10 Unique Marketing Ideas to Kickstart Your SaaS
In a world inundated with software solutions, how can your SaaS product stand out from the crowd?
The answer lies in innovation, creativity, and a dash of audacity. If you’re ready to take your SaaS marketing game to the next level, prepare to embark on a journey through uncharted territory.
We’re about to unveil 10 uniquely intriguing marketing ideas that will not only kickstart your SaaS but also send shockwaves through the industry. Get ready to push the boundaries, captivate your audience, and redefine the way SaaS is marketed.
It’s time to ignite your imagination and set your SaaS product on a trajectory to success like never before.
If you prefer to watch rather than read, check out this great video by Gary Vee, which gives you a unique marketing strategy blueprint in under 3 minutes.
Why Market Your SaaS?
Effective SaaS marketing is essential for attracting customers, building brand recognition, and driving growth and revenue. Without it, it’s tough to make your brand stand out in a crowded market and convince your target audience to buy your product.
A good marketing strategy helps you distinguish your business from competitors by showing potential customers the value your product offers. A successful marketing campaign can also give you valuable insights into your target audience, like their needs, challenges, and preferences. This information can guide your product development and spark innovation.
Furthermore, effective SaaS marketing can help you retain your current customers. By using the right marketing tactics, you can keep your existing customers engaged and encourage them to recommend your product to others. This boosts your brand’s reputation, especially considering that 49% of consumers are influenced by others’ buying choices. So, keeping your current customers happy is crucial for your business to thrive.
Marketing Prerequisites
Before you dive into some of these unique marketing ideas for your small business, it’s crucial to consider a few key factors to ensure your marketing plan works effectively:
- Know Your Audience: To sell your product successfully, you must understand your target audience – who they are, their problems, and their needs. This knowledge helps you craft messages that resonate with potential users and boost sales.
- Analyze Your Competitors: Study your competition to figure out what they excel at and where they fall short. This analysis can uncover gaps in the market and highlight what makes your SaaS unique.
- Define Your Unique Selling Point (USP): Your USP sets your SaaS apart and explains why customers should choose your product. A clear USP guides your messaging and campaigns, aligning them with your business goals.
Taking these steps before you start your marketing efforts equips you with the insights needed to select and implement the right innovative marketing strategies for your startup. If you need help creating a solid marketing plan, check out this blog post.
Unique Marketing Ideas for Your Startup
Grow a Following
Building a social media following on platforms like Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook is a valuable marketing strategy for several reasons:
- More Visibility: A sizable social media following increases your brand’s visibility, getting your product in front of more people.
- Targeted Reach: Social media lets you reach specific audiences based on their demographics and interests, connecting with those more likely to be interested in your offerings.
- Boosted Credibility: A substantial and engaged following enhances your brand’s credibility and authority in your industry.
- Improved Customer Engagement: A strong social media following opens up direct communication with your customers, gathering feedback and insights to enhance your products and services.
- Increased Traffic and Sales: Growing your social media following can drive more visitors to your website, leading to increased sales.
Remember, don’t overdo the sales pitch on social media. People follow accounts for entertainment, information, or connections rather than constant sales pitches. Focus on contributing positively to your community, and website traffic will naturally follow.
Signup To Review Sites
Review websites can be strong marketing tools for SaaS businesses because they offer impartial assessments of your product.
Positive reviews enhance your company’s credibility and reputation, making your product more appealing to potential customers. Since these sites often have large audiences, a favorable review can reach many people and attract new customers.
Additionally, many review sites provide SEO (Search Engine Optimization) advantages, helping your SaaS company appear higher in search results and making it easier for potential customers to discover you online.
Referral Schemes
Referral programs can be a powerful marketing strategy for your startup because they create a mutually beneficial partnership between affiliates and your company. Affiliates earn commissions by promoting your products or services, while your company gains increased exposure and sales. This arrangement motivates affiliates to actively endorse your products, driving more traffic and sales to your website.
Using affiliate links is a cost-effective way to expand your company’s reach. There’s no need for significant upfront investments or ongoing expenses. You only pay affiliates when they successfully generate sales, making affiliate links a low-risk method to boost your sales and reach a broader audience. Just look at Senja’s experience with affiliate marketing in the tweet above – it brings in over 100 sign-ups every month.
SaaS Integrations
Connecting with other relevant businesses to create integrations between your products can be a great way to market your SaaS.
- Increased Reach: Integrating with other services expands your product’s reach, making it available to a wider audience. This can help increase brand awareness and drive more traffic to your product.
