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SaaS marketing: 6 impactful and efficient tactics for H2 2022

This is a guest post from Irina Maltseva. Head of Marketing at Hunter and Founder at ONSAAS, Irina works on product marketing strategies and growing SaaS companies with inbound marketing.

2022 has been a mixed year for SaaS. It started after a record year for SaaS spending, valuations, and growth. Yet now, we’re in uncertain economic times, growth is slowing, and acquiring new customers is more difficult. 

This new landscape makes it even more important for SaaS companies to stand out and show where they add value - but with dwindling marketing budgets, the tactics you use to drive awareness and demand, need to be efficient. 

In this blog post, we take a deeper look at which marketing strategies you can use to create impactful results for your business. From hyper-personalized cold outreach to increasing your visibility through SEO, here are 6 effective marketing strategies for your SaaS businesses:

1. Find new clients through cold outreach

Used badly, cold outreach can come across as a pushy or aggressive sales tactic. Used well though, it is a powerful strategy that can help your SaaS find new clients on autopilot.

The most important thing to consider when constructing a cold outreach strategy is personalization. The cold outreach personalization process is actually pretty simple: 

  1. Identify prospects: This includes the key decision-makers of the businesses you would like to approach.
  2. Contact the prospect and not the company.
  3. Personalize your emails: Use premade templates and personalize with any additional information you gather about your prospects.

There are multiple tools that can help you automate this process. First, you can use software like Albacross or social media platforms like LinkedIn to identify decision-makers. Then, you can easily find or verify their email addresses with Hunter to create your list of leads.

2. Create a free but powerful tool

Free or interactive tools like calculators, directories or templates are an effective way of attracting prospects. 

Example: if your software is relevant to the cold outreach niche, you could create an email subject line generator or a directory of free cold email templates. This will add value to your online presence and your prospects will have already benefited from your services before they even contact your sales team. 

The same is also true for free SaaS trials. By allowing your prospects to try out your services, you automatically show off your products and customer service. At the same time, your customers have the opportunity to share their feedback and you get the chance to optimize your services accordingly.

3. Use content marketing to generate qualified leads

Content can increase brand awareness and generate new leads in multiple ways. One of them is by educating your target audience about your industry, product, and the challenges your customers face.

Generating high-quality content will not only attract qualified leads but also help your brand get more visibility in organic search (more on that next). To find out how your content performs and improve on it, you can take advantage of popular content optimization platforms

4. Improve visibility on organic search

SEO is a long-term investment that provides excellent results. 

To create your strategy, you need to research and identify the most relevant keywords for your business and audience.

Start with a list of  topic ideas that you think are relevant. Then analyze these topics and extract valuable keywords using tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs or MOZ. 

Keywords are broken down by difficulty (to rank for) and search volume. If you’re just implementing your SEO strategy, it’s best to aim for long-tail keywords that have relatively low difficulty and a sufficient search volume.

5. List your company on top review platforms

Your business’ presence on the most well-known review platforms is a must for SaaS – your competitors are there, you should be too. Here are the most popular for SaaS:

  1. Capterra
  2. G2 Crowd 
  3. Trustpilot
  4. TrustRadius

Getting your company listed on these platforms allows you to get more visibility in the consideration stage of your sales funnel because these sites make it easy for prospects to compare the different providers in your space. It can also increase your reach because these sites are used by marketers to create industry listicles

Both listicles and review platforms act as an authority for your SaaS. Buyers and decision-makers have the chance to validate your credibility and product quality.

Remember though, if you list your software on such platforms, you probably shouldn’t expect organic reviews out of the blue – so build in asking for reviews into your support processes.

6. Rethink your approach to email marketing

Email is a powerful tool for marketers - but today, it needs to go beyond the traditional marketing newsletter. Instead you should create segmented lists that allow you to target prospects with relevant, personalized information. 

A hyper-personalized email marketing strategy proves to have multiple benefits:

  1. It allows you to expand your audience.
  2. It helps you focus and communicate with persons (decision-makers) and not companies.
  3. It helps you build a deep relationship with your prospects and turn them into loyal customers.
  4. It boosts your brand authority.

Creating personalized content isn’t as hard as you might think, all you need to do is identify key decision-makers, create a list of prospects and construct your email templates – ready for your marketing or sales team to personalize effectively. 

Used well, email marketing has one of the highest ROIs among all marketing strategies. 

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Choosing the right tactics for your business

The marketing strategies above are proving to be extremely worthwhile for SaaS in 2022. Of course, you do not have to (and shouldn't) implement them all at once, it’s about choosing the ones which will be most impactful for your business in these uncertain times. 

If you take one thing away from this blog, it’s to personalize your marketing strategies. Whether you are targeting email marketing, organic research, or something else, building strong relationships with both potential and existing customers is what will ultimately help your SaaS succeed.

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