Need for capital

Capital is a basic need for any business whether a startup or a big enterprise. It applies to SaaS products as well.
There are at least 2 counts on which money needs to be spent in ample measure: HR and SaaS Marketing. Software development is a labor- and skill-intensive business where qualified and experienced hands are needed and it cost top dollar to the company. Marketing is something that you can’t do without, more so for SaaS product marketing that faces some exceptional challenges.

Why you need a SaaS Product Marketing Agency?

When it comes to SaaS B2B marketing, it is not possible to work without a SaaS Product Marketing Agency. It is so because a SaaS company needs to grow rapidly and at a high rate to remain in the reckoning. As per a report, a SaaS company that grows at 20% per annum will most likely cease to exist in 5 years – such is the pace of innovation that the tough competition that follows. The average growth rate of successful SaaS companies in the first 5 years should be above 65%, says another report.
To achieve and sustain such a high rate of growth, companies need to spend vigorously on SaaS product marketing.
This brings us to our topic of the discussion – Ideation to Investors to IPO: How Should You Plan Your SaaS Product?

Need for SaaS product planning

A SaaS product must be comprehensively planned from budgeting to market research, product development, and introduction to the market.
We will explore different aspects of funding and SaaS product planning in some detail here:

Funding

The need for a strong funding support is paramount in SaaS marketing. Access to capital is a competitive area and not easy to come by. However, there is a proven roadmap that can help any enterprise in accessing capital.
Here is how a SaaS startup can raise funds to support its marketing, growth, and expansion plans:

Angel Investors:

This is also called seed funding and is the  earliest stage of funding for a startup. Here, a High Net-worth Individual (HNI) invests in a business idea more because he is convinced of the abilities of the entrepreneur rather than the SaaS business idea. However, given the high risk in such businesses, an angel investor may not exceed his exposure to startups beyond 10% of his investment portfolio.

More often than not, an angel investor may come from close family and friends. For a startup, it makes sense to work within its budget and this concept is called bootstrapping. It intends to stay clear of capital at high rates or on coercive terms.

Venture capital:

Once a SaaS startup finds its groove and is poised for steady long-term growth, it needs a fresh round of capital. At this stage, both HNIs and institutional investors such as investment banks may be interested in funding your business.

Series A, B, C…

After the business has been fairly successful, you need to work on the growth and expansion fronts. And at this stage, investors are interested in becoming part of your SaaS success story by bringing their capital and taking equities in your business. Series A, Series B, and Series C represent the stage of the business and why the funds are needed.

Series A investments are linked to the basic capital requirement in the initial stages of a startup and may still come from angel investors or capital firms.

Series B funding is likely to be used for expansion and improving the portfolio of products and services. Usually, venture capitalists bring in investments for this round.

Series C investment shows investors have confidence in the business and want to invest in its further growth and expansion.

Planning an IPO

When a SaaS startup has become successful and well-known in its niche and industry, it has capital requirements for various new projects including some strategic acquisitions. To fund these activities, the founders decide to go public and sell a percentage of the equity in the company to the public. The company needs to engage an underwriter or investment bank to take your IPO plan forward as it’s an exclusive area of domain experts.

SaaS product planning

Once the funding roadmap is clear, you can get back to your SaaS product and take a serious look if it needs any tweaking and adjustments as you ready to go to the market with it. Here is a checklist for SaaS product planning and development:

Faith and conviction in your SaaS business idea

Are you convinced and committed to your business idea? Most businesses fail for the lack of these two factors. Read about prominent SaaS products such as Salesforce, Oracle, Amazon, Google, and IBM for inspiration and course correction.

Product planning

Analyze the market in terms of customers, competitors, business model, and advantages your product enjoys on these counts. Develop a business plan about the pain point your product is going to solve, target audience, brand building, advertising, and funding.

Create your team

A SaaS company needs a team of expert IT and marketing professionals. In particular, you will need business analysts, software developers; designers; quality assurance engineers, and project managers.

Build an MVP

Coming up with a minimum viable product (MVP) and introducing it to the market is an important step. It not only gives you an early bird advantage but also helps you with feedback and course correction advantages.

Summing up

SaaS product planning and funding management are two key components that determine the success of  SaaS B2B marketing products. However, taking on board a  SaaS Product Marketing Agency  can help the company overcome many of the hurdles on the way to success. If you are into the SaaS product business, you should read some of the blogs on Start-up Marketing Mistakes You Should Avoid  and  Things You Need To Know In Digital Marketing. You will find these blogs on KloudPortal, which is a top-ranking sales and marketing outsourcing service provider to SaaS companies.

The story of all successful SaaS products sounds similar on this count! And they come from all possible business segments — marketing communication, payments systems, project management, and marketing automation to name a few.

A roadmap helps resource planning and budgeting in alignment with the business and marketing goals of an organization. SaaS products are intangible, consistently being updated, and pitched in a fiercely competitive marketing environment. Given this, a SaaS Product Marketing roadmap is an absolute need for SaaS companies and marketers to stay on the course.

