Hello!

My name is Ruslana, and I am a content marketer at Solve Marketing. Today, I spoke with our team to find out what marketing should look like for promoting SaaS.

— First, what is SaaS?

Kateryna — COO Solve Marketing:

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a service, where the user receives useful functions by subscribing to the website. That is, you pay for a certain period of service use, during which you can receive its services.

Currently, we are seeing the rapid spread of SaaS in all areas of life:

  • Leisure. Entertainment services provide products such as books, movies, TV series and television, other video content, etc. Well-known examples include Netflix, YouTube, Mybook, etc.
  • Financial management. FinTech services help keep track of income and expenses, automate accounting, etc.
  • Professional activities. Niche professional services are useful tools for specialists. For example, marketers widely use services for competitor analytics or social media pages, email newsletters, etc.
  • Education. Educational platforms allow professionals from various fields to purchase courses, webinars, conferences, use educational and other useful materials, etc….

and many others.

How exactly does SaaS differ from other businesses?

Andrii, Marketer, Traffic Manager:

The use of such services has advantages for both users and business owners.

Advantages of using SaaS for users:

  • No need to install software on your computer;
  • Ability to choose pricing plans according to your financial capabilities and needs;
  • Ongoing support from the service provider;
  • Fairly easy to use.

Advantages of creating and promoting SaaS for business owners:

  • regular income associated with the nature of the product — the service subscription must be regularly renewed, and therefore paid for;
  • no problems with the distribution of unlicensed software;
  • the service requires attention and involvement only when certain problems arise.

— What is the purpose of promoting SaaS?

Serhii, Head of Marketing:

The goal of SaaS promotion is to attract and retain an audience that will benefit from using such a service.

First, you need to decide on the following questions:

  • Who will need it?
  • What problems will it be useful for?
  • Under what conditions will the audience want to use this particular product?
  • What offer should be made to attract users?

…and many others.

The ultimate goal is to increase the customer base. After all, the more subscribers a service has, the better it is for business. A considerable amount of money is invested in the development and promotion of SaaS.

To recoup all expenses, it is necessary to attract subscribers who will remain with the service for a long time.

We have experience promoting SaaS projects for 3 years and continue to do so today. In this case study, we describe in detail all the components of lead generation and the results they produce.

— Please tell us about the key metrics for SaaS.

Andrii, Marketer, Traffic Manager:

To understand how effective marketing is for SaaS, you need to rely on the following key metrics:

  • MRR (monthly recurring revenue) — total monthly revenue generated by service subscribers;
  • CAC (cost of customer acquisition) — the cost of attracting a customer;
  • ROMI (return on marketing investment) — the ratio of marketing revenue to the cost of generating that revenue;
  • LTV (lifetime value) — the profit that a user brings over their entire lifetime;
  • Churn rate — the percentage of users who have stopped using the product over a certain period of time;
  • CRR (customer retention rate) — the rate at which existing customers are retained;
  • CR (conversion rate) — the conversion rate, which shows how many new users have become customers of the company;
  • ARPPU (average revenue per paying user) — the average revenue from a single customer who purchases the company’s product.

These are the main, but not all, metrics that help track and analyze the level of SaaS development.

— What are the specifics of promoting SaaS?

Violetta — Head of PM:

This specificity consists of two main factors:

1. The essence of the field of activity and the product itself. The specifics of promotion depend primarily on understanding the business itself, namely:

  • who it is aimed at;
  • what user problem it solves;
  • how this service is better than its competitors.

Therefore, you first need to find answers to these questions.

2. What stage of development is this SaaS at?

We distinguish two stages of SaaS development:

Hypothesis testing. At this stage, it is important to find out how useful and understandable the product is to users. Therefore, it is necessary to show it to the audience, assess their ability to use the service and pay for it.

Searching for opportunities to scale the business. This process is quite specific, because for each project/product, a separate plan is developed to find new users so that they are not too expensive. 

In the latter case, one of the most important metrics is CAC — customer acquisition cost. Our task as marketers is to attract the required number of new users within the permitted cost.

How can we tell that the service will grow and bring its owners more income? The number of new users and MRR will grow, while CAC will remain within normal limits.

— How is internet marketing for SaaS structured?

Serhii, Head of Marketing:

Here we return to the definition of the stages of SaaS development:

  • If the service is at the hypothesis testing stage, we need to create an offer to attract users who will start using it.

What do we pay attention to here? How they will use this service, whether they are willing to pay for it, what is the ratio of registration to payment, and what can be done to increase it.

  • If the service is at the business scaling stage, we identify three areas:

1. Attracting new users.

In this case, we already know that the audience is ready to buy the product, so our task is to attract more new users to the service.

Most often, this audience already uses a similar product from competitors. Therefore, we need to find places where this audience is concentrated and persuade them to try our service to prove that our service is better than the one they used before.

2. Retaining the audience that already uses the service.

To increase monthly revenue, you need to not only attract a new audience, but also retain the existing one. Content marketing is used for this purpose.

Content marketing is a set of actions aimed at creating content that is interesting and useful for the audience and distributing it through available channels of communication with the audience, such as social networks, email, and messenger channels.

Content marketing is a set of actions aimed at creating content that is interesting and useful for the audience and distributing it through available channels of communication with the audience, such as social networks, email, and messenger channels.

This helps to maintain constant contact with the user. Then, a person who uses our product is less likely to switch to another service, because they will remember what they are using and that the service constantly offers something interesting.

3. Survey the opinions of service users.

This is necessary to find out how best to maintain and develop the product in the future in order to attract and retain more people.

Want to get a basic strategy for promoting your SaaS? Sign up for a preliminary consultation.