How to structure your software go-to-market strategy using Smart Insights’ Opportunity Strategy Action framework

When planning to go live with a new product or service, it’s important to have a clear idea of how and when you will launch. This is particularly true for software marketing leaders, planning their go-to-market strategy in a growing and competitive marketplace. Software as a service (SaaS) spending worldwide is estimated to reach $10 trillion by 2030. When you also take into account that up to 45% of product launches are delayed for different reasons, the importance of having a clearly defined go-to-market strategy becomes even more stark. Delayed product launches may mean your software won't be received in the same way as it could have been at your anticipated on-time product launch. In some instances, missing the boat here could significantly impact your product's financial viability, despite costing the same amount to…

Churn is a growth and revenue killer but it’s not something that occurs when the customer is abandoning you.

It is a customer lifecycle problem, which should be tackled throughout your entire relationships with customers (and even before they start). In this post, we are going straight to the battlefield and explore low-cost, actionable ways to combat churn and boost the growth of your SaaS business.

[si_guide_block id="108833" title="Download our Free Resource –Improving Audience Engagement and Retention" description="Lifecycle Marketing Automation and Email marketing strategies to increase audience engagement."/]

1. Optimize your targeting

If you’re acquiring new customers at a fast pace but aren’t keeping them in the long run, your offer may not be the right solution for the people you’re targeting. Focus most of your marketing campaigns on your ideal customers - people who apriori look for the benefits that your product is able to give them. Study…

The best tools and softwares to help manage and optimize your SaaS project

You’ve launched a great service or a product, but it is not getting the due consideration that you’d hoped for after the release of your SaaS project. Why? Simply because no one knows about it. [si_guide_block id="5676" title="Download FREE Resource – Digital marketing plan template" description="Our popular marketing planning template built on the Smart Insights RACE planning system."/]

What is SaaS?

The SaaS concept as a business model has been around for quite long period of time but still very much growing and evolving in many directions. To explain it in a few words, SaaS means that users are not buying a software to install but instead sort of rent it out for a monthly or yearly fee. So basically Saas is a leased software owned and managed by one or more providers and not hosted on a SaaS provider’s…

A newly launched SaaS will be up against hefty competition and numerous potential customers who have seen it all before.

The owners and administrators of the service can get a quick leg up by following a few tried and true SaaS growth strategies. Compare your strategy against the checklist below, and you’ll be better prepared to achieve your marketing goals for launching your SaaS. [si_guide_block id="100244" title="Download Premium Resource – Product launch Playbook" description="Launch a product using RACE planning to structure your marketing activities. A marketing playbook defines the key messages, types of communications, best practices and optimisation techniques that should be used to maximise return-on-investment for different marketing objectives."/]

1. Get a Plan Together

Too many SaaS marketers try to wing it. They assume they’ll be able to form their plan as they go. They put out a campaign, check the analytics, test the…

Most of these companies are dominating online, but where is all their traffic coming from?

Digital marketers, web specialists, and online-business owners alike have been seeking out digital solutions to serve their marketing needs for a long time now. Today, I’ll be diving into how some of the top marketing SaaS companies drive online growth. Specifically, I’ll be examining their sources of traffic. What makes this study interesting is that it will challenge each company's product offering. Each of the 100 companies that I included falls into a certain category such as SEO, social media, content marketing, web analytics, etc. Are these companies “eating their own dog food” or do they talk a big game about the benefits of their product without leveraging the “benefits” themselves?

Let’s break down how the study was done

First, I set out to collect 100 websites that fall into the marketing SaaS company category. Using both Alexa and Similar Web…

Does your SaaS business measure these key metrics?

New research from Totango reveals the metrics that are being tracked by most Saas businesses. Their survey of over 300 SaaS businesses found that whilst the vast majority measure basic metrics like churn and web visitors, surprisingly few measure customer retention cost. Retention cost is important for SaaS businesses, because churn rates make a huge difference to long-term profitability. It's good to see 80% of SaaS businesses measuring churn, as this is crucial to long growth, as this post on ideas to reduce SaaS churn shows. Really that figure should be closer to 100%. If you're not measuring churn then your setting yourself up to fail. For reviewing benchmarks of actual performance there are some great compilations including these SaaS business metrics in an updated Google Sheet from Nathan Latka…

Preventing churn is key to improving revenue

For subscription-based businesses like SaaS companies, churn rate is a crucial metric that determines overall performance. Simply put, churn rate is the rate at which customers cut ties with your service during a given period. This percentage gives you a clear idea about your customer retention, which is an important factor defining a company’s success. Looking at the below chart you'll see that the lower the churn rate, the better your business is performing.

Importance of Churn Rate in SAAS

Churn rate is easily one of the most essential metrics when measuring the performance of SaaS businesses. Totango reports that the fastest-growing companies will reduce churn rate less than 5%. For SaaS companies, a lot of time and money is spent on acquiring customers. Since this investment pays off over time, the…