The SaaS Growth Blog

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?

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.

As the owner or marketer of a SaaS product, you have to stay on top of the latest marketing trends to make sure you are prepared to beat competitors and get a decent sliver of that B2B exposure.

So let’s discuss what SaaS companies need for marketing in 2017.

 It doesn’t matter how great your product is, or how much effort you put into marketing it with excellent content. Proper SaaS marketing content distribution is a non-negotiable component of every successful campaign. If your marketing efforts aren’t in front of the right audience, you might as well be lighting money on fire.

Don’t spend your time curating excellent content only to let it go to waste. These three steps can help your marketing efforts land in front of eager customers.

At this point, we’re roughly midway through the process. The Attract, Convert and Experience stages have led your prospects through the steps to become users of your product, but now the time has come to unlock the next achievement in your customer development. Subsequent installments of our full breakdown will explain the remaining stages. At this time, however, we’ll detail the next part of the SaaS Marketing Journey, the Success phase.

Building a robust content marketing strategy is far from easy. In fact, two of the top five content marketing challenges, according to a study by Content Marketing Institute, are related precisely to that issue:

Blogging has evolved into a powerful industry of its very own since its early days of online "Live Journals" and niche digital logs. Many individual bloggers have gone on to develop their careers around an ability to document industry best practices, and countless businesses have greatly benefited from the opportunity to share their messages with a global audience. Accordingly, blogging has grown into an invaluable tool over the years, as the Internet has continued to take a more and more central role in the way our world functions.

Thus far, we’ve reviewed the Attract and Convert phases of the SaaS Marketing Journey, which center on developing uninitiated consumers into promising leads. Subsequent entries will detail the entire process that ultimately results in loyal customers who actively promote your business for you, but now we’ll delve into the next step in your customer development journey, the Experience stage.

As subscription models rise in popularity, Software as a Service products are fast evolving from the new frontier to the industry forefront. Because of this continual need to win and retain customers, the significance placed on a scalable, customized marketing strategy has never been stronger. While SaaS marketing previously held mostly to the established strategies used by inbound marketing (as illustrated in a popular HubSpot infographic), the changing nature of the industry has demanded the development of an updated methodology.

With subscription-based models like Software as a Service (SaaS) increasingly becoming the industry standard, it’s more important than ever for companies to have a concrete knowledge of how to shape their marketing strategy into something scalable and tailor-made to meet customers’ specific needs. For years, SaaS marketing was largely defined by traditional inbound marketing methodologies (including a key infographic from HubSpot), but the continuing evolution of the industry has cultivated the need for a more robust approach.