Maximizing your SaaS marketing budget can improve your ROI. You can either do this by yourself or hire a reputable SaaS marketing consultant. Either way, this post discusses the best strategies for maximizing your marketing funds as a SaaS company.
Read on!
1. Connect Marketing Metrics to Your Budget
The business stage is a significant factor that influences the goal of marketing activities. At an early business stage, a marketing activity aims to attract new customers and subscribers. On the other hand, the marketing activity of an established business focuses on client retention. As a business owner, identifying the best marketing activities that will generate significant leads goes a long way in maximizing budget. It ensures that funds are spent appropriately on the right channels and invested in high-performing areas.
Understanding the best marketing metrics and connecting them to your budget helps to improve business growth.
Defining a SaaS goal aims at improving business growth. The type of goal determines the necessary marketing strategies, tactics, and budget. Common SaaS goals include;
- Increasing the freemium rate to users by about 40%
- Expanding marketing pipeline by 10% monthly
- Improving brand equity and presence
- Boosting sales to current customers
- Penetrating a new market
Marketing Tip: Constantly review your marketing metrics and budget. To get the best out of your marketing goals and also improve ROI, stay committed and adjust allocations for high-performing metrics.
2. Constantly Review the ROI for Every Marketing Goal and Make Necessary Adjustments
Reviewing each marketing activity helps your business achieve its marketing goals. Although budget allocation for SaaS companies requires strategic planning, there should be room for adjustments. Reviewing marketing activities includes asking questions such as;
- Are trade shows necessary for generating and converting leads? Will the funds for trade shows yield better results if spent on webinars or PPC?
- Is the target audience younger or older people? Does the audience use social media? LinkedIn and Quora are great tools for B2B SaaS companies. They can improve promotions, direct communications, and even help reach target audiences.
Marketing Tip: Make preparations for quick and easy shifts in your marketing activities. Avoid being preoccupied or becoming attached to a part of your marketing budget that may require future changes. Constantly keep in mind that marketing is not limited to a one-channel activity.
3. Prepare Yourself for the Long Haul
It is essential to use a calendar to line your marketing budget and product business plan side-by-side. Always create estimates and constantly check if you need to make adjustments to the actual spend. Across the year, there are peculiarities in marketing growth for SaaS companies, including;
- Strong growth for Q1 and Q2
- Slower growth in Q3 due to summer vacations
- Q4 also has a slow growth due to the winter holidays
Marketing Tip: Although there may be no plans for vacations, a marketing team needs to celebrate significant milestones by taking mini-breaks. If the budget doesn’t accommodate mini-breaks, late morning work can be pretty rewarding.
4. Involve Your Customers
Involving customers is a marketing strategy that not only maintains the budget but also improves growth. How can you motivate people to become brand ambassadors and market your product? Taking DropBox as an example, the organization used incentives to get customers involved. The strategy offered additional free storage for customers whenever their friends or colleagues sign up. You can implement this strategy for referrals. Your incentives could be a free audit, widget, downloadable material, or anything that doesn’t require a significant investment but is of immense value to your customers.
Furthermore, you can increase cross-promotion by asking clients for testimonials and adding them to your website and marketing materials. Also, happy customers will be glad to have your logo on your website promoting their businesses.
Marketing Tip: You can convert new customers from your existing customer base. All you need to do is engage your customers and offer them valuable incentives to generate new leads from their friends and colleagues.
5. Create a formidable team
The first step in creating a formidable marketing team is ensuring that all team members understand the SaaS business tactics and target audience. They should also be able to generate and execute an effective marketing strategy.
It is common knowledge that labor is the most expensive factor of production on a budget. However, hiring experienced sales and marketing team members shouldn’t be costly. When creating a budget, consider the cost of labor by asking questions such as;
- Is it more profitable to hire local full-time employees or outsource the marketing strategy to an agency?
- There are startup marketing agencies that can grow with your company. Does it make business sense to hire them?
Marketing Tip: You can create a formidable marketing team by hiring based on referrals. Afterward, encourage your new team members to learn and grow consistently. You can also host seminars that improve your team’s expertise.
Conclusively
The results you get from your marketing budget are only as good as the strategy in place. You can maximize your budget by defining your business goals, reviewing marketing activities, and involving your customers.
