7 Best B2B SaaS Marketing Strategies To Increase Business ROI And Value
One size does not fit all. Similarly, one marketing strategy cannot be used for every business. There are several factors that affect the marketing mix you need to consider for your brand.
Product marketing readiness rating, ideal customer personas, and having a clear idea of your target audience are a few things that you must remember before diving into the marketing of your B2B SaaS business.
In case you are not clear about what SaaS business marketing is, here is a quick recap. B2B SaaS marketing refers to the marketing of Software-as-a-Service to other businesses. Currently, the B2B SaaS market is dominated by key players in varied industries such as finance, real estate, IT, and consulting.
The post-pandemic boom is just around the corner and even during the battle with the contagion, B2B SaaS companies managed to grow their businesses. In 2020, the global SaaS sales were in the excess of $132 billion and as the competition intensifies, marketers need to find smarter ways to market their brand.
Why Do You Need a Fresh B2B SaaS Marketing Strategy?
Who doesn’t want to automate their lead generation process, right? So, even if you were doing well with your digital marketing plan in the past few years, you need to focus more on engaging ideas rather than performing mundane tasks.
The importance of thought leadership in the digital marketing plan is bound to increase dramatically as the post pandemic economy opens up. You must look back on your existing digital marketing strategies and incorporate new ideas if required, especially because it helps:
- Automate all your lead generation tasks
- Optimize lead nurturing through all stages of the funnel
- Create more opportunities to sell and upsell new products to existing customers
- Improve brand awareness and visibility in the industry
- Become a thought leader in your respective domain
In a nutshell, your B2B SaaS marketing strategy needs an overhaul in terms of the following:
- Identifying target audience
- Creating targeted messaging
- Planning and executing branding campaigns
- Aligning sales, marketing, and other teams toward a common goal
- Improving onboarding and retention
- Optimizing all the available marketing channels
Interesting B2B SaaS Marketing Statistics
Many small- and medium-level enterprises have tasted success recently and B2B SaaS marketing companies have seen exponential growth among them. They prefer using digital transformation to increase the efficiency of their branding, marketing, sales, and after-sales service functions. Here’s how:
- As per a 2021 Salesforce study, more than 41% of B2B SaaS marketers look to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning to improve efficiency.
- 43% of B2B SaaS marketers have plans to utilize analytics while making informed decisions.
- More than 32% of marketers prefer using personalization as an approach to cater to their customers.
The B2B SaaS industry depends on digital marketing and transformation to increase its footprints among customers, improve brand recall value, and sustain the business among the hyperactive competition.
Read Also: Top Challenges in B2B Marketing & How to Resolve Them?
B2B SaaS Marketing Characteristics
Let's recall the characteristics of B2B SaaS marketing before we dig deeper into the details:
- B2B SaaS marketers target a small audience of key decision-makers who have buying power.
- B2B SaaS buying is driven by logic, efficiency, and financial incentive. This may include multiple rounds of negotiations, business analysis, and long-term planning.
- B2B SaaS marketers need to continuously educate and convince their customers. Their customers need to know the benefits of their product and services and how they can impact their business’ bottom line.
- B2B SaaS customers look for expertise, efficiency, and ROI, and face the responsibility for all the buying decisions.
- B2B SaaS buying is based on acquiring long-term solutions. These buying decisions do not change until there is a major technological or industrial change, or a fault in service. It leads to long-term contracts with multi-step buying cycles where a buyer’s investment increases with each cycle.
Stepping in the Right Direction
Before we move on to B2B SaaS marketing strategies that work, let’s take a look at some of the major concerns of B2B SaaS marketers.
Most of the B2B SaaS marketers struggle when:
- Continuously generating more leads
- Improving the lead quality
- Converting leads or closing deals
- Winning customer loyalty and retention
- Getting referred by existing customers
- Cross-selling and upselling
To overcome these challenges and simultaneously maximize your B2B SaaS marketing ROI, consider the following proven strategies:
7 Timeless B2B SaaS Marketing Strategies
1. Keep Investing in Content
Content plays a major role in bringing more B2B SaaS buyers to your website. Buyers do not believe in buying directly from on-call sales reps until they are aware of the solution. Before they make any buying decision, they like to educate themselves on the value our product or service will deliver.
They would like to understand how our product can help them achieve their objectives. Through Blogs, E-books, Videos, surveys and findings, researches, and white papers, one can keep attracting buyers to the business websites and encourage them to interact more often.
