Congratulations! You’ve made it through all the crazy steps of creating your company! You came up with an innovative concept, chose a name, built a great team, and now you’re at the crucial stage: how do I put my SaaS in the spotlight? Marketing automation is one of the levers to make that happen, and we’ll look together at how—using a concrete campaign example.
1/ Make your SaaS known through inbound marketing
Nowadays, inbound marketing is the trend! A practice that has proven itself, especially among SaaS publishers. The idea? I give my target a clear, concise answer to their problem through so-called “premium” and free content. That way, you can ask for their personal data in return and start nurturing the relationship.
This is where it all starts for driving your company forward—you need to be visible and have everyone talking about you! The value of this practice is to collect high-quality data, establish your expertise in your area of choice, and become legitimate in the eyes of your prospects. And yes… they’ll naturally turn to you when they’re ready to convert into users.
To do that, let’s start by attracting our prospects. In the SaaS world, one of the best-performing types of content is the whitepaper or ebooks, for example. If you go with this option, I strongly recommend being precise and keeping your promise by giving advice that readers can easily put into practice. That’s how you capture attention and—most importantly—create a sense of trust over time.
Another successful example of high-value content is the webinar format! It has the advantage of letting you interact directly with the audience, create live polls, and thus collect even more high-quality data. At Webmecanik, it’s one of our favorite formats, because we can address the challenges of our future clients directly and without beating around the bush.
Finally, if your business model allows it, don’t hesitate to offer free trials. This is a first step to introduce your offering and show your target audience the value of using your product. It’s a fast and effective trigger for collecting data at scale. You can then leverage it with your marketing automation tool!
2/ What you need: the tools and a few ideas for your first pieces of content
To set up and leverage your inbound marketing strategy, you’ll need tools to process and—most importantly—capitalize on the data you’ve collected. Marketing automation is the essential tool that will let you both store, feed, and maintain a high-quality database.
The direct benefit is being able to identify prospects, send the right message to the right person—and above all at the right time! No prospect is ignored anymore, and the user experience will only be strengthened. Indeed, with this tool you can act on the four essential phases of your conversion funnel: ATTRACT, CONVERT, TRANSFORM, and RETAIN.
Today, let’s look at the first step: “ATTRACT”, using a concrete content case. For example, I’m a company and I offer a SaaS software product that revolutionizes how companies process candidate profiles. To attract my target, I offer a webinar with a catchy title, and I promote it on LinkedIn, for instance. The goal is to bring prospects to your website, have them register, and let them discover your solution.
Webinar requires, depending on your budget and preferences, several platforms are available such as GoToWebinar or Livestorm. You can easily connect these platforms to your Webmecanik Automation software using the connectors. If it’s a sensitive topic for you, don’t worry—our trainers will support you in implementing it?!
3/ An informational campaign to your contacts—let’s go!
What campaign to inform your contacts? At this stage, you probably don’t have many—if any—email addresses to manage, so I encourage you to use the power of your marketing automation tool to attract and target as many people as possible. At Webmecanik, we call them anonymous visitors!
To recap: you created a LinkedIn post with a link to your website, where you included a registration form for your great webinar. There are several places where you can integrate this form, and they are all possible and recommended. For example, a landing page—and why not a pop-in that appears when a visitor is about to leave your website.
With the Webmecanik Automation software, you capture anonymous visitors via tracking—and yes, at last, no prospect is ignored!
Here’s an example of a scenario in images:
As you can see, the source of the campaign is anonymous visitors grouped into a segment. They will enter the campaign when they submit the form, once the contact details have been recorded. Then, the contacts will receive an email and a follow-up reminder to take part in your webinar.
Note: the best practice is to collect consent from your contacts, so think about opt-in as soon as they enter the database, then use scoring to evaluate how engaged your contacts are. These are tools available in your marketing automation software.
In this campaign example that applies to any type of SaaS, I invite you to manage marketing pressure by giving your contacts some time before you follow up with a second invitation email for your webinar.
The final goal of your scenario is to keep nurturing the relationship with your contacts—remember your post-webinar campaign!
4/ The next step… think conversion!
That’s it… the webinar is over. You had lots of registrations: attendees or contacts who couldn’t make it. So it’s important to keep nurturing these interested contacts. Now is the time to think about converting those leads into subscribers! You’ll learn all the secrets of this new step with Léa Igier in her next article, where you’ll find a concrete, easy-to-implement campaign—sounds interesting, doesn’t it?!
For my part, I suggest that you discover the replay of my Live session below. You’ll see in detail the scenario presented today! I’ll also share all my tips for implementing YOUR marketing automation strategy to get into the spotlight. A valuable time of discussion around your challenges—one to which I’ll respond with my expertise from all the clients I’ve been able to support. See you soon!
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