What is SaaS Product Marketing | SaaS Product Roadmap

What is SaaS Product Marketing | SaaS Product Roadmap

I am always fascinated by SaaS products. Every product that is designed, developed and released solves a market problem. Closely monitored and carefully designed, most of the SaaS products, I feel, add a lot of value to its users. But I always wondered why we only see less than 1% of the SaaS products succeeding? Why do the SaaS products lose their shine? One key aspect that we found was the gap in marketing and sales. In this article, we highlight the core marketing steps for every SaaS product to succeed

Many entrepreneurs dream of building their SaaS products and in helping the market with their solutions. The beauty of every SaaS product is there is a passion to solve a problem that can affect millions of lives. Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce, Zoho, all are SaaS products that have identified certain gaps in the market and have developed appropriate solutions to fill the gaps or solve a problem.

Then you may be wondering, when so many SaaS product companies exist, why only a handful of them reach the market potential? What do they do differently, than other SaaS product companies that reach a success criterion and capture a large market share?

What is SaaS Product Marketing?

SaaS Product Marketing is the process of creating market awareness about a problem and how your product can solve it. The objective of SaaS product marketing is not always focused on increasing the number of subscriptions alone but also creating awareness in the market about a possible problem this product can solve.

Marketing Vs Sales.

Many Product owners are often confused between Marketing material and Sales Material. While marketing material is more focused on “What” of a problem statement, Sales collateral focuses on “How” of a problem statement.

Most of the SaaS marketing collateral focusses on helping customers understand the features of a product. While we advise you to focus on “What” of the problem statement in your marketing collateral. What problem you saw in the market and a high level picture of how your product solves that problem.

A detailed walkthrough of your solution should be the part of your Sales pitch and your product demos.

Identify Target Market

Identifying your marketing channels plays a major role in strategizing your marketing plan. Geographics, Demographics and Psychographics of your Target audience segment plays a significant role in successful execution.

Identify your Market.

TAM – Target achievable Market,
SAM – Serviceable Available Market and
SOM – Serviceable Obtainable Market.
The goal of SaaS Product Marketing is to effectively reach your SOM.

Eg., Say you have developed a SaaS product that is a Management Software. Typically, your feature list includes Admin Panel, Workflow Management, Calendar, Task Management, Integration plugins (Eg., Shopify & Magento), E-commerce Modules etc.,

TAM – All the organizations/companies across the World who use Software in their organizations.
SAM – All the organizations/companies that sell their products online are your SAM
SOM – All organizations/companies/small businesses that are using Shopify or Magento as their e-commerce platform.
Typically your SOM is 6 percent of your SAM market.
The above metrics is not only important for a marketing plan, but is also the most demanded one to be included in your business plans, if you are going for investments.

How is SaaS Product Marketing different from Traditional Services marketing?

Marketing efforts vary based on the type of product, service and market segments we try to reach. For example a Consumer based SaaS product like Uber App has a different set of audience, different demographics and Psychographics, where as a SaaS product like Salesforce has a different objective focussed on the B2B segment.

The difference between SaaS Product Marketing and Traditional services marketing is huge and they are two different segments which have to be looked up independently. There are several factors based on which a strategy is designed. For Eg., Target Market, Demographics, Culture, Psychographics etc., play a significant role.

When should SaaS Product Marketing Start?

Many SaaS product owners are quite confused on when their marketing campaign should start. Often most of the SaaS Product owners engage the marketing team at a much later stage, and often don’t see the results quickly.

The best time to start your SaaS Product marketing is when you are half way through your MVP 0. When the marketing team starts working with you, you have to have few things already in place – Your Competitors list, Your Target Market/audience defined and most importantly your digital presence which includes a basic website, Social media channels etc.,

SaaS Marketing RoadmapThough SaaS product development itself is less than two decades old, our fascination to study the SaaS Product roadmap has never ended. We keep updating ourselves with latest techniques, market shifts and marketing tools to take SaaS products in to the market. Stay tuned to this space, as we will be coming up with more articles on SaaS Product Marketing. If you want to explore more about SEO techniques please checkout our recent blogs around it. Want to know about Instagram hacks, we have an article for you too.

The Digital Marketing Flywheel

The Digital Marketing Flywheel

We have heard about many business models that define a company’s revenue and growth vision. Coming to marketing, funneling the leads and engaging the leads was always a point of discussion. However, identifying your flywheel in your business is the key to move up the ladder from being a startup to enterprise. And it is essential to remember that it does take time to identify the flywheel and the key players who turn the wheel.

Being a Digital Marketing agency with over seven years of experience, here we present you the Digital Marketing Flywheel.

As we always advocate, Digital Marketing is not a one person’s job. And true to that, we have experienced this flywheel in KloudPortal, where the wheel is turned by each of the stakeholders.

