Want to Marketing Your B2B SaaS Solutions?
B2B Software as a service (SaaS) is a rising software distribution model as more and more companies start to look for ways to optimize their workflows digitally. The concept of B2B SaaS has been around since the 1960s. However, its popularity has increased substantially in recent years, with approximately 71% of businesses currently deploying cloud-based SaaS to enhance their IT service delivery speed and 93% of CIOs stating that they are planning to adopt cloud SaaS.
The B2B SaaS market size is even expected to reach nearly $200 billion by 2024. With such an increase in demand, B2B SaaS marketing will increase significantly, and if you’re new to the market, it’s important to take the time to understand what B2B SaaS marketing is and the most common best practices as well.
Defining B2B SaaS Marketing
B2B SaaS marketing is what it sounds like—marketing your B2B SaaS to businesses with the goal of a sale. Simple, right?
Not entirely.
B2B SaaS marketing is considered one of the more challenging marketing tasks because you are attempting to sell something virtual as verse to a physical product that someone can hold, manipulate, and share with others.
What Makes SaaS Marketing Different?
The primary difference between B2B SaaS marketing and traditional marketing is that your end-user isn’t always the “decision-maker.”
See, with B2C and even some B2B consumers, the end-user is the person that is making the decisions, whether it be an investment or a purchase. They are the ones that are choosing to take action, and your product is the end result, such as a new computer or investing in the help of a skilled marketing consultant to help your brand boost awareness.
With B2B SaaS marketing, your service is designed to help another brand with reaching its ideal audience’s “decision-maker.” For example, if a brand offers editing services to their clients, they may require a B2B SaaS to help them streamline their editing process so they can deliver the edited content to their end-user.
An excellent example of this is Microsoft Teams, as they are a B2B SaaS that offers a virtual office of sorts that can be used in various ways. While Microsoft provides the software to brands, it’s up to the brands to market their access to meet their clientele’s needs—making their customer’s clientele the “decision-maker.”
3 B2B SaaS Marketing Best Practices
With B2B SaaS marketing, the goal is to prove to your audience that you can help them address their decision-makers’ needs. To do that, you’ll want to pay particular attention to these three B2B SaaS marketing best practices:
1. Always Be Researching
This brings you to the next vital B2B SaaS marketing best practice: always be conducting research into your:
- Industry trends/changes
- Industry’s needs
- Customer’s needs
Market research plays a crucial role in helping B2B SaaS providers determine who in their industry needs what. Once the need has been identified, you can start to create the necessary content to prove that you have the solution to those needs.
2. B2B Content Marketing Optimization is Crucial
B2B content marketing is another vital practice that will help you build a successful B2B SaaS marketing strategy. In 2019, the three most-cited B2B content marketing goals achieved were:
- Building credibility/trust (75%)
- Creating brand awareness (86%)
- Educating audience(s) (79%)
These are all critical goals for B2B SaaS providers because they help improve overall brand awareness and lead generation and build lasting relationships with their audience members, crucial for customer retention and brand loyalty.
Whether you’re looking to generate new leads or you’re looking to encourage current users to renew their product license (or upgrade), you need to be not only putting out constant content but content that proves that you are better than your competitors.
While new content is excellent, you also want to make sure you are leveraging your old content as well. That means using your research not only to identify new information/trends but to identify how your competitors are marketing themselves. Believe it or not, you may find that you don’t have to redo an old piece of content completely. Instead, you may be able to optimize it according to the latest keyword trends that other brands may be using.
While creating new content is an absolute must, you will also want to be sure to conduct regular SEO audits as well to see what content you can reoptimize to stay ahead of the game.
3. Free Trials are Your Friend
Another significant difference between B2B SaaS marketing and traditional product marketing is the fact that you typically wouldn’t see most brands handing out free samples of their products. Meanwhile, B2B SaaS providers benefit significantly from the use of free trials because it allows their consumers to see how well it would suit their audience’s needs.
B2B SaaS Marketing Help with CadenceSEO
Trying to determine where B2B SaaS marketing fits into your digital marketing strategy can be a challenge. If you’re struggling with how to implement it in, then let CadenceSEO help!
Contact us today for more information!
