Digital marketing for SaaS companies is a way to build awareness and sell software/services. These tactics allow a company to bring a product to market, position a product, and build awareness for the brand.
There are essentially two types of digital marketing, which are both essential for success:
- Driving traffic through organic/online visibility (such as through content, search engine marketing (SEO), organic search, and organic social).
- Purchasing web traffic through paid search, programmatic, and paid social.
In general, companies should build their strategies around the 7 Cs of digital marketing:
- Customer
- Content
- Contex
- Community
- Convenience
- Cohesion
- Conversion
They should also ensure their tactics hit on experience, engagement, exclusivity, and emotion, as those are key to capturing leads and closing sales.
Your sales goals can be accomplished through well-thought digital marketing strategies – here are some tips for developing one for your brand.
1. Know Your Audience
The more you know your audience, the more powerful your digital marketing efforts will be. You’ll be able to set up your landing pages to convert more effectively and create an exceptional overall user experience. Your content can be better optimized, and your messaging can be tailored for action.
You’ll want to understand things like:
- Basic demographics, like age, gender, education, household income
- Geography
- Where/how do they consume content
- Online activity
- Lifestyle
- Problems/solutions they need
- Interests
- Personality traits
- Values
- Opinions
- Motivations
Gather this information by conducting market research, surveys, analyzing existing customers, and social listening. Then, you can build buyer personas, which are a representation of your ideal customer based on the data you’ve gathered. These personas provide a “voice” from target customers that tie to your marketing efforts.
2. Analyze Your Competition
Don’t spend too much time on this to avoid paralysis by analysis. However, there are a few things you should do when it comes to understanding your competition. First, identify who your real competitors even are. Then, you can do things like:
- Determine the keywords they are targeting and analyze their keyword ranking on Google.
- Research their most shared content.
- Follow their social media activities.
- Read their blog articles and sign up for any e-newsletters.
- Check out their website content, landing page layouts, and conversion opportunities.
- Try to understand their strengths and weaknesses, especially through current or past customer reviews.
- Get an idea for what their marketing efforts are.
Doing this prior to building a digital marketing strategy can give you a good place to start, especially if you’re starting from scratch.
3. Develop A Strong Content Marketing Strategy
Your content strategy will support almost everything, from landing page content, blogs, emails, and social media to advertising and more. A few examples of content you can produce include:
- Blogs
- Social media posts
- Videos
- Infographics
- White pages
- Case studies
- Newsletters
- How-to guides
- Podcasts
Additionally, content helps define your marketing goals and set priorities, ensuring all marketing efforts are goal driven. It also can create a logical path through the buyer’s journey and marketing touchpoints, building trust and relationships with your leads and customers.
Focus on creating unique content that supports a meaningful and interactive experience. Content should be engaging, sustainable, cohesive, and quality over quantity.
Simple steps to build a content marketing strategy include:
- Define the goals for your content, including brand awareness, lead generation, brand authority, and/or conversions.
- Use buyer personas to understand what content your leads and customers want and need.
- Determine the types of content you want to create. You don’t have to do them all, and you can start simple (like with a blog and social media posts). These should align with your buyer personas.
- Think about general content themes, especially those that can be mapped to your marketing funnel.
- Determine places to publish content, such as on your company website, social media pages, or email campaigns. Again, this should align with what your buyer personas tell you.
- Brainstorm content ideas.
- Create, publish, and manage the content. Choose the most meaningful key performance indicators (KPIs) like landing page views, clicks, leads generated, or others. Keep an eye on what performs and what doesn’t and optimize your strategy over time.
4. Make Customer Interactions Easy
Every interaction your customer has with you should be transparent and easy. For example, they should have no problem finding what they are looking for or signing up for something. Or, your sign-up process should be smooth, easy-to-use, and guided by best practices. Essentially, it should be as easy as possible for users to become a lead or customer and get started with your brand right away.
Review your current sign-up process and see if there are ways to shorten or streamline the process. Ensure any forms on landing pages are short and simple and provide something of value, like free trails, guarantees, or gated content. Determine if any artificial intelligence or machine learning capabilities (like chatbots) can help automate process for even better service.
Additionally, each time you’re in front of a prospect you need to have a clear and concise call to action. Customers should know exactly what they are getting and how to get it.
Finally, the more personalized the user experience is, the better.
5. You Don’t Have to Do It All
With dozens of types of content you can create, tens of social media platforms you can have a presence on, different types of digital advertising, and other choices, creating a marketing strategy can feel overwhelming.
However, trying to be everywhere and do everything can actually hurt your digital marketing efforts. Focus on where your customers and prospects are, how they consume content, and what resonates with them and build your strategy around that. Don’t feel like you must be on every platform or create every type of content there is.
If you don’t know what’s best, do some testing and learning, ask your customers, and perform market research to get a better idea, and always be optimizing to do what makes the most sense.
6. Emphasize Search Engine Optimization
SEO is the process of improving the quality and quantity of your website traffic from search engines. This helps get your website and pages ranked higher on search engines like Google, which increases the likelihood of more organic traffic.
There are two types of SEO strategies to focus on:
- On-page SEO includes things like:
- Keyword strategy.
- Internal linking (linking to your own site or other articles).
- Titles and descriptions for content and pages.
- Lower page load time.
- Strong user interface (display screens, appearance of a desktop, way a user interacts with an app, etc. should all be seamless).
- Off-page SEO includes:
- High-quality links from trusted sources (such as other companies linking back to your content as a source of expertise).
- Link shares, such as on social media.
SEO is crucial because it makes your website more visible, increasing traffic and opportunities for people to become customers. Not only does this save you money on advertising tactics, but it can generate a greater return on investment in the long run. Your brand gains credibility and trust, and you can say more competitive.
7. Don’t Underestimate the Power of Email Marketing
More than four billion people are accessing emails every day, and with a shocking ROI, email marketing should be a big focus of your strategy. In fact, email ROI is estimated to be $36 to every $1 spent (in 2022).
Email is also one of the most flexible tactics because there are many different types and ways to target different audiences. Examples of campaigns you could develop include:
- Lead nurturing
- Providing gated content
- E-newsletters
- Customer retention
- Triggered series based on a specific action
- Product or feature updates
- Thank you messages
This is just the start. Essentially, you can develop a variety of campaigns depending on your needs and audience throughout each stage of their journey.
Some email best practices include:
Follow all CAN-SPAM regulations.
- Focus on the subject line.
- Make emails easy to skim and brief, with only the most critical information (you can link to more info on your website).
- Write casually and conversationally.
- Personalize your emails when possible.
- Avoid buying contact lists. Instead, use your own lead or customer lists.
- Stick to consistent branding.
- Don’t email too often.
8. Always be Testing
A/B testing allows your teams to make careful changes to their user experience while collecting data on the results, helping them to learn why certain elements of their experiences impact user behavior. It gives marketing teams data and proof of what does and doesn’t work so they can optimize tactics to:
- Increase user engagement
- Reduce bounce rates
- Increase conversion rates
- Create better content.
When testing:
- Make sure you’re only testing one item at a time so you know what is making the impact.
- Clearly define a goal and success metrics, as well as how significant your results need to be, so you have clear results.
- Focus on what your audience needs and what can make their interactions with your brand better.
- Split your sample and control groups equally and randomly.
- Avoid overlapping tests in the same campaign.
Contact Dragonfly Digital Marketing
If you are interested in developing a SaaS marketing strategy, contact Dragonfly. We can help tailor your campaign to achieve your specific goals and improve your processes overall. Call (443) 564-4634 to speak with a professional digital marketing service today.