Digital Marketing Flywheel for Kloudportal. Every member in the team turns the wheel effectively, to give enough momentum to our marketing efforts. An SEO expert extensively works on Search Engine Optimization techniques which are both On-page and Off-Page. Keeping in tune with the Google’s search engine optimization updates, Bing and Yahoo search engine updates, understanding the key ranking factors, our SEO expert is constantly evaluating our website’s performance as per search engine’s guidelines.

Off Page SEO experts – guided by the latest guidelines, Off-page SEO experts work continuously with an objective to drive traffic to the website. On an average, making 30-40 submissions in a day, fine tuning their submissions to drive more and more quality referrals to the website.

Search Engine Marketing Experts – This team focusses on bringing in search engine traffic to the website. Optimizing our display advertisements, search ads on Google, Yahoo and Bing they consistently work on improving the search appearance, managing the ad budgets and improving the ad performance.

Social Media Marketing – Social Media has become an inevitable part of life. Keeping a track of social media behaviors of our prospects, identifying the right social media channels suitable for our business, strategically presenting KloudPortal on social media channels, driving engagement and traffic to the company pages. Users triggering call to actions on social media posts, has been driving considerable quality traffic to our website.

Digital Marketing Flywheel for KloudPortal. Content Writing – This team focuses on developing value added content for our prospects. Consistently writing about latest google updates, changes and suggestions as proposed in Google, keeping an eye on the search engine ranking parameters, this team adds value to the visitors coming to our website.

Content Marketing – Creating content and just leaving it there on the website, doesn’t help much. The value added content should reach the audience on different channels. Hence our content marketing team focuses on sharing the KloudPortal blogs on various channels, websites and social media handles. They focus on taking KloudPortal content to the eyes of our prospects and customers.

PR Marketing – This team focusses on taking the KloudPortal’s work to larger audience through Press Releases. Working exclusively with Medium.com and EIN presswire, this team analyzes the audience reach and optimizes the Press Releases accordingly.

SMS Marketing – A 121 channel to reach our prospects, SMS Marketing has played a key role to bringing great prospects to KloudPortal. The team focuses on driving attention of the prospects by keeping the message crisp and clear with an intentional Call to Action.

E-mail Marketing – Reaching prospects on their personal e-mails, delivering value added content to their inboxes, have attracted valuable prospects for KloudPortal. Many B2B customers have reached us for their marketing needs.

How we measure the flywheel performance?

We define KPIs for each stakeholder in the flywheel. While they enjoy doing their work, each stakeholder is excited to share their results and observations. They consistently plan to improve their performance, thereby adding momentum to the flywheel.

Typical KPIs that we use to measure our stakeholder’s performance include:

  • Website Performance
  • Traffic Analysis
  • Goals and Conversions
  • Submission Rates
  • Engagement Rates
  • Measuring our SEO RoI

While we build the flywheel model and execute it successfully for ourselves, we help our customers identify their Digital Marketing flywheel and execute it for them too.

Our experience has shown that, every organization’s Digital Marketing flywheel varies. A service based company sees a different digital marketing flywheel, and the same does not work for a product based company.

Want to know which digital marketing flywheel model is correct for your business? Book a strategy call with us. Fill the Contact us form today with your details, and our team will be with you as soon as possible.

What is Link exchange and how does it affect SEO?

What is Link exchange and how does it affect SEO?

Links are a basic and essential part of SEO. The early ranking algorithm of the Google search engine was based on the PageRank algorithm, which works by counting the number of quality links on a page to determine the importance of the website to rank it.

A link is a clickable object on a webpage that directs from one page to another. They may appear as text, buttons or images. Based on the destination of the link, they are classified as Internal, Outbound and Inbound links.

Internal links are links that navigate you to another page of your website. These links allow users to stay longer on your site. As a result, it increases dwell time and boosts ranking. Outbound links are links that navigate you to another website, whereas Inbound links are links from other websites to your website. Therefore, more links will increase your website’s credibility and improve rankings.

Now that we have understood the links and their importance, let us move on to link exchange and how it works in SEO?

LINK EXCHANGE – PROS AND CONS

Link exchange is defined as the practice between websites to exchange links with each other to increase visitors and page ranking. It is also referred to as Swapping backlinks, Reciprocal links, or Link partnering.

Link exchange is an ancient link-building strategy to achieve improved website ranking. As we know in digital marketing, link popularity plays an important role. Webmasters and many other website owners will use link exchange for link building, which helps in promoting their websites to the major search engines.

Link exchange is not effective in all cases. They have the disadvantage of distracting prospective customers to other websites before they thoroughly explore your website.

IMPACT ON SEO

The purpose of Link exchange techniques is to gain an advantage on rankings. Receiving a high-quality backlink will allow you to acquire a trust signal that will increase your website rankings and traffic to stand over the competition.

Link exchange generates many quality links pointing to your website, therefore, it increases your link popularity, which is one of the most important ranking factors in successful search engine marketing and SEO campaigns.

