The digital landscape is an ever-changing and competitive place to be, especially for a digital industry such as SaaS. It relies on constant creativity and innovation to engage an audience and remain memorable amongst a vast sea of competitors. Luckily, there are many elements to an internet marketing strategy, so if you find that one thing isn’t working, you’ll surely find something else that will.

In this article, we’ll explore key SaaS digital marketing techniques that could help you boost traffic, improve engagement, and increase conversions.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

The value of organic traffic cannot be understated. Ultimately, the way most people will discover your brand is through a search engine, so it’s essential that your site is set up to be as search-friendly as possible. That’s where SEO comes in. SEO involves deliberate keyword targeting, ensuring meta data is as optimised as possible, and producing valuable pages targeting keywords. It also involves applying relevant structured data, having a user-friendly architecture, and ensuring important pages are linked internally across the site. Keeping on top of indexing issues in GSC will also help you pinpoint elements affecting your visibility.

Technical SEO is one of the most important aspects to consider for SaaS. If you want people to buy your software, you must ensure that your website is technically sound with no rendering issues, broken code, or poor mobile compatibility. A low-quality website will affect user trust in your product.

Content marketing

Expertly written content—whether that’s a blog, knowledge hub, or whitepaper—is an important way SaaS companies can position themselves as authorities in their field. It allows you to target high-volume keywords to improve your rankings and increase traffic. While this doesn’t necessarily lead directly to conversions, it does increase the chance of obtaining quality backlinks. Acquiring quality backlinks boosts brand awareness, bringing your product to the attention of those looking to convert.

This only works if your content is of high quality, relevant, and valuable to your users. Poorly written content generated just for keyword targeting purposes will be recognised as such by most search engines. This will have an impact on the content’s likelihood of ranking.

Content isn’t just about the written word either; videos are extremely effective for a variety of purposes. Whether as supplementary informational content, or as a method for advertising, videos have proven to increase engagement time, boost brand recognition, and are much more likely to be shared across social media.

Community building

Building a community is a great way to boost customer retention and organic growth in SaaS. Creating an environment where customers can share feedback on products, engage with each other, and share ideas not only makes for a better customer experience—it also helps reduce the costs associated with these for your brand. A good online community is where customers are actively engaged with the product through helpful discussion, user-generated content, or word-of-mouth recommendations. This can reduce user churn, lower acquisition costs, and reduce pressure on product support as customers have a community to direct their queries to.

Email

Email marketing is a low-cost but effective tactic for generating leads, boosting sales, and increasing brand loyalty. It usually involves sending promotional emails to customers or subscribers offering special discounts or rewards.

For existing customers, it can more easily draw their attention to newer products or updates that might be relevant to them. For potential customers, this can encourage them to convert long after they first discover your brand.

Social media

A huge part of community building is social media. If users aren’t finding brands on search, they are most likely discovering them on social platforms. A solid social media strategy involves generating engaging content on a regular basis. It can help to establish who your audience is and learn about the kind of social media posts they interact with. It may be that your audience enjoys sharing amusing videos, loves commenting on amazing graphics, or likes to tag their friends in informative articles. Once you gain some traction, your brand will be more visible to your users in the future, increasing brand awareness and potential for conversion.

Communication platforms

When it comes to community building, communication platforms such as Slack and Discord are great for SaaS in particular, but for different reasons:

Slack is great for professional settings. For SaaS in the B2B arena, Slack can provide a highly structured communication solution and is commonly used across businesses.

Discord is a more informal setting. It’s great for real-time engagement within communities such as developers, gaming SaaS, or the tech-savvy. It offers a variety of community-building features such as voice and video, servers, and flexible moderation.

These platforms are most helpful for providing user support, product feedback, and even ideas for product development.

Digital PR

Digital PR is another email-related marketing tactic, but this involves targeting journalists, influencers, bloggers, and other content creators in order to increase brand awareness and boost reputation online. This might involve getting journalists to publish content about, or with reference to, your products or services. It could also be sending out review links to media outlets and influencers or circulating press releases with data or news on your industry.

Free Trials, Demos & Discounts

Software can be expensive, and it’s not the type of thing customers will purchase on impulse. Offering free trials and demos will boost your chances of getting a conversion as it allows customers to ‘sample’ the product first. This also means there will be fewer incidences of refund requests and other negative feedback. Discounts such as seasonal reductions, reduced upgrades, or software bundles can also entice customers who are weighing up their options to go with your product.

Customer Service

When you’re just starting out in the SaaS industry, you’ll likely encounter a lot of competition. The advantage that you have early on with fewer customers is the ability to provide excellent customer service, and this is the key to maintaining customer loyalty. Most customers will not fault you for minor installation problems, software bugs, or UX issues if you are there to help solve the problem. Ensure that contact information is easy to find on your website with a strong CTA in the header and/or footer. Additionally, ensure you can respond to customers within a reasonable timeframe.

Summary

It’s important to remember that not all SaaS digital marketing tactics will be right for your brand. Some will work better than others, but learning from where things haven’t worked compared with where they have will be the key to developing the most successful campaign for your brand.