7 Creative Marketing Ideas For Your SaaS Business

Convincing someone to integrate software is not as easy as convincing them to buy, let’s say, a pair of shoes. This is a decision that people take extremely seriously, especially since most of them use SaaS for their business operations. People know how advantageous it can be to use the right software, so they are extra cautious and very picky when they’re making this investment. 

Spending on SaaS is expected to get as high as $55 billion by 2026. This is a potentially very rewarding sector to operate in. However, if you want to get more people to use your software solutions, you need to beat many in your competition. 

The SaaS market is trending more than ever, so your competition in this field is getting really heavy. Companies don’t constantly test or use many solutions for their operations. They make their decision and that is it! This means that you’ll lose your chance at getting a new customer as soon as they pick another option over yours. 

This makes marketing for SaaS companies a big challenge. As a result, SaaS businesses are turning to new avenues to promote and market their products and services. If you want to thrive in this industry, you need to discover and develop creative, innovative ways to market your brand. 

In this article, we’ll teach you exactly that – how to become more creative with marketing your SaaS business. 

1. Do Keyword Research For SaaS Link Building

In oversaturated industries like this one, research is the number one method that will set you apart. Your first and continuous mission is to research your competition and the keywords that help you rank highly to reach your audience. 

But, where should you use those keywords?

Those keywords don’t just belong in your site’s content or that on your social media. It is vital to use your keywords in link building, too. Skale’s guide on keyword research for SaaS shares some truly creative ways to discover and pick the perfect keywords for your marketing strategy. These include:

• Use Google Ad converters
• ANalyze the keywords your competition uses
• Focus on ‘jobs-to-be-done’ or JTBD
• Save and analyze sales calls
• Work in a customer journey map that you’ll update regularly
• Use reviews to get the voice of the customer (VOC)

Strategies like this have helped Skale, a link-building and performance SEO service to achieve tremendous results in only a few months. Researching keywords by doing a bit of Google search or using a single analytics tool is no longer enough – you need to get creative if you want to get the best and fastest results. 

When Skale finds the right keywords, they use them to create quality links that optimize the SEO ranking of the company they work for. In the following image, you can see how they optimized it for one of their clients, Moonpay. 

2. Be Very Transparent About The Pricing

People don’t have the time to waste and having to jump through hoops to learn how much a service will cost you is really annoying. Let’s face it – you can have the best SaaS product out there, but the price will have the most direct impact on your sales for most of your customers. 

Since this is a key deciding factor, you cannot hide it from your potential customers or make them go through an ordeal to get the quote. Don’t get overly creative with trying to avoid the cost of your solution. People won’t even consider your products unless they know the price is a good fit. 

Be creative with this and try to combine the perks that people will get from your SaaS solution with the price they’ll be asked to pay for those perks. Take, for example, Vimeo, a trending SaaS provider. They have their pricing plans attached to all the things that come in the package. This way, the target audience can decide whether or not Vimeo is what they need and want fast. 

3. Give Them A Sneak Peek

When people go shopping, they touch the products, take a close look at them, and even try them sometimes. When they shop for things like clothes online, they can see images, read about the materials, watch videos, etc. 

When a person invests in SaaS products, they cannot get tangible proof that it will work. Surely, testimonials can help in guiding people to decide on your business. But, that’s not enough. 

If you really want to grab the attention of your audience, you need to give them a sneak peek into what they will get when they use your service. Be creative and show them how it works. Whether you’ll do this in a free trial version, by offering videos, or in any other way, it’s important to give them a chance to test your service before they spend their money.

Take, for example, Promoter.io’s post about using their NPS measurements in practice. This company decided to use it to predict the presidential election and posted the entire process for the audience to see. 

Not only did this prove to be a great way to show how the product works, but it also attracted over 12,000 votes daily. Essentially, the company attracted a wider audience by offering something unique and creative. 

4. Use Marketing Automation To Send Drip Emails To Prospects

Many marketers today create forms where leads can subscribe, share some contact information, claim some rewards, etc. This is a great way to boost your email marketing strategy, but how do you use those prospects next?

One great way to do this is to use marketing automation and send drip emails to the people that shared their contact information with you. It will take some time to create those prospect emails, but once you do, an automation tool can do all the job for you. 

How Does This Work?

When a potential customer gives you their contact information to download something from your site, subscribe to your newsletter, etc, you start by following up with an automated thank-you email. 

A few days later, you follow up with a personalized email that offers something similar to the thing that the prospect downloaded or showed interest in. 

If this works, the customer will convert or take some other action, and you can follow up on the lead further. 

5. Use Exclusivity To Create A Sense Of Urgency

Let’s start this point with a good example. Tinder employs local reps on campuses in the US to host parties for young people aged between 18 and 24. This is the main target audience of the platform (68% of Tinder’s audience base). 

This is their ‘Love me tinder, love me sweet’ marketing strategy. If you want to get into this, you need to download the app on your phone. 

So, the company provides an incentive to prompt people to download their dating app. It makes the entire thing exclusive and creates a sense of urgency, and it does it so well that it attracts the very specific demographics that are most interested in their services. 

6. Make Waiting Lists

It might seem silly to make waiting lists if there’s no actual need for them, but this also creates a sense of exclusivity and urgency. It’s an unconventional, yet creative way to make your brand ‘harder to get’, which can help you expand your customer base. 

We are not saying that you should have waiting lists for your products, but put some limitations on who can access your content, educational materials, and other information. Take a small portion of what you create regularly, such as 5% or 10%, and lock it behind an exclusive list. 

Next, tell people that if they subscribe to join this list, they’ll get access to the 10% that only a limited number of people can see. This might just be the incentive you need to convince more people to engage with your business. 

At some point, you can even start charging for said access like Forbes does in this example:

As you can see, some of the content and the events this company offers are exclusive to members. 

7. Integrations And More Integrations

More and more companies today are using coattails and integrations to join forces with other services and boost their customer engagement. In 2007, Airbnb decided to ride the Craigslist coattails instead of spending a fortune on competing with the site. When this happened, as soon as a user added their listing to Airbnb, it was automatically added to Craigslist. 

Do you like the idea of joining forces with some of your competition to increase your chances of success? It gives you fewer companies to compete against, and access to their audience in addition to your own. 

Creating such integrations can be hard and time-consuming, but it can truly pay off. 

Wrapping Up

The SaaS industry is one of the most competitive industries in today’s world. With that in mind, you need to be open to new possibilities and use your creativity to deliver something unique and attractive to stand out in the crowd. Hopefully, these 7 tips will help you market your SaaS business more efficiently.