How Do You Promote New SaaS?

SaaS marketing in general can present some challenges, but promoting a new SaaS company can be especially tricky. We’ve put together some of the SaaS marketing best practices that can help you launch your new SaaS business into the world with a bang.

How Do You Promote SaaS as a New Business?

Marketing for SaaS startups presents two sets of circumstances that require special thought. One is that marketing for Software as a Service (SaaS) companies uses different strategies than more traditional businesses that sell physical products. The second is that promoting a brand new business works from a different playbook than an established business.

When you combine these two challenges and put them into the very competitive SaaS landscape, it takes a lot of planning and work to make sure the marketing for your new SaaS is a success. In this blog, we’ll talk about the best ways to deal with both these challenges, as well as explore a SaaS marketing strategy example to show how these plans can work in the real world.

How to Market a SaaS Product as a New Business

When you launch a brand new business, letting people know you exist can be the biggest struggle. So what are some of the best ways to raise brand awareness and get the ball rolling when you’re just getting started? Here are some pre-launch and newly launched business marketing ideas:

• Set up your social media, website, and email list before you launch. Key to being able to generate some hype about your business as soon as it goes live is to have a social media presence already. Equally important is to have a place where people can see more about what you will be offering and sign up to be notified when it goes live.
• Get influencers talking about it. You can do this by giving them early access to your platform so they can try it out, doing paid promotions, or setting up interviews on popular podcasts within the relevant industry.
• Offer early access perks. Getting people to know and talk about what you're doing is great, but giving them a way to buy it as soon as they’re excited is better. Offering a discounted rate or a free month of your service can be a good way to reward these early fans too.

How Do I Promote My SaaS Company?

Now that we’ve given you a few tips specific to marketing a new company, let’s focus on some tried and true SaaS marketing plays and how you might tweak them to work especially well for a brand new SaaS business. We’ll focus on content marketing, but you could apply the same ideas for social media strategies, advertising budgets, etc.

1. Identify Your Target Audience. Clearly define who you’re selling to before you do anything else. That way you can tailor your marketing strategy to this buyer persona every step of the way.
2. Define Your Goals. Identify what key performance indicators (KPI) are most relevant to you and build in a way to collect and analyze them. Having this concrete data from the start makes it much easier to know if your marketing strategy is working or if you need to revise.
3. Research Your Competition. Knowing what other successful companies in your field are doing is a great way to know what direction your own marketing should take. For example, DemandJump’s content marketing platform has you start with inputting your competitors to see how they’re performing before you begin building your own marketing plan.
4. Write and Distribute Your Content. There’s a lot that needs to be written before you can launch your product. Get it written and published so it can start reaching your audience. Following best practices for SEO will make you easy to find on search engines. But you can go beyond that and promote this content on the social media channels where your audience hangs out, and through email blasts too.
5. Monitor Your Performance. Use the KPIs you defined earlier to see how your audience is responding. Track what’s working well and what isn’t showing the results you’d hoped. Building brand awareness and marketing in general takes time, so you may need several weeks or even months to get a full picture of how your efforts are working.
6. Adapt Your Strategy. Once you have enough data to see some real trends, make adjustments to your marketing in areas that aren’t working well. A marketing strategy is never set it and forget it. Tracking and adjusting as things change is one of the most important parts of a long term strategy.

B2B SaaS Marketing Examples

A huge number of SaaS companies sell business to business (B2B), and this requires slightly different tactics than when selling business to consumer (B2C). We’re going to go through the six marketing strategy steps from above to take a closer look at the SaaS B2B marketing strategy for a hypothetical B2B company.

Our example company is Bookshop Sellout, a SaaS platform that connects businesses that have bulk secondhand or overstock books to sell (like libraries and bookstores with remainders) with businesses that sell used books. Here’s what their content marketing steps might look:

1. Identify Target Audience: Bookshop Sellout is targeting business owners who buy, sell, or lend books. Since the platform works best when the books being listed are in bulk, businesses that deal with a high volume of books are most desired.
2. Define Goals: Their goal is to gain 500 new email newsletter contacts and 100 free trial users by 30 days after launch.
3. Research Competition: Bookshop Sellout identified three similar companies and listed them in the DemandJump platform as competitors. Then, they used their content ranking topics as a jumping off point for written content.
4. Write and Distribute Content: They set a deadline for the website copy to be written, and created a plan to write one piece of content marketing per week, based on DemandJump’s insights. They then made a weekly content publishing calendar and promoted new content via LinkedIn and search engine ads.
5. Monitor Performance: Bookshop Sellout created a workflow that included tracking email signups, and free and paid platform users — the identified KPI for monitoring the first month.
6. Adapt Strategy: The Bookshop Sellout team schedules regular meetings with the leadership team to discuss KPI and plan adjustments to the marketing strategy as needed.

DemandJump: SaaS Marketing Made Easy

As a SaaS company ourselves, we know the challenges that come with trying to get your name out — especially as a new business. We designed DemandJump to take the mystery out of the content marketing side of things. We show you exactly what topics to write about to make sure you show up on page 1 of search engines! Don’t spin your wheels trying every marketing strategy out there, use a data-backed, content-based approach so your customers can find you.