Martech: 5 Trends to Look Out in the SaaS Sector

Marketing is vital to the success of any business. It doesn't matter what industry you operate in or what it is specifically that your business does, you will need a strong marketing strategy in order to cut through the noise. The right marketing strategy can not only be the difference between success and failure for a business but, more than that, a business can live or die by the quality of their marketing efforts.

The software as a service sector has grown considerably over the last couple of years. As a result, there are now more businesses than ever before competing with one another for market share. Succeeding in this sector, therefore, requires an awareness of the marketing strategies that your competitors are likely to be using. Here are the most important martech trends that SaaS businesses need to be aware of.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a strategy used by businesses across virtually all sectors today. Content marketing, as the name implies, involves the creation of online content with the purpose of attracting new visitors to your website and, therefore, your business. One of the key advantages of content marketing over other forms of marketing is that content marketing has a compounding power, enhancing the effectiveness of other marketing methods that you use. This means that your content marketing can enhance the value of other forms of marketing.

Blogging

High-quality content will keep people coming back to your website on a regular basis. This is why many businesses in the software-as-a-service sector have decided to add blogs to their website. These blogs provide them with an opportunity to publish high-quality content that the audience will be interested in. These blog articles then bring new visitors to the website and, therefore, expose them to the business.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing is a tried and tested method marketing any business. It might seem somewhat outdated compared to the more modern marketing methods on this list, but while email marketing might be an old tactic it is still a very effective one. Email marketing is an effective way of keeping your customers up to date with the latest developments in your business. A well-written newsletter is one of the best marketing tools there is but writing the kind of newsletter that attracts attention is easier said than done.

If you aren't confident in your own ability to write a compelling newsletter, there are a number of email marketing services that you can turn to. Of course, in order for your email marketing to be useful, you will need a list of addresses that you can send your emails to. You can gather email addresses through your website; it is a good idea to offer customers the option of signing up if they purchase something through your website.

Free Trials

Offering free trials or services is becoming a very popular way of promoting them within the SaaS sector. It's easy to see the benefits of a free trial; the customer gets to try out your service without having to commit any money to it. Meanwhile, the business doesn't incur any, or at least only negligible, extra costs.

When they are used correctly, free trials are one of the most effective lead generation tools you have. No amount of salesmanship or promotion is going to be as effective as actually putting the service in the hands of a customer for them to try out. A customer may not believe you when you tell them that yours is the best software available, but they will certainly believe their experience if it tells them that your software is the best they've ever used.

SEO

Without search engine optimization, businesses are destined to languish in obscurity online. The majority of Internet traffic is driven by search engines, and the first handful of results on a search engine results page will receive the vast majority of the traffic generated.

With a growing number of SaaS businesses competing with one another, search engine optimization has become an even more important consideration. It's no good if your business website only appears when someone searches for your business name; you want your website to be top of the page when a potential customer searches for a problem that they need solving.

SEO is intimately linked to content marketing. If you are able to produce lots of high-quality content for your business's blog, you will find that lots of other websites begin to link back to yours. When high-quality websites backlink to yours, it boosts your SEO score.

The SaaS sector is a rapidly evolving sector in every sense. As our technological capabilities improve, businesses are able to offer SaaS solutions that wouldn’t have been possible a few years ago. Naturally, the marketing techniques that SaaS businesses use is evolving as well. There are plenty of marketing options available to SaaS businesses, but the above five methods are the ones to watch this year.