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Four B2B Marketing Strategies for SaaS Companies

To market your SaaS products to a targeted audience, here are a few of the best SaaS marketing strategies to implement in 2021.

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SaaS companies in India have made waves in the global market over the last few years. The focus on digitization has provided a huge boost to the SaaS ecosystem. With cloud usage soaring and companies going digital to drive remote working and virtual innovation, the SaaS ecosystem has been resilient. According to a recent Nasscom report, revenues for Indian SaaS companies total approximately $3.55 billion and are expected to grow to $20-25 billion in the next few years.

The SaaS industry is more competitive than ever before, meaning SaaS companies must differentiate themselves from competitors to stand out in a crowded industry. That’s where SaaS marketing strategies come in.

With many new SaaS tools, the solution being provided is new and innovative – meaning that customers must be educated on a problem to create demand. This is different from convincing someone to buy a physical product, such as a pair of shoes. This is why companies must rely on proven SaaS marketing strategies to drive sign-ups and conversions.

The goal of product marketing is to communicate the benefits of the product to your target audience identified through persona building. A closer look at these three marketing buzzwords – product, benefits, audience – will tell you what this function means for your own organization.

To market your SaaS products to a targeted audience, here are a few of the best SaaS marketing strategies to implement in 2021.

1. Start your product marketing team 

From the moment you decide to start a business, you are involved with product marketing. There is always a proxy product marketer – if you will. Early on, it is most likely a co-founder or founding team member, and don’t be surprised if it is the person leading the product or technology function. When organizations began to grow, many founders come to the realization that a product marketing team is essential in order to drive demand and awareness of their product.

There are some tell-tale signs that indicate the need to hire your first product marketer. The key driver of these signs is scale – ie. your organization’s pseudo product marketer starts burning out and can no longer be part of every pitch or your product’s collateral across your website and sales content show inconsistent messaging. Once product+market fit is detected, it is a good rule of thumb to have a dedicated business unit to own product marketing.

2. Hire your product marketers 

The first step after deciding to have a dedicated team is to get that team staffed properly. In light of the highly cross-functional nature of the role, I would recommend hiring hybrids – a combination of a product marketer and a growth marketer. A product marketer and a content marketer could also be combined.

Product Marketers need to be learners all the time – about prospects, customers, products, market changes. Maintaining healthy relationships with a diverse set of individuals is imperative for them as they work across different functions such as sales, marketing, product, sales enablement, engineering, customers, prospects, influencers, and partners. Finally, PMMs need to love your brand, your company, and your product – only then will you get great results

3. Scale your product marketing team

You may need to scale your team for a varied number of reasons: a product has steadily become more complex with an ever-increasing number of features, and you must weave these together into a cohesive pitch that can withstand the test of time,you have to launch a new product, expand to additional geographies or need to focusing on a different customer segment.

Once you are clear about the reasons you have to decide between hiring a team of full-stack product marketers or a team of specialists. Specialists could be focused on competitive intelligence, GTM tactics, enablement etc. There is no simple approach to hiring full-stack PMMs versus specialists. All you need to do is, make a conscious choice and not expect specialist work from a generalist or vice versa.

4. Work on strengthening your positioning statement

Positioning is knowing what problem we are solving for the customer, how we are better, and how we differentiate ourselves. It is worth noting that you need a version that resonates with your buyers, and a modified version – as opposed to a radically different one – that resonates with your users. Positioning should also be reviewed frequently. As competition increases, so does the need to revisit positioning faster. More me-too products are harder to differentiate, and therefore they often need to be repositioned more frequently.

Winning in the Digital Era

Riding on the wave of digitization and the need to scale, SaaS businesses are realizing that establishing the product marketing function should no longer be an afterthought. As the Indian SaaS industry grows, having an effective product marketing strategy becomes critical to capture a larger portion of the global market.

(The author is Vice President of Product Marketing at Whatfix and the views expressed in this article are her own)

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