How to Design a B2B SaaS Marketing plan

When one thinks about how to market to a software company, it seems like a colossal task. One may be confused about where, to begin with, to design a B2B SaaS marketing plan. The term “SaaS” stands for “Software as a Service”. Marketers may have different B2B SaaS marketing strategies but one needs to connect those ideas to their SaaS digital marketing strategies. In an era of Martech, B2B companies are amplifying their list of mega-success stories by stepping into the software subscription business.

Although the death of SaaS companies can be discouraging, according to a report by Trends in SaaS for Enterprise IT, 75% of sales or marketing companies are moving their cores of business analytics and customer service in the cloud.

What is a B2B SaaS Marketing Plan? A B2B SaaS marketing plan can be similar to the one for customer products. The core principle though remains to focus on customer satisfaction at every step of the way.

According to a report by the Transparency Market Research, the overall SaaS market will be worth $164.29 billion by the year 2022. The #1 factor that influences the success of a SaaS product strategy is showing prospects & customers the ways to succeed with their tools.

The follow-up during the trial phase & post-sales phase remains critical. Steps to Design a B2b SaaS marketing plan When trying to come up with smart marketing tools & tactics to design a B2B SaaS Marketing plan & trying to come up with the best SaaS marketing campaigns, the marketers need to brainstorm on a lot of underlying factors. An ideal B2B SaaS marketing plan template starts with the identification of the ideal customers & opting for an inbound approach to attract engage & convert them. The following are the core components of designing a B2B SaaS Marketing plan:

1. Goal Setting:

Having a clear goal helps the designers of a B2b SaaS Marketing plan figure out whether they have clear goals & operational framework in place to measure what’s working & what’s not. A consolidated B2b SaaS Marketing plan can be seen to be designed in several fragmented pieces:

• Identifying Your Ideal Prospects:

This includes the clear demarcation of creating personas to characterize your customers. Marketers should seek an answer to what is their criterion for defining an ideal persona. Confiding in the problems being faced by the persona & trying to resolve them, sets the pace up for executing a successful B2B SaaS Marketing plan. Interviewing the customers & surveying the prospects, sorting through your CRM data & examining the social mentions, user reviews, feedback & queries sets the stage up to create a realistic persona or several.

• An Inbound Approach:

An Inbound approach holds the key for designing & executing impactful SaaS marketing tactics. The marketers need to lower the cost of customer acquisition, increase the lifetime value of customers, increase the conversion & retention & establish omnichannel authority through their SaaS marketing channels.

• Increase the Free Trials by Pre-Sales Marketing:

Apart from having an attractive & fast-loading website, the marketers need to include educational resources to draw the interests of the prospects. Looking like an expert increases the chances of signing up for new trial accounts. Remember that your goal is to create a small win for the prospect so that they see value in paying to upgrade.

• Establishing Marketing & Sales Alignment:

Establishing marketing & sales alignment is about establishing a revenue or lead-commitment based on the funnel metrics & revenue growth goals.  While designing a B2B SaaS marketing plan marketers also need to delineate how many marketing-qualified leads must be delivered to the sales team over the month & what percentage of those leads will become sales-qualified, then opportunities, then customers. Determining the metrics helps marketers fuel their B2B SaaS marketing tactics & the marketing team needs to accomplish its targets by working backward from the metrics.

• Marketing Budget:

According to HubSpot, SaaS companies invest 80 to 120 percent of their revenue in sales & marketing & Jason Lemkin discussed using 40% of the revenue growth data as marketing spend. Furthermore, an analysis of SaaScribe of public SaaS companies showed that when comparing sales & marketing spending to two-year revenue growth goals, each dollar spent on sales & marketing generated $2.20 over a time period – a lasting positive investment. Optimizing the marketing budget & allocating proper resources holds the key are at the very core of the SaaS marketing best practices.

2. Run the pay-per-click (PPC) advertising:

PPC advertising helps drive targeted traffic on your website. This can be done by means of Google AdWords, Retargeting or remarketing & by using the paid social media ads. Paid Ads can be used to aid the effective execution of a SaaS product strategy.

3. Optimize the Landing Pages:

The offers made by a brand should be aligned with ads, social media campaigns & various other traffic generating endeavors -creating landing pages optimized according to the buyers’ journeys and as per their specific areas of interest helps to optimize the conversions & qualifies as an effective B2B SaaS marketing plan. Read more: 11 Practices for B2B Landing Page Optimization

4. Employ Email List Building:

Publish lead magnets, this helps generate leads & build the omnichannel reputation for the brands. Creating ebooks & whitepapers serves as cornerstone content to fuel your B2B SaaS marketing plan. Lead magnets can also be deployed in the form of blog posts, emails, infographics, webinars, social media posts & more.

5. Create & Implement a highly enticing Content Strategy:

Content Marketing is an absolutely imperative B2B SaaS Marketing plan. Creating a content hub that entices users to buy or at least progress ahead with their buying journeys helps. An effective SaaS marketing plan includes pieces of content that transcend beyond the blog posts. This can be done by leveraging the following tips:

• Focus on User-Generated Content:

Answering to the relevant questions of the prospects is amongst the most vital B2B SaaS Marketing plans. Employ social listening and assimilate the insights gathered from the Q&A answering sites such as Quora to track the important questions that your prospects might be seeking answers to & subsequently answer these questions.

• Publishing Comparison Content:

This is an innovative way to show the value proposition of your products or services. Comparing your services to the products or services of your competitors can help the marketers in establishing the ways their products or services are different from their competitors. Also, marketers can project the unique USPs of their products or services. Thus, the comparison content is amongst the most effective B2B SaaS marketing strategies.

• Creating Niche-Specific Content:

The analysis of your customer behavioral data can help understand the most lucrative marketing niches that your brands might be operative into. Accordingly, tailored & highly personalized pieces of content and be created to match the niche relevance & ease of usability of the users.

• Creating industry research reports:

Use the intent data & data from surveys, complementary brands & data from the industrial benchmark reports to create industry research reports. Besides, the methods enlisted above effective pieces of content as the part of B2B SaaS marketing plan can also be created by becoming impactful with your social media marketing strategies, optimizing your websites for conversions & being interactive enough to answer the queries of the customers in real-time by indulging in live chats & offering live Q&As.

Wrap Up

The secret to design & optimize a B2B SaaS marketing plan lies in understanding your niche & persona & proceeding accordingly. You need to define metrics after aligning your sales & marketing goals. Sales enablement assures that time & again you can measure & optimize your marketing plan in accordance with the SaaS marketing best practices. Targeting the review sites to establish strong brand equity, writing ebooks & hosting webinars & podcasts can help you get your marketing stack together & will lead towards an invincible B2B SaaS marketing plan.

According to research by Salesforce, the digital marketing budgets for high performing marketers will double in all areas within the next three years; comprising 70% of their digital marketing spends. 

So, understand the market, deploy data, construct a hypothesis & design an effective B2B SaaS marketing plan following the tips enlisted in the blog. Analyzing the data-driven insights & tweaking the present strategies to optimize the measurable outcomes & keep abreast with the latest trends in the industry will help you thrive in the highly competitive B2B landscape & excel with your SaaS marketing tactics. Experts at Valasys  Media are architects of personalized B2B services including the ones such as lead generation, account-based marketing, lead nurturing, event promotion services, list building services & content syndication services. Contact us to optimize your pipeline management for revenue & to benefit from in-depth business insights driven by data intelligence.