DohertyWhite - how to market SaaS products

How do you market Software-as-a-Service products? Michael White Version 1, Dec 2011

You’ve built a new SaaS system.How do you acquire customers? 2

When you’re marketing a SaaS product youneed to know how to generatetraffic, convert that traffic to trial accountsand persuade those trial accounts tobecome paying subscribers 3

Key Points:• Understand your buyers• Deliver value to your buyers quickly• Define your acquisition process• Get good at online lead generation• Keep cost of sales low – use web and phone• Measure performance of your process• Continually improve conversion rates 4

How do your promote your SaaS system? A B C “What are you selling?” “Who are you selling to?” “How will you sell?” Your Value Proposition Your target buyers Your acquisition process 5

What is Your Value Proposition A B C “Who are you selling “How will you sell?” “What are you selling?” to?” Your Value Proposition Your target buyers Your acquisition process Answer these questions  Why should I buy something from you?  What value does your SaaS product provide to me?  How much is that worth to me – money, time saved, other benefits?  How quickly can I see the value your system delivers?  Why is your product better than other similar products?  Why is your product better than what I do at the moment?  Can you show me examples of your system delivering value?  Focus on the results you produce rather than what you do 6

Who Are Your Target Buyers A B C “Who are you selling “How will you sell?” “What are you selling?” to?” Your Value Proposition Your target buyers Your acquisition process Who are your buyers?  Where are they (countries, languages)  What industry sectors? TIP:  What types of organisation? Size, location ... Use “Buyer Personas” as a way to  Any specific target companies? analyze your target buyers. These are  What are their typical roles or titles? summary descriptions of your most  How does your system relate to their job? common target buyers based on interviews (phone or in-person) with a  What are their key concerns/drivers/goals? sample of customers and prospects.  What are their demographics?  Where do they hang out online?  What sources of information do they use? 7

How do you sell to those buyers? A B C “Who are you selling “How will you sell?” “What are you selling?” to?” Your Value Proposition Your target buyers Your acquisition process 1 2 3 4 Convince them to Bring people Persuade them Persuade them to renew each year – to your to sign-up for a pay for your retain your website Free Trial service customers Traffic Conversion Subscription Retention 8

4 Key Steps for SaaS Customer Acquisition1 2 3 4 Convince them to Bring people Persuade them Persuade them to renew each year – (traffic) to to sign-up for a pay for your retain your your website Free Trial service customers Traffic Conversion Subscription Retention 1 2 3 4 Traffic Conversion Subscription Retention 9

4 Key Steps for SaaS Customer Acquisition1 2 3 4 Convince them to Bring people Persuade them Persuade them to renew each year – to your to sign-up for a pay for your retain your website Free Trial service customers Traffic Conversion Subscription Retention Use online Use your website to Use your product to Ensure they remain marketing to convert traffic persuade them to buy customers through a drive traffic retention process - Value proposition - Define a process -SEO - Reflect the buyer - Demonstrate value - Define a process for - Pay-per-click -Home page design - Product can sell itself ‘renewals’ - Social media -Calls to action Easy to use -Remind customers -Email - Landing page - Don’t let them figure regularly of the value -PR - Lead capture things out alone you deliver - Follow-up - Increasing usefulness - Contact them in advance of renewal 10

Bring people to your site - Traffic1 Bring people to your website To market your software-as-a-service Traffic product successfully you will need to Use online understand online marketing marketing to drive traffic -SEO - Pay-per-click - Email -Social media - PR 11

Bring people to your site - Traffic1 Bring people Webinars to your website Traffic Generate leads at the top of the sales funnel using online marketing – Use online marketing to email, Google pay-per- drive traffic click, social media and PR -SEO - Pay-per-click - Email -Social media - PR 12

Bring people to your site - Traffic You have to understand online marketing because1 your buyers will find you before you find them Bring people to your website In a survey of B2B buyers in the US, 80% of those buyers Traffic said they found the vendor, not the other way round. Use online marketing to Source: MarketingSherpa B2B drive traffic Technology Marketing Benchmark Survey 2008 -SEO - Pay-per-click - Email -Social media - PR • Buyers are doing most of their initial research online before initiating conversations with vendors and are better informed at an earlier stage. • You need to make sure your target audience finds you when they search online for your type of product or service. 13

