The digital marketing landscape is continually evolving, and it’s happening at a quick rate. It’s essential to stay nimble in the ultra-competitive business-to-business (B2B) marketplace. B2B marketing strategies are a lot more complicated than business-to-consumer (B2C) approaches. This is especially true if you’re a tech startup or a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) firm.
Depending on where you are in your SaaS business’s growth, you can choose from different marketing goals one at a time, or concurrently according to your company’s size. Here are some of your possible goals:
- Increase visits to your website
- Generate leads
- Offer add-ons to existing customers
- Rise to the top of search engine pages
- Stand out and get your brand known
Here’s an overview of the different ways you can upgrade your B2B marketing strategy, which can help you easily reach your goals and metrics:
1. Create An Attractive B2B Website
One of the most common SaaS marketing goals to implement is building an appealing B2B site. Appealing means useful to many personas inside your target company. For enterprises, buying SaaS means choosing a logical solution and not just easy-to-use software interfaces. Design your website with high-level language incorporated in the copy for C-level executives and managers to peruse, and with download buttons on the side to white papers and technical specifications for their engineers to analyze.
Remember, the decision to purchase takes a longer route for businesses than for end users, so arrange your content to educate about your product rather than to urge the visitor to buy immediately.
Additionally, with this longer process and with many roles checking out your site, it’s central to implement RWD (Responsive Web Design) on all your pages. This makes your site easily viewable in any screen size, from a large projector-like monitor during a strategic management meeting, to a small smartphone screen of an entry-level knowledge worker comparing your site to that of a competitor for the purpose of completing a survey.
2. Use Videos To Your Advantage
Because B2B SaaS is targeting an audience group (multiple people in a company), video marketing for these products can be more complex than its B2C counterparts. Yes, there are similarities. You can address pain points in your explainer video. And the promo video must encourage your prospects to click on your call-to-action link or button. But because the sales process is longer with B2B, it’s optimal to utilize videos more times along the lead nurturing process.
If you target small and medium-sized businesses, a customer testimonial video is a good persuasion piece to send them once you’ve gotten their contact details. On a larger scale, big enterprises will be interested to see your company culture videos to find out how solid your company is, and if there’s a possibility of product upgrades in the future.
When your lead is in the consideration phase of your marketing funnel, show them a demo video. You can prepare a video for each of your prospective clients’ use cases. And once your brand has grown its customer base, a video channel is a good marketing strategy and after-sales support (e.g., tutorials, training videos, and others) at the same time.
3. Adopt An Email Marketing Strategy
By now, you and your team must have created compelling copy for your email marketing. And A/B testing has vetted the more promising versions. If your firm hasn’t yet done it, one nifty and effortless tip to automate qualifying your email leads is to validate email addresses in real-time. Because you want businesses only, you can set up your lead magnets in such a way that only business email addresses are accepted. Otherwise, the form won’t go through.
Once this is settled, your prospect client can continue with the customary drop-down menus that further tell you about them (e.g., industry, job function, company size, and others).
4. Identify Your Buyer Persona
Buyer personas for B2B tech product advertising usually consists of three, one in each management level: the knowledge worker, the middle manager, and the C-level decision-maker. Your salespeople must have been taking into consideration these clients’ individual pains, fears, and dreams in their copy and proposals by now.
To upgrade your strategy in terms of personas, pay attention to any pattern changes. Any technology change, business or industry shift, or significant fluctuation in your analytics tools might mean you need to re-align your buyer personas. Sit down and consult your team about it.
5. Influencer Marketing
There is a lot of novel ways you can utilize influencers to market your SaaS brand, especially when this strategy is used less by B2B tech firms than by B2C companies. Perhaps one twist is to roll one of your CSR (corporate social responsibility) programs and your influencer marketing in one.
A case in point is a software company (a maker of SaaS and other applications) that continuously hires and leverages the untapped talents of persons in the autism spectrum (a whole new type of influencer group). If you have a similar idea, your business can follow suit. With such company culture, large enterprises will want to be associated with your brand.
6. Measure The Online Performance Of Your B2B Marketing
From time to time, measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts using different analytics tools. By continually measuring your performance, you can pinpoint what’s working and know the necessary changes to make. This way, you don’t end up putting your precious time and resources on marketing strategies that aren’t yielding the desired results for your business.
Takeaway
Remember, you’re in an industry with plenty of room for growth and innovation. SaaS is a good way of making money with lesser capital needed than the other computing areas. Whether you’re a tech startup or already in the market, your SaaS B2B marketing will revolve mostly around your website, videos (social media), audience personas, email and influencer marketing, and analytics. You can designate them among your team members but stay hands-on for an orchestrated marketing success.
