Ad media in the world of SaaS might seem like a complex, unnavigable black hole. There is so much information and knowledge available around everything to do with SaaS in the form of blogs, direct question answers, free webinars, and even research papers. Yet, advertising for your SaaS company might still appear rather intimidating and we are here to help you with that.
Advertising in the SaaS space is rather peculiar because the buyers and sellers are all dealing in a virtual, online space. As a result, SaaS digital marketing appears as the only viable way to advertise the product at large. SaaS digital advertising and marketing opens a whole world of possibilities- a good website, content marketing, traffic from search engines, email campaigns, and social media.
It is also possible that you, as a SaaS business owner, might not be very inclined to the means of digital advertising, however, digital is the only way forward with organic reach continuously being on a downward slope. Paid acquisition is key and the sooner you start figuring a way around it, the higher are your chances to flourish!
If you are a SaaS company planning to amplify your advertising efforts, here are 6 tips to help you answer “how to advertise a SaaS company” –
1. Tailor-Make Your SaaS Advertising Campaigns
Entrepreneurs, at large, tend to take an uncreative approach to advertise, using the same old techniques and formats across various channels. This, however, does not help the advertisers since when it comes to SaaS, context matters just as much as content does.
An ideal SaaS advertisement should outrightly point to the problem that the product is aiming to solve, thereby building an instant connection with the audience and making them curious to know more about you. For example, if you are a SaaS product that is aimed to reduce the operational costs of a restaurant, your advertisement should clearly address how restaurants are infamous for lower profit margins and how you, your product can help blur the generalization.
It is also recommended to tweak your ad campaigns as per the target audience and as per the platform you wish to advertise on. If you are a SaaS application targeting web-users, it will hardly make any sense to advertise on mobile platforms.
2. Build Brand Awareness
SaaS advertisers and marketers often tend to undermine the power of brand awareness. Though brand awareness could be argued as a less important factor when compared with measurable growth in sales conversions, it is an important concept for long-term goals.
If you are a SaaS company that your targeted audience has already heard of somehow in the past, the targeted audience naturally will be more likely to sign up for a demo or for a consultation as a result of familiarity bias.
Brand awareness campaigns can be carried out with awareness-focused content around educational topics. When you put out information-rich content under your brand name for the targeted audience to read, you already make more sense to them and appear as authoritarians of the industry who know what they are into. Brand awareness also comes in handy when reaching out to pitch to that set of targeted audience which is already in a contract with your competitor.
3. Look Out For Click Fraud
An important point to keep in mind before launching your SaaS advertisement campaign is to be proactive against click fraud. Click fraud, essentially, is a fraud that occurs in the world of pay-per-click online advertising. Click frauds are usually done via bots and can amplify your advertising costs by having the bot repeatedly click on a PPC advertisement to generate fraudulent charges. As much as $5.8 billion was lost globally to click ad frauds in 2019!
Hence, stop assuming that only human beings would click on your SaaS advertisement and instead devise a plan to protect your advertisement campaigns against click fraud. Multiple click-fraud prevention tools on the market like ClickCease can also be utilized that help detect and block fraudulent clicks on Google and Bing ads. ClickCease and multiple other similar software Click Guard, PPC Protect help save funds of your advertisement budget with AI that picks up on suspicious behavior patterns, automatically banning offensive IPs, and even submitting refund requests to the ad networks for the fraudulent clicks on your behalf.
4. Underutilisation of User Generated Content
User-generated content or UGC refers to the positive content about your company or your SaaS product generated by your already existing clients. UGC, if utilized to its optimal possibilities, can help drive some major traffic to your company and help you sign up so many more clients as UGS is the ultimate form of persuasion. Human beings naturally tend to believe what is told to them by their peers of known people and hence, UGC works on the line of worth-of-mouth advertising.
When it comes to the operations of SaaS that take place completely on a virtual platform and as a product itself that cannot be seen or touched, advertising the UGC could be a smart approach. Since UGC is created voluntarily by the customers (actual users) based on their experiences, opinions, and feedback, it helps potential consumers gain some faith in your product and helps them feel safe from frauds or scams. Testimonials on an industry-specific platform by your current users could be a good start to UGC advertising for your SaaS company.
5. Build Nurture Funnels
A practical approach to convert a great number of clients over time would be to build out ad funnels that nurture your prospects over a period of time. With a sequence of interlinked content and clickable CTA buttons, you can boost your advertising efforts at each stage of the buyer’s funnel and also influence your targeted audience from one step to the next. This tactic is particularly effective for SaaS products because in the SaaS industry, though you can reach out to a lot of your targeted audience via various methods, it is still difficult to convert the potentials to actuals due to the long sales cycle.
As per Profit well, the SaaS sales cycle “can take up to 90 days on average if your product is at the higher end of the pricing scale” and since SaaS is supported, maintained, and engineered by an external company, you would know, the price anyway is usually on the higher end.
6.Invest In Branded Keywords
A branded keyword, or a branded search, can be defined as “any query via a search engine that includes the name of your company, business or brand, such as ‘Go Up’. Fundamentally a branded search includes your brand name as part of it.”
SaaS companies usually tend to rely only on organic search listings, writing off branded keywords. You might not be interested in the idea of bidding for a term that you otherwise believe you can rank for organically. However, a SaaS advertiser should understand that search terms that use your brand name are basically a signal that there exists a readiness to close the deal and you should not be missing out on that opportunity.
For example, you might be a SaaS company named Blue Monkey. Blue Monkey, given the eccentricity of the name, may not really rank organically but you, as the company owner, might still want to capitalize on the name recognition. This can become possible only by striking a fine balance between organic and paid listings for more number of overall clicks on the SaaS advertisement. More clicks on the advertisement also mean an accelerated AdWords quality score.
If you are planning to run multiple advertising campaigns that involve various types of keyword targeting, you could also consider resorting to a management tool like WordStream. WordStream and similar tools like Marin Software, AdStage, SEMrush, and Adzooma can be utilized to segment the impact of any ad, regardless of pre-devised campaign structures, thereby helping reveal the value that your bids on branded terms are delivering.
Having said all of that, we would also recommend not to go too far and avoid a bidding war for your brand name. Always keep the limitations of the acquisition costs budget in the picture and bid as practically as you would for any other keyword.
7. Include Your Existing Clients
As a SaaS owner, you must already be aware that SaaS products and businesses heavily rely on customer retention. And so, it only makes sense to not overlook your existing customers in your SaaS advertising efforts.
SaaS advertising can be injected into your already existing customer retention strategy in multiple ways as follows-
- Onboarding communication
- Spotlight your client’s names and testimonials in emailers
- UGC (User-generated content) advertising.
For example, Snapple used their actual customers to introduce and sell Snapple’s teas in their commercials. - Content-based promotion of new product features
- Including the existing consumers in a new product or feature launches
- Establishing case studies and uses of your tool. Share the before v/s afters
- Building a referral ecosystem
If you really want to grab some attention as a goal of your SaaS advertising efforts, make your current user base a part of the advertisements. By doing so, you will not only effectively engage potential clients but also build relationships with and retain the current ones
Final Thoughts
The online advertising space is fierce with competition and with so many new SaaS companies upcoming each day, the game just gets tougher with each day. In order to make sure that your advertising budget is optimally put in place, it is about time that you sit down and carefully plan a paid media strategy to gain a head start on your pursuit and to also gain a competitive advantage.
Looking for a SaaS advertising company to help you gain a value-driven competitive advantage in the industry? You have arrived at the right place! Get in touch with us today for a free 30-minute consultation and let us take your SaaS advertising to a whole new level of success!