Content can win more deals than any other technique. Smart marketers know that a loyal audience or a reader will surely become a future customer. If your content can help the reader imagine how your product or service can increase the efficiency of his business, your purpose is solved.
Use relevant images, graphs, and references to outer content with their links to support your claims. Make your content skimmable and reader-friendly by making it mobile-friendly. Case studies should be backed with before and after statistics clearly indicating how your product or service has improved the business objectives of your clients.
Also Read: Key To Successful Lead Management In B2B Marketing
2. Use Open Source and Subscription-Based Content Wisely
Many times we use Call-to-Action (CTA) to acquire client data so that we keep in touch with them in the future. However, It is suggested that CTAs should not be used with every content piece. Sometimes, CXOs also look for B2B solutions and they may not feel like giving their email addresses and other contact details.
We should use CTAs to give access to those readers who like to get high-quality content frequently. These readers would like to receive an email from you to get information about the newly added content with the link to access it. This will lead to more visitors to our website and more traffic will lead to qualified leads for sales.
3.Define Your Buyer Persona Clearly
Every B2B SaaS marketing campaign’s success depends upon developing the campaign structure brick by brick. However, the foundation for such a campaign is defining a detailed buyer persona.
A well-defined buyer persona ensures that our targeting is accurate and well-timed. Once buyer personas are ready, we can keep developing content keeping in mind their preferences, problems, and their solutions. Our pitch depends upon the buyer persona and if defined accurately, we can develop the right tools to push leads towards closure.
4. Define a Content Strategy Based on Lead Funnel Approach
A lead funnel is the most important part of the B2B SaaS marketing process. It has different levels based on the response from the lead. They are termed TOFU (Top of the Funnel), MOFU (Middle of the Funnel), BOFU (Bottom of the funnel).
A lead travels through various levels of the funnel by responding to the stimulus (content-driven marketing) and ultimately pushed towards BOFU where it is converted into sales.
For B2B SaaS marketing, it is very important to nurture the leads and push the right content at the right time. The buyer persona and lead funnel management are the most important aspects to achieve this. Through lead nurturing, B2B marketers keep enriching their leads and this advocates the product or service at the back of mind.
5. Use AI to Respond Quickly
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the newest entrant in the field of digital transformation. It's a wrong perception that AI comes at a huge cost. However, Chatbots, CRM platforms, and tools such as Grammarly are an example of how easily and reasonably AI technology is available to modern-day marketers.
AI brings down dependency on human involvement. A chatbot can welcome and manage a customer query so intelligently that clients often feel that they are communicating with an artificial brain.
There are many ways AI can help B2B SaaS marketers. Here are some applications of AI in B2B SaaS marketing:
- Creating and Generating Content
- Content Curation
- Email Marketing
- Digital Advertising
- Introducing Next
- Searches
- Web Design
- User Experience (UX)
- Chatbots
- Predictive Analysis
6. Use Social Media Wisely
B2B SaaS marketing needs specific branding and marketing plans. To achieve their marketing objectives, smart marketers use social platforms which cater to their target audience such as LinkedIn. Linkedin is the largest social media platform with more than 722 million users (January 2021).
Linkedin gives you outreach to targeted individuals who fit into your buyer persona. Similar to Facebook and Google, Linkedin also gives you an analytical choice to target a specific set of individuals who can be your potential buyers.
LinkedIn gives you multiple ways to promote your content. You can post articles, share blog posts, videos, etc. You can also use LinkedIn to collect user data by asking them to fill the form to access your content.
This way you not only access user data but also get space in their mailbox. You can also promote an upcoming webinar or event and it establishes LinkedIn as a strong platform to reach out to connections and convert them into future customers.
7. Use Analytics and A/B Testing to Fine-Tune Your Campaign
Digital transformation does not guarantee immediate results. However, it surely paves your way to successful digital campaigns. Analytics and AB testing give you real-time information about what's right and wrong and how to improve your overall marketing campaign.
Smart marketers use this information to fine-tune their campaigns and make the best of their investment in digital marketing. Frequent changes are never suggested in marketing as they focus on long-term benefits. However, with analytics and AB testing, you can make subtle changes as and when needed and modify the campaigns at the right time.
Conclusion
We may keep finding numerous strategies and tips to achieve incremental revenue. But these core strategies surely can help you to drive your B2B SaaS marketing on the right track.
Want to supercharge your digital marketing campaigns? Let’s talk! Growth Natives offers you groundbreaking digital marketing solutions that generate positive ROI and convert your brand into a revenue generator.
To know more about our services, email us at info@growthnatives.com or visit our website today.
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