There are thousands of website owners looking out for exchanging links from other webmasters and bloggers to generate impressive results in their search rankings. Moreover, major companies and publications also practice link exchanges in a low-key way by link exchanging schemes. The link exchange services and directories have gradually developed and the era of automatic link generation has begun. Since then, Google has reconsidered its opinion regarding fake links and the use of such traffic.

Excessive link exchange can be bad for rankings

Things have changed and now link exchange can adversely affect your website rankings and reputation if used excessively. Google’s John Mueller mentions that it’s a terrible idea to engage in excessive link exchanges, automated programs for link building and paid linking activity. Google highly discourages website owners taking advantage of link exchange strategy excessively for search engine rankings without making any effort on their part. It also considers it as a violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Here are the best ways to handle link exchange to deliver a positive impact on your website’s SEO rankings.

#1. Partner up with websites that are rich in traffic.

#2. Pick websites that have top-quality content related to your business that can be useful to your visitors and will make an amazing link exchanging partner.

#3. Choose websites that aren’t your closest competitors and maintain high-quality websites with good SEO scores.

#4. Connect with the websites that rank for similar keywords as you do.

CONCLUSION

Link exchange is like a double-edged sword, if practiced correctly, it can be a powerful tool to boost your SEO scores. It is an immense opportunity to quickly acquire new customers to your website, but with certain limitations. Legitimate link exchange is a long-term effort, gained naturally with the merit of your content.

To watch the latest Google SEO Office Hours, please check out the video below:

Durga

Durga

About The Author…

Durga has a master’s degree in engineering. Technological advances in digital space interest her a lot. Digital marketing is her forte and she passionately follows latest trends in the digital marketing space. She has written many trending articles on various social media platforms. Her areas of interest include SEO Optimization, structured data, SMM, Keywords research and analysis etc. She is focused, resourceful and dedicated.

5G and Future Digital Marketing

5G and Future Digital Marketing

With the advent of 5G there has been a lot of buzz and hype around it. And looks like the hype is worth it. Yes, the speed of processing is going to be increased which benefits future digital marketing! Yay!

As the technology word suggests, with every “G” there is something new coming up. This new G is definitely going to put our millennials on the fast track.

Let us just step back a few decades and see the evolution of the “G”s – G is for Generation:

1G – Mobile Phones – 1980s
2G – SMS or Phone Texting – 1990s
3G – Mobile Internet – early 2000s
4G – Mobile Apps – 2008
5G – Bringing Connected Devices

5G is expected to connect 70 Billion devices by 2025. It is going to expand its reach to multiple devices and Internet of Things, Wearable technology, retail commerce, connected homes and appliances, connected vehicles, decentralized distribution of data etc.

Impact on Future Digital Marketing

The question comes on what would be its impact on marketing?

The dynamics of marketing is going to change. Here are a few pointers to keep in mind:

• Real-time analytics is going to drive the marketing strategies.
• Marketing for clusters – people with similar demographics, sociographic, geographics and psychographics shall be grouped and targeted.
• Interactive advertising
• Personalized Marketing
• AR/VR based user experience driven marketing.

5G and Digital Marketing

Real-time data analytics:

With the devices connected to each other, there is a huge data that is going to be generated every second. The precision with which this data can be analyzed to deliver the best service to the customer is a challenge.  The faster the reach, sooner the conversions.

Marketing for clusters:

With 4G we see all the apps, web devices etc., are existing, but not connected. With 5G all the devices including your smart phone, TV, Cars, Home automation systems etc., will be connected. A huge data potential is awaiting the output of 5G revolution. Customers are currently segmented only based on demographics and psychographics. But the segmentation will go a little more deeper to connect geographies, sociographies as well. Future digital marketing will see the cluster audiences, who may have high demand for a particular product of services.

Interactive advertising:

Current advertisements which are instructional in nature and are one to many, is going to change. It is going to take the form of many to many. With already chatbots on the cards, most of the businesses have adopted for remote assistance for their customers. With interactive advertisements, it will get more specific with gamification and user engagement.

Personalized Marketing:

While cluster marketing will focus on detailed market segmentation based on demographics, sociographics, psychographics and geographic factors, an in-detail personalization will be the new norm. This is to enable the customers with right products and quicker buy/sell decisions.

AR/VR based user experience driven marketing:

AR/VR has currently entered into educational, real-estate segments. There is a rapid expansion expected in healthcare, industrial automation and retail segments. Virtual reality shall enable the users to walkthrough a journey and experience the product/service, before making a buying decision. Video based marketing has already started, and adding AR/VR experience will just make it more realistic.

Be ready to explore the new marketing trends that 5G is going to bring. Start exploring more about how you can add value to customers. User Experience driven marketing will be a game changer once 5G is in.

The Conclusion:

Digital Marketing certainly will not be same as today. Markets are quickly adapting to technology and change. Be ready to take advantage of 5G network. Stay ahead of the Game!

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