A savvy audience, a fast-growing niche, and a hunger for scaling – SaaS pros know this is the name of the game.
But even when you’re seeing the success you deserve, you can almost guarantee that competitors are nipping at your heels, ready to steal your customers and market share.
That’s where a SaaS marketing agency comes in. These expert marketing teams can work with your B2C or B2B SaaS company to build an air-tight digital playbook that’ll set you up to withstand whatever challenges come your way, so you can continue to thrive.
The key is, of course, to find the right agency to pair with. That’s why we’re here – not only because we know a thing or two about SaaS marketing, but because we want to help you know what to look for to find the right partnership for you.
Alright, enough with the preamble – let’s kick some SaaS.
How Does Digital Marketing Benefit SaaS Companies?
How much time do you have?
OK, OK, we’ll make it quick. While SaaS is certainly in a class of its own when it comes to how the industry operates and evolves, the ways digital marketing can help your brand excel aren’t that different from how it benefits other brands.
When you build a solid marketing foundation for your SaaS offering, you’re better equipped to grow your new customer base, connect with your target audience, and scale your business.
Digital marketing is all about maximizing the channels at your disposal – from social media to search engine marketing (SEM) and everything in between – to get the word out about your business, and help your ideal clients understand what you offer and how it can help them. Plus, with customer acquisition and retention concerns, longer sales cycles, and fast-changing technology, the right digital marketing approach can truly be make-or-break for your SaaS business.
Results from our SaaS Clients
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2х
Doubled their targeted traffic
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75%
75% more sales demos
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80%
Cut CPA by 80% and doubled lead volume
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409%
Increased users by 409%
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74%
Increased first-page keyword rankings by 74%
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126%x
126% more clicks to the website
What Does a SaaS Marketing Plan Need to Stand Out?
Whatever plan you create for your SaaS company, don’t think of it as iron-clad. Rather, you want to create a plan that leaves enough wiggle room for flexibility when strategies inevitably need to pivot.
As past years have taught us, industries — not to mention search engine algorithms — can change in a flash. That means the campaigns and marketing tactics that worked one month may fall flat the next.
With that in mind, here are some elements a successful SaaS marketing plan often includes.
Clearly defined personas:
Ideal client personas are key for any solid marketing plan, sure. But SaaS companies in particular often have more nuanced products and more in-the-know customers, so generic demographics just won’t cut it.
Along with the standard client persona info (age ranges, regions, income, education level), you can dig deeper to paint a fuller picture. Sync with your sales team and CSMs, send out surveys, and scour your the data from a customer relationship management (CRM) tool like HubSpot, if you have one, to gather additional info like their pain points, goals, budgets, and the benefits they care about most as they relate to your product or service.
Unique value propositions:
For business owners running software companies, one of the most frustrating aspects of the industry is how competitors can crop up out of nowhere, vying for your customer base and trying to steal away your market share.
This is just one of the reasons why focusing on your unique value propositions is so important. Not only can it help you beat out your competition, but it can be much more effective at turning virtual window shoppers into marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and, ideally, customers.
When you’re brainstorming which unique value props you bring to the table, think about your software’s benefits. What problems does it solve? How does it improve the user’s life? In what ways is it better than others in your niche?
Once you’re clear on benefits, you can highlight them through tangible, data-driven facts like social proof, client testimonials, case study statistics, and specific SaaS product features.
Educational, high-quality content:
Speaking of value, having a savvier customer base also means the content you publish should be heavy on the value, with fluff nowhere in sight.
Once you’ve done the proper keyword research to identify the best terms to target at each stage of the sales funnel, you can craft a content marketing strategy that focuses on educating your audience through blogs, guides, e-books, infographics, and more.
PRO TIP
Creating a content calendar spreadsheet keeps you organized, adds transparency for your team, and makes it easier to plan which topics need to be covered or updated.
A long-game plan for lead nurturing:
Ah, yes, the lengthy customer journey of SaaS can be a slog. The upside: All that time gives you ample opportunity to nurture those leads and turn them into customers. It’s all in the approach.
