functions to handle. Research and hands-on experience of the products are going to give you the edge here. When creating a SaaS marketing strategy for a client, you should ask to play with the software and ask plenty of questions.
All the QLs
SaaS companies tend to score leads in a variety of ways. When working with one, you are going to find that you’re knee-deep in AQLs, MQLs, and SQLs in minutes. Once you understand where the leads come from, you will know where you should be allocating the budget. To do so, you will need to create campaigns to generate various lead types. These include raw leads, viable leads, nurtured leads, active leads, and marketing qualified leads.
Adapting
There is always a gap between marketing and sales for every company. You have to accept that no matter what you market. You will be looking to reduce the friction in the marketing and sales process as much as possible. Your SaaS marketing agency will need to know what leads sales needs, and sales will need to understand how to leverage your messaging. With that in mind, you need to make sure that you understand how the SaaS clients you are working with score their leads, and also how their business development representatives are (or are not) dovetailing off of your marketing efforts.
Past performance
In order to help SaaS companies successfully market themselves you have to have access to all of the previous marketing and paid advertising history. If they don’t have one and aren’t a new company, you should ask yourself (and them) why that is. If you do have access, then spend some time analyzing and extracting the information and the outcomes of any marketing efforts. You can then find what the issues were in their previous attempts. Use the data to build a new and improved strategy for them.
Be part of it
SaaS companies (generally speaking) place a lot of value in ‘team.’ You’ll see it on their websites, in their packages, and how they work in general. You need to be part of the team, rather than an outsider with their hands in the cogs of the machine.
Value-added
What else have you got that you can put on the table? SaaS companies grow at an incredible rate, and if you have extra services that will benefit them – put them on the table. When you have been around awhile, and have insight into what they need, you’ll be able to preempt it and secure a more significant piece of the pie.
SaaS clients are challenging and fast-paced, but this can often be the perfect antidote to the marketing that the average company needs. Make sure that you are able to handle this type of workflow when looking to help SaaS companies with their marketing efforts, and understand that they are often looking for strategic partners in the SaaS marketing agencies that they hire.
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