The SaaS Growth Blog

The SaaS Marketing Journey -- that arduous road that sees newcomers to your business become active promoters of the products you offer -- is a complicated beast, to be sure. However, just because the tasks ahead pose a significant challenge to your SaaS business, it doesn’t mean that success is beyond your reach. In fact, a number of companies have wisely leveraged SaaS content marketing to gain customers and boost awareness.

Following the successive stages of the SaaS Marketing Journey, we’ll touch base on the best practices of just a few of the companies who have optimized their content marketing efforts.

Somewhere along the line, we lost the idea to “Give the people what they want!” As marketers and as startup founders, that idea has always been our guiding star. But along the way, that simple message tends to get diluted, becoming “Give the people what we think they want,” or even worse, “Give the people what will make us the most money.”

What happens all too easily is that the people don’t get what they want, or get what they want at first, then find themselves saddled with a version of your SaaS that doesn’t deliver what they need at all.

Imagine if you could give every visitor to your site an experience targeted particularly to their interests. Doing so might be easier than you think. You don't need to write special content catering to various demographics and interests. And you certainly don't have to write personally tailored posts.

All you need is a bit of information about your readers. From there, you can start targeting your posts to their idiosyncratic content consumption habits. Here's how to thread the needle between custom-tailored content and creepy intrusiveness.

You’ve already gotten your prospects aware of your product and committed to a free trial. Now it should just be a matter of time before they become paying customers, right? Unfortunately, it’s not always that easy to get trial users to convert to premium subscribers, even when they’ve been able to gain some hands-on experience with your product. Luckily, hope is not lost when it comes to getting your SaaS leads to take that leap into the premium version of your product.

When implemented in the right way, SaaS content marketing can be one of the most powerful tools to build your product’s awareness and foster a devoted customer base that will ultimately comprise enthusiastic promoters of your message.

However, while the SaaS community has largely embraced content marketing as a primary engine for driving a business forward, there are still a number of ways in which even the most experienced companies can mishandle its principles.

It’s nearly springtime, and if you’re a gardener like I am, you might be looking into composting. I know, you’re wondering what on earth composting has to do with content marketing, much less SaaS marketing, but bear with me. A successful compost pile is a carefully constructed layered mass of dry, brown matter – dead leaves, dry lawn clippings, straw – and green waste (fruit and vegetable waste from your kitchen). If you don’t get the ratio of brown to green right, you’ll wind up with a stinking heap of garbage.

Are you seeing the connection to content marketing yet? No?

I recently did a 30-minute workshop for Forget The Funnel on creating better user onboarding that focuses highly on your customer and their desired outcome. I wanted to highlight the most important areas here.

By Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré & Trevor Hatfield

We’re in the midst of writing our SaaS Growth Playbook – a zero bullshit, actionable guide to growing SaaS businesses that are set up to scale from the start. It’s an ambitious undertaking, because so much has been written about this. Really great books like The Startup Owner’s Manual (currently highlighted and bookmarked past recognition on our desks), The Lean Startup and Lean Analytics, Value Proposition Design, and that whole “Jobs to be Done” thing? Is that a book yet? Because it seems like every founder we’ve spoken with in the last two months can’t stop talking about it.

Any online business is only as good as its marketing. After all, if prospective customers cannot find you online, it doesn’t matter how outstanding your product or service is, right? SaaS businesses are no exception, but just because marketing is key to the business model, that fact alone doesn’t mean that you can launch a successful campaign at any point and expect results. In order to make the most of the resources involved in successful marketing, there’s a great deal of work that must be done first.

Over time, we’ve developed a more comprehensive understanding of what works and what doesn’t work in design. Whether in reference to interior design or web design, the way a visual element is structured and organized can itself have a tremendous effect on how individuals respond to it. Oftentimes, people aren’t even completely aware of why they react a certain way to something. Rather, the subconscious affects how they feel about what they’re seeing.