Email marketing is a great avenue for this. Creating automatic drip campaigns based on actions taken on your site can feature case studies, highlight those unique value propositions we just mentioned, and offer demos for those ready to learn more. And if you’re not seeing the opens and clicks you want? Then A/B test away until you find what resonates.
Enterprise-class SaaS company Peer Software helps customers solve data management challenges with file and object storage in multi-site, multi-vendor, and multi-cloud environments. They partnered with HawkSEM to help increase brand awareness and drive leads through marketing campaigns on an international scale. Through targeted ad campaigns that addressed their audience’s pain points, we helped Peer Software increase conversions 128% while cutting cost per conversion nearly in half.
A social media presence:
We get it: It’s easy for social media management to land at the bottom of that (endless?!) to-do list. But having a presence on the main social platforms is a budget-friendly way to boost brand awareness, increase your reach, and directly connect with your audience.
What’s more, this part of your strategy can be relatively low-lift. Start by focusing on the channels your audience uses most, then create a basic plan for what you’ll post and how often. If you’re lacking inspiration, consider these types of social posts
- Exclusive survey or research stats
- Compelling quotes
- Behind-the-scenes shots of your team
- Job openings
- Videos that promote new content or highlight your offering
- User-generated content (UGC) that others have posted about you
You can also include helpful parameters around the kind of imagery, tone of voice, and aesthetic you’ll use for your social profiles.
Results Are Everything
HawkSEM in 90 seconds
Plans for scaling:
Most SaaS companies can reach customers across time zones, countries, and even continents.
But global opportunity without a plan to scale (and get that sweet-sweet monthly recurring revenue, or MRR) can quickly become a recipe for disaster if you suddenly experience a business boom without the resources to handle it.
This is where a lot of SaaS brands call in the marketing experts, like a B2B SaaS marketing agency with a hefty dose of experience in the software-as-a-service space.
And since it can be hard to predict SaaS growth, having a team you’re already synced with can make the process seamless and successful.
An optimized website:
Think of your website as the first impression most people will get when it comes to your business — because it is. When someone lands on your site, you want their experience to be streamlined and direct. That means easy navigation, a polished design, and answers to all their questions.
So, what elements make a website optimized for the most conversions possible? A few things:
- Clear, eye-catching CTAs
- A header and footer with helpful link
- A thoughtful form submission process
- Customized landing pages poised for lead generation
- A mobile-friendly design
125% / 200%
Mileage logging mobile app MileIQ (acquired by Microsoft in 2015) was looking to partner with a digital marketing agency for help to increase the amount of high-quality organic traffic to their site and app. Through that search, they found HawkSEM. We helped their team optimize their business website, along with building new content and backlink strategies for increased brand authority. Through these marketing efforts, MileIQ saw year-over-year organic site traffic grow by 125% and organic sessions increase by more than 200%.
What is a SaaS Marketing Agency?
Not all digital marketing agencies are created equal – no surprise there.
So, what does a SaaS marketing agency do, exactly? In simple terms, these agencies partner with your SaaS business to either help you build a strategic digital marketing plan, or optimize the one you currently have in place.
Agency services will vary by business. Some agencies are full-service, meaning they offer all the main digital marketing deliverables like search engine optimization (SEO), paid search, email marketing, social media, etc., via packages or a la carte. Others may specialize in just one marketing aspect, like pay-per-click (PPC) or LinkedIn.
If you opt to work with a SaaS marketing agency, the one you choose should be whichever one best aligns with your goals, industry, marketing budget, and communication style. Let’s dig into the details below.
Meet the Team
What Services Do SaaS Marketing Agencies Offer?
Once you’re ready to entrust an agency with your SaaS marketing plans (and goals), the next step is determining exactly what it is you want them to manage based on the services they offer.