Before we discuss a roadmap for SaaS product marketing, a clear understanding that much of , a clear understanding that much of  SaaS marketing takes place in the B2B marketing space will help us. Here are a few quick facts:

• In 2020, the SaaS market was pegged at $157 billion and 80% of businesses were using at least one SaaS product
• SaaS market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 9.22% between 2019 and 2023, adding $60 billion during the period
• 73% of organizations report that all their apps and software requirements will be met by SaaS by 2021
• 93% of CIOs report that their organizations are actively adopting cloud-based SaaS, with adoption varying from complete to under-consideration
• From being standalone software, SaaS has grown to offer integrated platforms for mission-critical applications

SaaS Product Marketing Roadmap

Although as important as for any tech company, product marketing for SaaS is a little different concept. For other products, the marketing roadmap is pretty straight beginning with product launch and culminating with product positioning. A SaaS product marketing agency has a slightly different order of priority. Here, the product is at the heart of the marketing and it always remains there, thanks to the constant update that it goes through in its product life cycle.

Except for this, the basics don’t change much for SaaS product marketing. Some of the routine features include:

• Defining Industry
• Defining Target market
• Creating Marketing model
• Planning Proper Messaging
• Market Positioning
• Content and Channels

Business Model

Complexity and price play an important role in SaaS marketing. For example, a low price and high complexity product will not survive in the market. The right strategy would be:

• Enterprise model for high complexity and high price products
• Transactional Model for low complexity and high price products
• Self-service model for low complexity and low price products

SaaS Product Marketing Strategy

A marketing roadmap should have a well-formulated strategy along the proven success path. For SaaS product, it goes something like this:

Creating Buyer Persona:

You can 2-3 target audiences as well as many buyer personas

Marketing Funnels:

From discovery to delight, the roadmap of the customer journey should be identified

Inbound Marketing Funnel:

Marketing automation tools can inform you where your leads are in their buying journey

Awareness and education

Specific to SaaS B2B marketing, creating awareness about the product and the pain point it aims to solve is very important. In this context, accurate and exhaustive information about the product and prioritizing data are necessary. This leads us to the most important part of the SaaS marketing roadmap: Content Marketing.

Content Marketing:

There can be many forms of content marketing:
Blogs, newsletters, ebooks, sales emails, videos and they can work much like sales funnels. The twist in the tale is: your content is the lead form rather than the impersonal lead form that you see on the sites.

Many SaaS brands have junked the idea of traditional lead forms for lead generation. Rather, they rely on their content to create leads through likes, shares, and referrals.

Why Content Marketing?

For SaaS product marketing, the use of meaningful and personalized content is also necessary for customer retention – an area of critical importance. Customer acquisition is a lengthy and expensive process while customer retention depends on the emotions and experiences created.

As SaaS has a subscription-based revenue model, its topline or ARR (Average Recurring Revenue) depends on the retention of subscribers. To this end, SaaS companies update their software pretty regularly in their bid to outsmart competitors and retain their subscribers.

Marketing automation

SaaS Product marketing involves the same set of marketing tools and techniques that any other online marketing plan might involve: SEO, PPC, SEM, Marketing Automation, and Content Marketing. All of these are geared up to Growth Hacking. The quick and high growth rate is critical to the survival of a new SaaS product on the market.

Scaling up marketing efforts calls for the use of marketing automation tools such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and automated email marketing. For a SaaS product, these become all the more critical, making it an essential tool for a SaaS product Marketing Agency.

Summing up

When it comes to using marketing automation tools for SaaS marketing, you can’t overlook OPAL CRM from Kloudportal, a digital marketing company providing marketing and sales outsourcing services to SaaS companies.In SaaS B2B Marketing, you can’t hire just any agency. The stakes are high as your product needs to capture the market quickly and decisively.

Failing to do so can mean the end of the road for a SaaS product. To know more about SaaS marketing, you should get in touch with Kloudportal and go through some of the blogs on its site.

It’s often said that SaaS product marketing is difficult. Is it?

There is no doubt that it’s different from any other type of marketing. It is because in the case of SaaS, you may have a great product but you can’t show it to the customers. Why it is so?+ They don’t get an idea of all the features of a SaaS product just by looking at a few advertisements on the internet.

A visit to the site of any successful SaaS product such as Hubspot and Zoho would confirm that the company has taken a great deal of effort to explain the product on the site itself. The only way to do so is through online content.

To know how to market SaaS products with great results, we need to understand SaaS and the difficulties in its marketing.

What is SaaS?

In the course of a normal day at work, we use many software products that are available online. For example, we use Grammarly to check the correctness of the language in a copy, Copyscape to identify copied or plagiarized text, and Bitly to shorten unwieldy long URLs.

We never have these platforms on our computers as we have MS Office or CorelDraw. And, to use these platforms you pay a subscription fee rather than a one-time cost of the product.