Bring people to your site - Traffic  Think about how your target buyers search and what they search for  Bring them to your site using natural search (using search engine1 optimization) and paid search (Google and Bing pay-per-click ads, LinkedIn Bring people or Facebook ads, banner ads) to your  Get them to register on your site for content or a newsletter so you can website bring them back using email  Encourage them to connect to you via social media – your blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google +, YouTube, Slideshare Traffic • People take different routes to your site when searching • Their searches can fall into broad categories e.g. describing a problem, describing a symptom of the problem, describing what they think the solution is, searching for a Search route 2 product or brand name etc. WWW • You need to understand which kinds of searches are best for bringing your desired buyer to you • You need to analyze and understand each major “search route” into your site so you can increase that traffic • Use Google analytics, KISSMetrics, ClickTale to monitor and analyze where people are coming from and what search14 terms they are using

Bring people to your site - Traffic  To generate good search traffic your SaaS product is not enough - you also need to have good content1  Produce content that will interest your target buyers (use your buyer Bring people personas to identify what will interest them) to your  Over time a percentage of the visitors who read your content will then website register for your trial  Examples of content people will register for includes: how-to guides, tours and overviews, eBooks, white papers, industry surveys, case studies, Q&A Traffic interviews, company and product information  Place that content as downloads on your site and as posts in your blog  Link to that content using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus etc. Visitor gets white paper Bring people to your content using Email, Google You get contact details Ask them to register to download ads, ‘natural’ search and of visitor 15 the content e.g. white paper social media

Persuade People To Signup for Trial  Once you are driving regular traffic to your site your next problem is to get2 those visitors to sign-up for your free trial  You do this through: Persuade them  Clear value proposition to sign-up for a Free Trial  Home page design  Landing pages  Clear calls to action Conversion  A/B testing  ‘Nurturing’ and marketing automation Use your website to convert traffic  Analysis of visitor behaviour  Clear Value Proposition – can you communicate the value you deliver in a - Value proposition couple of seconds to a web visitor? You need to get your pitch across quickly - Reflect the buyer -Home page design and clearly -Calls to action  Home page design – keep the home page simple with the clear objective of - Landing page moving visitors toward the ‘Free pilot’ sign-up. Look at the layout used by - Lead capture other succesful SaaS products such as CampaignMonitor, MailChimp, and - Follow-up Basecamp. Provide sufficient information (videos, graphics, documents, slides) so visitors can “sell themselves”. Provide someone to talk to if a visitor has questions. 16

Persuade People To Signup for Trial  Landing pages – when you set up Google ads or email campaigns you can2 bring visitors to special pages on your site – ‘landing pages’. These pages are specially designed to increase ‘conversion’. Check out resources from Persuade them vendors like KissMetrics and Unbounce and analysts like MarketingSherpa to sign-up for a on good landing page design. Free Trial  Calls to action – your home page and landing page should have clear calls to action, with corresponding buttons. Call-to-action button design is a Conversion subject to itself. Use descriptive verbs on the button text (e.g. “Download now” rather than “submit”), use bright colours and make the buttons as big as possible. Include a product screenshot near the call to action and Use your website to sell the benefits the user will get from taking the action. convert traffic  A/B testing - a/b testing means testing two variations e.g. sending one email to 200 people and a slightly different version to another 200 to see - Value proposition - Reflect the buyer which version has the best response. You can a/b test almost everything -Home page design in online marketing – your home page (using Google website -Calls to action optimizer), landing pages (using Google or Unbounce), your Google pay- - Landing page per-click ads, emails, tag lines, graphics and downloads. - Lead capture - Follow-up 17

Persuade People To Signup for Trial  “Nurturing” and marketing automation – as people register to2 download your content you will build up a list of contact details of people who have shown interest in your product and area of focus. Start Persuade them ‘nurturing’ these contacts by periodically offering them other high-value to sign-up for a content that you think they will be interested in. Use marketing Free Trial automation to automate the workflow of repeated interactions with large numbers of contacts. Keep the nurturing simple to begin with e.g. send a follow-up email every 3 to 4 weeks offering a different piece of Conversion content. If you see contacts interacting positively, call them to encourage them to sign-up for a free trial.  Analysis of visitor behaviour – once you’ve been running for a few Use your website to convert traffic weeks and you have some content and trial registrations, you need to analyze what is happening so you can improve your conversion rates. - Value proposition You want to know what search terms people are bringing people to your - Reflect the buyer site, what other sites refer traffic to you, what way visitors act when they -Home page design get to your site and which kind of website changes will increase the -Calls to action number of people who register. Google Analytics provides loads of - Landing page information so start by asking some good questions and see if Analytics - Lead capture - Follow-up gives you the answers you need. Set up conversion tracking on your Google ads. Use tools from KISSMetrics or Clicktale to analyse visitor behaviour. Check out “Web Analytics 2.0” by Avinash Kaushik and search online and in Twitter for free tips on web analytics and conversion 18 optimization