Here’s a handy breakdown on the main services a SaaS marketing agency may offer. First, let’s tackle PPC deliverables:
- 1.Analysis & strategy
- 2.Paid search campaign creation, setup & launch
- 3.Optimization
Analysis & strategy
Most agencies will want to start off by digging deep into your current marketing initiatives. This often involves actions like:
- A PPC audit of current and/or past campaign metrics
- Analysis of your website and any other marketing channels
- A competitor PPC analysis to check out what others in your industry are doing
- Reviewing your ad accounts to ensure everything is properly set up and tracking
- Understanding your business goals
- Getting to know your target audience
Once all of those details are squared away, your agency team will be better able to craft a SaaS marketing strategy that’ll work for you. This strategy stage can entail:
- Exploring new ad types or platforms
- Analyzing current ads and landing pages for conversion rate optimization (CRO)
- Updating or creating new key performance indicators (KPIs)
- Building out your keyword list (and negative keyword list)
- Syncing on a plan for communicating and sharing results
Paid search campaign creation, setup & launch
Current analysis? Check. Communication sync? Check. Solid-gold growth strategy done and dusted? Check and check. Now, it’s time to put those new plans into action.
PPC ad campaign setup, like so many aspects of digital marketing, is easier said than done. However, any SaaS PPC agency you choose to partner with should help you create campaigns that have:
- Organized, well-structured ad groups targeting relevant keywords
- Thoughtful, eye-catching ad copy
- An optimized landing page with strong calls to action (CTAs)
- A bidding strategy that makes sense with your budget
- Proper conversion tracking in place
- A plan for regular performance analysis and A/B testing
Optimization
Speaking of analysis and testing, these are the elements that’ll be instrumental when it comes to one of the most important parts of your PPC program: optimizing.
Leaving your ads running without monitoring how your audience responds and testing different elements (like the visuals on your landing page or your ad headline) is a surefire way to have your ad grow stale – giving competitors a better chance at snagging your spot on the search engine results page (SERP). Yikes.
This is why any agency worth its salt will help you not just launch PPC campaigns, but optimize them, too. That process generally looks like:
- Testing various campaign assets, keywords, and landing pages
- Updating your negative keyword list as needed
- Taking advantage of assets (formerly dubbed “ad extensions” by Google)
- Tweaking your bidding strategy as needed
- Monitoring your Quality Score
- Testing new match types
- Using tools like heatmapping to analyze user behavior
Another tool for better campaigns, from creation to optimization: HawkSEM’s proprietary platform, ConversionIQ.
Think of this as your one-stop shop for performance improvement. You can sync all of your marketing data to better pinpoint areas of opportunity, wasted ad spend, unqualified leads, and more. Armed with all this easy-to-digest data, you can create a path forward with better budget pacing, a plan to scale, and cross-channel insights.
Next, Let’s Talk SEO
At HawkSEM, we offer specialty SaaS SEO services, including a content marketing audit, organic traffic goal assessments, landing page optimization, and much more.
You can learn more about our SaaS SEO services here.
Additional Marketing Services:
Email marketing
Influencer marketing
Ecommerce shopping feed management
Performance display ads
Paid social media marketing
Remarketing and retargeting campaigns
Website design and migration
Proper Communication & Reporting — No Matter Which Services You Use
These last two factors may seem less important than the previous ones mentioned, but just the opposite is true.
You want to feel confident that your agency is trustworthy, honest, and transparent with you. And, unfortunately, you can only gauge so much from an exploratory call or consultation.
The good news: You can avoid a mismatch by being clear about your preferences from the get-go. If you prefer biweekly calls to weekly emails, then say that. The more upfront you are about your expectations, the more likely the agency is to meet your needs, no matter which services you leverage.
HawkSEM has been hand-selected as a Google Premier Partner and Microsoft Advertising Partner
We make things happen …but don’t take our word for it:
CSUN
Patch Of Land
Google Partner
Google Premier Agency
The bottom line
SaaS is a nuanced, fast-moving industry – as our years of experience working in this field have taught us. Which is why, when you choose to partner with a marketing agency, you want a team of experts with the know-how to hit the ground running so you can quickly garner business growth in the form of measurable results like these:
From startups to enterprises, this is just a glimpse at what we’ve done for SaaS companies in the past – in fact, our clients see an average of 4.5x ROI. Ready to find out what we can do for you? SaaS results are one of our team’s specialties. Get in touch today.
Request a Free Consultation
No BS, just results. Average clients see a 4.5x ROI
- Dramatically improve ROI
- Outperform the competition
- Increase conversion volume
- Better track ROI
- Reduce cost per acquisition
- Improve lead quality