Businesses use many software applications on the internet whenever they need to use them. For example, Freshbooks is popular accounting software while Zoho offers similar features with options to customize it to Indian GST requirements. In the marketing automation space, Salesforce and Hubspot are among the most popular SaaS products.

How SaaS is different from regular software?

SaaS products are different from regular software because of their ability to implement instant upgrades and customization, which is a growing need of businesses in today’s high-paced and intensely competitive business environment. These software products are hosted on the service providers’ servers on the cloud. It spares the customers all the hassles involved in buying and installing the software on their systems. Typically, SaaS products are available for a subscription rather than a one-off sale. These factors make them more robust and versatile.

Trends in SaaS Product Marketing

As per a survey, 38% of small and medium business (SMB) organizations are running entirely on SaaS, the market is still witnessing new and more promising products.

For example, Kloudportal provides SaaS marketing services and offers a suite of SaaS products that cover many functional areas of a business:

EazeKart: Reads barcodes and QR codes and can be integrated into both offline and online stores.

OpalCRM: Offers marketing automation solutions such as lead capturing.

Simple Exam: Provides educators and education businesses customizable software to organize exams online.

Mobilearn: Provides a complete ecosystem for a coaching business.

MobiQuiz: This allows you to engage your customers and audiences quizzes.

Why SaaS marketing is different and difficult?

We have discussed in brief how SaaS marketing is difficult. It is because we have a product to sell that we can’t show physically. Whether it’s B2B marketing or B2C marketing, SaaS is a different ball game altogether. But is it difficult, too? We at Kloudportal, a SaaS Product Marketing Agency, don’t subscribe to the idea that SaaS Product Marketing is difficult.

Yes, it’s different from product marketing, for instance.

That said, any type of marketing requires calibrated strategies and consistent efforts. If we use the same approach to SaaS marketing with necessary changes in content and delivery, SaaS marketing can also be successful.

Difficulties with SaaS Marketing

Lack of physical features

We have talked about this earlier in the post. Now, we would explore how the lack of physical features can be overcome.

One of the most effective ways of making SaaS products known and popular among the target audience is by talking about its features and use cases through content – blogs, guest posts, articles, social media posts, and videos.

When you visit a successful SaaS product site, one thing that strikes you most and leaves you impressed, if not awe-inspired, is the quality and quantity of the content — the explainer type.

That’s the way forward!

A case for compelling and engaging content

Explain your SaaS products in the context of the overall industry and level of awareness about them. A SaaS product may be ahead of its time. Its story and future need to be told amply for the people to grasp its use cases and potentials.

Talk in detail and in an engaging manner how your SaaS product offers effective solutions to a major problem such as scalability constraints faced by businesses. Educating the customers is vital to make them take an informed and confident decision.

Retaining the customer rather than the acquisition of a new customer is always less expensive and more rewarding, more so in B2B marketing. Ensuring that your SaaS customers don’t migrate to your competition’s platform, you should keep them engaged and informed to stay ahead of the curve that your competition might be trying to scare them with.

So, content is the most potent weapon in the armory of a SaaS Product Marketing Agency.

Difficulty with free trials

A key marketing strategy is to let the customers have some real ideas about your product – how it feels, how it works, and how it solves the problems. You can use this strategy and give your customers an opportunity to try out your SaaS product before they subscribe to it.

Different companies offer different plans. Some may offer a free-of-cost basic version such as Grammarly’s basic plan in contrast to paid Premium and Business plans.

Many SaaS companies offer their services free for a limited period of time ranging from a week to a month. But, none would give access to their premium services as part of the free trial.

That’s where the difficulty with SaaS marketing surfaces. There is practically no way a SaaS Product Marketing Agency can let the customers have complete knowledge and feel about the product until they subscribe to it.

Well, this challenge once again highlights the importance of content that is compelling in terms of information and engaging in terms of delivery.

So, more content, please!

Long sales cycle

B2B marketing is a long-drawn process that can easily stretch up to a year for a single deal to come through. In a SaaS product’s life cycle, it’s a considerably long time for the product to remain as it was at the beginning of the sales cycle. Typically, a SaaS product would witness frequent upgrades to meet new challenges and competition. A SaaS product marketing strategy has to aim at swift results and to that end, it has to be different. This is the ultimate challenge in SaaS marketing.

However, a SaaS Product Marketing Agency such as Kloudportal is cut out for this type of challenge. It has a precise and proven roadmap that can deal with all possible hurdles in SaaS product marketing effectively.

Summing Up

Software as a Service is a rapidly growing technology that helps businesses with cutting-edge solutions without making them deal with logistical issues. SaaS products are available for subscription, meaning customers don’t need to commit for life by paying a hefty price to buy them. However, SaaS marketing may not appear as easy as other types of marketing. It has to focus more on educating the customers than selling the products.

But as sales are important, SaaS marketers have to work on multiple fronts and aim for quick results. Given this, a SaaS company must enlist the help of a SaaS Product Marketing Agency that has the capability to meet the challenge and deliver on the promises.

You must choose your SaaS agency with due care and planning!