“Software as a service,” or SaaS, is very popular in the business world.
According to one study, the average number of SaaS applications used by organizations has doubled since 2015, from eight to 16. Not only that, the statistics also show that the global workload of SaaS organizations reached 1.318 billion yuan in 2018 and is expected to grow to 2.43 billion yuan by 2021.
This clearly shows that SaaS marketing is on the rise in 2021. In fact, not only in 2021, but also in the past few years has been an upward trend. Therefore, this article will discuss the major trends in SaaS product marketing to provide strategies for SaaS product marketing success.
Before we get to the main content, let’s look at some of the essentials of SaaS marketing that may be essential for all marketers and businesses.
What is product marketing?
For large peers and some marketing personnel, when it comes to product marketing, they may ask “can’t product marketing be directly left to the marketing team of the enterprise? Can t you market it directly with companies? The answer, of course, is no. This shows the difference between the general marketing team and the product marketing team.
General Marketing team
A typical marketing team will manage brand publicity materials, public relations channels, events such as conferences and presentations, website content, and other things, focusing on the following.
- Define “Who are we? What do we do?” Information such as;
- Identify and implement the best way to communicate information to target customers;
- Let target customers visit the enterprise website or products through information reception.
The work may seem coherent, but the implementation is far more complicated and cumbersome than it sounds.
Product Marketing Team
For product marketing, it is necessary to comprehensively comb and master the detailed information of the product, market and competition. Specific attention should be paid to the following:
- Fully understand the technical details of the product;
- Understand (and predict) industry trends;
- Understand competitors’ product information, and make comparative analysis with their own products;
- Identify the core strengths of your product and deliver them in a concise and effective way.
As you can see, product marketing teams deal with more detailed and refined marketing content than the average marketing team. They manage product and sales materials, write white papers and product feature announcements, train sales teams and partners, and publicize the core benefits of the product.
Success in SaaS product marketing
The SaaS industry is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.22% from 2019 to 2023, and the market size will grow by 386.1 billion yuan from 2019 to 2023. Let’s take a look at the major top SaaS product marketing trends. To provide strategic reference for the success of SaaS product marketing.
1. The popularity of characteristic marketing
SaaS solutions continue to evolve, and companies continue to add new features, tools, and plug-ins to their applications and products. Functional marketing is where SaaS companies create parallel products that add value to the same users. Even though these products are separate from the company’s main products.
SaaS enterprises are constantly gathering feedback from existing customers to improve their existing products. In addition, the addition of new features will create more useful content and opportunities for the site. We all know that fresh content can enhance SEO and generate more traffic to a site, which in turn helps to get more customers.
The main advantages of 2021 feature marketing are:
- Attract new customers;
- Diversifying into different market segments;
- Converting free trial users to paying users with new version upgrades;
- Retain existing customers with new features.
2. Hyper-personalized marketing campaigns using ARTIFICIAL intelligence and machine learning
Statistics show that by the end of 2023, the ARTIFICIAL Intelligence as a service (AIaaS) market will reach 38.3-44.7 billion yuan. Many SaaS companies are leveraging AI to enhance the user experience, with chatbots in particular. Research shows that 80% of B2B marketers predict that AI could revolutionize the industry by 2020.
AI and ML in SaaS marketing can help with data-driven marketing campaigns and hyper-personalized campaigns that are highly user-centric. Artificial intelligence and machine learning harness behavioral and real-time data to master information that is highly relevant to the user. Ai technology can also process large amounts of data. When ai is combined with machine learning, they can optimize various marketing campaigns to ensure the best ROI.
3. Product or platform splitting strategy
In the near future, platform splitting strategies are likely to enhance and improve the transformation of SaaS companies.
The implementation of SaaS companies shows that not all features on the product are appropriate for every potential customer and their individual needs. This is also the main basis of the product separation strategy.
Through product splits, companies break their products into smaller, more specific parts. These specific sections help solve specific problems for users. In this way, it also helps companies optimize and improve the user experience.
4. User-centered brand building
In 2021, the motto for SaaS companies is to create a brand that aims to build relationships with potential customers, which will be accomplished by creating user-centric stories. This means that brands will create content that users really care about, which is a very important source of foundation for SaaS branding.
Large SaaS companies place a lot of emphasis on branding, which is to create a unique brand identity that helps them stand out from the crowd.
5. Customer retention optimization
The increasing use of social media software makes interacting with customers on social media one of the best ways to enhance the customer experience.
Customer acquisition is a difficult task in SaaS business, and customer retention is more difficult than customer acquisition. Improving the customer experience will increase customer retention and satisfaction and encourage customers to pay more, which also means more revenue for the business.
6. Video marketing
Online video has become one of the major components of Chinese consumers’ Internet traffic, while plain text content is slowly losing relevance and video content is the new “hot” in marketing. Video marketing can not be ignored in any marketing field or activities. Marketers and business managers, especially SaaS companies, should consider investing heavily in video marketing.
7. Build brand experience
Customer needs are constantly evolving and customers are looking for core value propositions that drive performance and results. Brand positioning and messaging are becoming critical in the SaaS market, especially in terms of customer acquisition and retention. Customers are looking for a brand experience that is distinctive and engaging, and that creates a real, natural emotional connection with the user.
conclusion
The above are the main trends in SaaS product marketing, and I hope to help you develop your product marketing strategy.
At the same time, pay attention to the nature of their own products, implement strategies in the right way, and keep an eye on market changes and other SaaS product marketing trends in the near future.
The field is dynamic and constantly evolving, so keep a clear mind and awareness of all possibilities.