- Improved User Experience: Integrating with other services can enhance the user experience by providing a seamless flow of information and data between different platforms. This can improve the overall appeal of your product and encourage users to engage with it more often.
- Increased Value Proposition: Integrating with other services can add new features and functionality to your product, increasing its value proposition to users. This can increase customer loyalty and encourage word-of-mouth marketing.
GIF Marketing
GIF marketing is becoming an increasingly popular method for marketing as it provides an engaging and attention-grabbing form of visual content to promote a brand. They are often much more memorable than static images and can convey complex concepts and ideas in a simple and concise manner. What’s more, GIFs are also highly shareable on social media platforms and messaging apps, making them a powerful tool for reaching a large audience with very little time and monetary investment.
Getting started with GIF marketing is also incredibly simple. You just need to create an account with Giphy or Tenor, find a gif that relates to your target audience and add your branding or logo to the image. You can see Status Hive’s attempt at GIF marketing here.
Attend In-Person Meetups
Not all marketing has to be done online! Sign up to attend gatherings or conferences targeted at your target audience by using event discovery services such as Event Brite.
Attending events gives you the opportunity to speak to potential users, understand their pain points and offer your product as a new solution. With 85% of people thinking that face-to-face communication is essential to build a business’s reputation, attending in-person gatherings is an essential marketing technique to use when starting your business.
Blogging
Creating a blog that provides genuinely useful content for your target audience is a great marketing tool for your brand as it:
- Increases Visibility: A blog allows a startup to establish its online presence and reach a wider audience. It can help the company get found by potential customers through search engines, social media, and other online channels.
- Establishes Expertise: Blog posts with complex content allow a startup to show off its employee’s knowledge and expertise in the industry. It provides an opportunity to share insights and information that can establish the company as a trusted authority in its market. This can help build trust and credibility with potential customers, which is essential for success in any market.
- Traffic Generation: A blog can drive traffic to a startup’s website by providing valuable and relevant content that attracts and informs potential customers. By including calls-to-action and lead magnets in blog posts, a startup can convert blog readers into leads and customers.
- Builds Customer Relationships: A blog provides a way for a startup to build relationships with its customers and stakeholders by publishing content that provides value, sparks discussion, and invites feedback.
By leveraging the power of a blog, a business can achieve its marketing goals and build a successful brand. Read this if you’re interested in creating a free blog using the Ghost platform.
Infographics
Infographics, visual representations of information or data have been a powerful marketing tool for promoting products for years as they:
- Communicate Complex Information: Infographics can simplify complex information and make it easier for potential customers to understand, such as feature lists, pros and cons of solutions, or facts about product use cases.
- Building Awareness: Infographics can be used to build awareness and generate interest in a product. By using eye-catching visuals, captivating graphics, and persuasive messaging, an infographic can attract attention and encourage people to learn more about a product.
- Sharability: Infographics are highly shareable and can be a great way to spread the word about a product on social media. They can be easily embedded on websites, shared on social media platforms, and shared via email or instant messaging.
- Improving Search Engine Optimization: Infographics can also help improve a company’s SEO by attracting backlinks to its website. When other websites link to an infographic, it signals to search engines that the content is valuable and relevant, which can help the company’s website rank higher in search results.
- Boosting Engagement: Infographics can help increase engagement and interaction with a product. By presenting information in a visually appealing and interactive way, an infographic can encourage people to spend more time with the content, learn more about the product, and engage with it in a meaningful way.
Business Case Studies
If your business already has at least one well-known brand using your product, reach out to them in order to create a case study. Product case studies are detailed accounts of how a product or service was used to solve a specific problem or meet a particular need. They typically include information about the customer, the problem they faced, the product or service used to solve the problem, and the results that were achieved.
Case studies are a great low-cost form of marketing as they demonstrate the effectiveness and value of their products without requiring any further outreach to new customers. They provide real-world examples of how the product has been used successfully, which helps build trust and credibility with the target audience.
Blog Guest Posts
Guest blog posts are articles written by a person or company for publication on another person or company’s blog. Guest posts provide an opportunity for the guest blogger to share their expertise, opinions, and insights with a wider audience, while also providing valuable content for the host blog. These posts usually include a byline that includes a brief author bio and a link to the guest blogger’s product or services.
This technique proves itself to be a useful marketing tool as it allows the product to be put in front of a new audience that may not have heard about the product before. These guest posts create new backlinks to the product’s website, improving the SEO of the site over time.
Overview
Before you get started on implementing these techniques, make sure you have a solid marketing plan for your startup. If you’re yet to get started on your entrepreneurship journey, have a look at the 5 core elements of a successful startup.