Persuade People To Subscribe  At this point you have a number of people using your pilot. How do 3 you persuade them to take the next step and become paying Persuade them to subscribers? pay for your  First - look at SaaS vendors like service CampaignMonitor, ConstantContact, Salesforce and others to see how they do it. Learn from best practice.  Demonstrate value – early and repeatedly; make sure you let users Subscription access most of the key features of the product – don’t provide them with a ‘hobbled’ version that doesn’t demonstrate its strengths Use your product to  Encourage use - encourage pilot users to add stuff to the system – persuade them to buy records, data, graphics, whatever it is they can put in. The more they add, the more likely they are to find the service ‘sticky’. Conversely, if - Define a process - Demonstrate value they are not using the system during the pilot then they’re unlikely to - Product can sell itself become paying customers. Easy to use  Call them - ring your prospects to see how they find using the system - Don’t let them figure – they’ll be pleasantly surprised to hear someone offering to help. things out alone - Increasing usefulness Phone calls are cheap compared to sales visits so use the phone and web to move your pilot customers to paying subscribers. Call them , don’t wait for them to call you.  Keep price entry point low – let small businesses in for a low price, have tiered enterprise pricing 19  Make it easy to buy – accept most common forms of payment

Retain your customers 4  At this point you are generating a regular flow of new customers. Convince them to  Now you need to concentrate on ensuring that these customers stay renew each year – with you when it comes time to renew retain your  Never stop selling to your customers – constantly remind them of the customers value of your system  Monitor their usage – if people’s activity slows or their accounts Retention become dormant then get in touch with them to see if you can help somehow Ensure they remain  Survey customers on a regular basis to see if they are satisfied and to customers through a identify potential causes of dissatisfaction retention process  Dedicated sales staff - For larger customers, have specific sales people - Define a process allocated to engage with them in the period leading up to the renewal – - Separate to normal treat it like its own form of sale sales process - Remind them regularly of the value you deliver - Contact them in advance of renewal 20

Now you are generatingtraffic, signing up pilotusers, acquiring payingcustomers and persuading themto renew. What do you do next? 21

How do you sell to those buyers? A B C “Who are you selling “How will you sell?” “What are you selling?” to?” Your Value Proposition Your target buyers Your acquisition process 1 2 3 4 Convince them to Bring people Persuade them Persuade them to renew each year – to your to sign-up for a pay for your retain your website Free Trial service customers Traffic Conversion Subscription Retention Optimize 22

Optimize each step, improve conversions 1 2 3 4 Convince them to Bring people Persuade them Persuade them to renew each year – (traffic) to to sign-up for a pay for your retain your your website Free Trial service customers Traffic Conversion Subscription Retention 1 2 3 4 Traffic Trial Subscribe Renew Measure Conversions – Measure number of pilot users who Monitor rate ofMonitor visitor number of visitors who sign- convert to renewals. Improvenumbers, anad sources of up for trial. Increase this rate subscribers. Improve through salestraffic – increase quantity each month through home by changes to interaction, monitoringand quality page design, landing page product, pricing, sales and addressing customer 23 design, a/b testing satisfaction problems.

Good resourcesHere are some suggested resources (we plan to add to this list) Links • Great presentation - http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/slides-sales-marketing-machine/ • Neil Patel’s blog QuickSprout (www.quicksprout.com) has pretty good info on search traffic • KissMetrics www.kissmetrics.com and ClickTale www.clicktale.com have great blogs • Unbounce - http://unbounce.com – tool to build landing pages that you can use when launching a product • Lincoln Murphy’s blog Sixteen Ventures - http://sixteenventures.com/ - advice on pricing, SaaS freemium models • Look at www.widerfunnel.com and www.conversionscientist.com Books • “Don’t make me think” by Steve Krug – great book on web design • “Crossing the Chasm”, Geoffrey A. Moore – classic guide to product marketing, good intro to marketing for technologists • “The Art of SEO” – gets going after about page 80 • “Web Analytics 2.0” by Avanish Kaushik • “Advanced Google Adwords” by Brad Geddes 24

Email michael.white@dohertywhite.com DohertyWhite helps business-to-businessMobile +353 86 383 8981 (B2B) technology companies generate leadsPhone +353 1 969 5029 online and convert those leads to sales. We +353 7493 81986 provide marketing automation, websiteTwitter @michaelgwhite design, digital marketing and PR services.www.dohertywhite.comwww.dohertywhite.com/blogs

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DohertyWhite - how to market SaaS products

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