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SaaS Strategy Playbook Series: Post Launch – Part 1 (4/6)

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SaaS Strategy Playbook Series: Post Launch – Part 1 (4/6)

Continuing with our series of blogs on the SaaS playbook. Now we come to the last part of this playbook which is “Post Launch”. But wait, this part is not that simple to understand and needs some detailing. This section requires the most strategic approach in taking your product to the consumer. This part majorly comprises of following areas:

#1 Marketing Mix

#2 Churn Management

#3 Partnership Ecosystem

#4 Geographical Expansion

 

SaaS 4-1

In this blog, we will discuss about Marketing Mix model since it is quite detailed and consists of different levers.

 

6 Levers of SaaS Marketing Mix:

1. Content Strategy

Inbound Marketing

  • Imperative for new customer acquisition in a digital environment
  • Pull strategy with useful information instead of traditional outbound calls and pushed ads
  • Consists of a mix of website content, blog content, external publishing, and emails

Customer Success:

  • Imperative for customer retention and monetization in SaaS landscape as metrics are centered around retaining and upselling& cross-selling to existing customers
  • The goal of customer success is to aid customers to achieve their goals with your product

 

2. Content Distribution

Social Media:

  • Post relevant content across identified social media platforms at different times of the day
  • Share relevant content posted by peers over social media platforms
  • Grammarly combines eye-catching images to entertain their 7 million followers

Directories:

  • List your application in SaaS directories to get referral traffic and attract qualified leads
  • Popular directories include- Trustpilot, GetApp, AlternativeTo, Capterra, G2 Crowd
  • Liveplan was listed on all the big SaaS directories to get websites linking to its website and receive initial feedback

Forum:

  • Actively engage in online communities to create awareness, authority, and thought leadership
  • Popular SaaS Forums include Reddit, Growth Hackers, Product Hunt, SaaS Community
  • OrangeDox created a variety of forum posts basis customer need that improved its SEO rankings and website traffic

Social Advertisements:

  • Search and social signals for paid advertisement helps in improving SEO rankings- create action triggered campaigns
  • Place the ad at relevant places and wait for 3 months to get the results
  • Rework paid ads strategy after analyzing results of last 3 months
  • Build fire utilized paid ads and SEO to grow into 7-digit ARR in 3 years

Remarketing and Retargeting

  • Follow your website visitors around the web with display advertisements to develop brand recall & remind
  • Don’t follow the visitors indefinitely- 15 days should be the maximum time to follow them on the web
  • AdEspresso does this right and helps its customers to do it right too

Affiliate Placements & Content Suggestions

  • Share your product with solutions such as Outbrain which displays “Suggested Posts” on the page with relevant and similar content
  • Shopify’s huge success is also credited to its affiliate program- it partners with content creators, influencers and entrepreneurs, and e-commerce training course providers

 

3. Product Optimization

Free Trials

  • Optimized free trial for 14 to 30 days, is the most preferred tool to close SaaS marketing leads
  • SaaS companies should:

    • Provide complete access to the premium product for trials
    • Provide effective customer support
    • Display customer success messages in-app
    • Send email campaigns to successfully close the lead achieved through free trials
  • GetAccept, an AI-powered SaaS product for sales teams, witnessed Free Trials as a giant sales enabler. It initially offered 14 days trials with full-fledged customer support that helped in the transition of their free trial leads into paying customers

Customer Onboarding

  • A strong customer onboarding strategy should be to educate customers on how to be successful with your product application
  • Widely used tools for smooth customer onboarding:

    • Inspectlet- To view the customer screen and understand their application areas
  • as well as their confusion areas

    • Heap Analytics- To analyze drop off areas in the customer journey
    • Appcues- To implement a smooth onboarding process
  • Slack displays in-app messages and tips to the users at the right place and its customers simply love that feature

Monetization: Up-selling and Cross-selling

  • Optimize monetization strategy with strategic content marketing
  • Widely used tools for up-selling and cross-selling:

    • Emails: Crisp and Relevant messages sent at regulated time intervals
    • In-app: Display how your customer can achieve extra value from your product
  • with additional services/features
  • Salesforce uses the same up-selling and cross-selling model- With the increase in their needs, low-level users quickly understand that they can achieve more with an upgrade.

 

4. Offline Market Traction

Influencer Status

  • Develop influencer status for the company to create a credible brand image
  • Invest in:

    • Speaking Engagements: Events like Zinnov Confluence, Nasscom’s NPC, SaaSBoomi events, Round Tables
    • Authorship: Many successful SaaS companies are investing in authoring books to enhance their reach and build strong credibility
  • Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has been a major influencer in the community through his powerful speeches and widely acclaimed book- Behind the Cloud which is a highly recommended book for all SaaS Founders/ Players

Trade Shows

  • Select events where your target segment are likely to be attendees
  • Ways to increase booth traffic at the trade fairs:

    • Interactive offerings: Games, Trivia and other fun offerings
    • Giveaways
    • Personalized social media interaction: Land onto event hashtag page and communicate with the target attendees
    • Live Blogging: Use content strategy tactics to create live blogs
  • Zoho states that 92% of the event attendees are looking for new products and services. Therefore Zoho has devised strong strategies from pre-event to post-event which help them close various leads

 The last 2 levers and others aspects of the Post Launch part we will discuss in our next blog.

Please find below the link to the earlier blogs in this series:

Product Development: https://community.nasscom.in/communities/productstartups/saas-strategy-playbook-series-product-development-14

Launch Preparation: https://community.nasscom.in/communities/productstartups/saas-strategy-playbook-series-launch-preparation-24

Product Launch: https://community.nasscom.in/communities/productstartups/saas-strategy-playbook-series-product-launch-34

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