Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is only one of many industries that have experienced sales setbacks during the global pandemic. However, as an industry that relies on a continuous payment stream rather than one-time purchases, it’s been especially vulnerable.
Some clients struggling with their own financials will have churned and ended relationships with your company to save on costs—cutting into your revenue streams. At the same time, signing a new client to any sort of long-term commitment in an uncertain environment is tough. Few folks are willing to make commitments when there’s no telling what the next month will bring.
Your sales team will continue to do their best, remain empathetic, and position your service as worthwhile. But marketing for SaaS companies can do just as much to compensate for lost sales opportunities. You can get prospects talking to your salesforce with the right marketing techniques for their present pain points. With focused effort, SaaS marketing can start to build up your sales pipeline and restore momentum. Here’s how.
If sales are down, so is revenue. It makes sense to tighten the belt just a bit on your budget. This way, you’ve compensated (at least in part) for lost sales revenue until business gets back to normal.
But reducing expenses doesn’t necessarily equal less total marketing for SaaS companies. It just means shifting budget towards more efficient, less costly channels. Fortunately, your business already lives in a digital space—which contains the most cost-effective marketing channels of all. This is where your users operate, so take advantage.
Expensive traditional marketing and advertising channels like TV, radio, and print ads (perhaps in tech magazines) cost exorbitant sums and make it notoriously difficult to track ROI. Consider trading for digital alternatives, such as Google ads services, search banners, promoted content on social media, and email newsletter ads from industry publications.
A typical e-newsletter ad might charge $25-50 CPM (cost per “mille,” or per 1000 impressions) for a daily edition. A magazine ad, by comparison, could cost $500 to $20,000. The inside front cover of some national publications would even cost as much as $500,000! Digital publications are much easier to target and more cost-efficient.
As a side benefit, banner ads are clickable, and thus trackable. You can precisely measure how many leads came from the industry source, which nails down your ROI. And even if you got 10,000 impressions, you’d still only pay $250-$500. Try contacting industry publications to request pricing for web banner ads or e-newsletter sponsorships. Make sure to ask about the traffic they receive and the size of their distribution lists to evaluate the cost-to-benefit ratio of the opportunity.