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The Ultimate Guide to B2B SaaS Marketing Team Structure: A Proven Framework for Success
October 14, 2024
SaaS marketing is different from marketing a physical product. Agree?
All you have is a stack of benefits your prospects would love, yet there is nothing physical to show.
From selling an intangible product and setting it up for your customer to providing systematic service and customer support, you have much to handle when marketing SaaS products.
Does that mean SaaS is impossible to sell? Never!
A solid and intelligent enterprise SaaS marketing strategy can set your business up for tremendous success.
So, are you ready to create a perfect enterprise SaaS marketing strategy? If yes, this guide will help you.
Stay tuned!
SaaS enterprise marketing is a process where SaaS providers target and focus their promotional and advertorial efforts primarily on enterprise businesses.
Most large businesses use multiple SaaS platforms for a variety of purposes, such as:
1. Marketing management
2. Human resource management
3. Finance management
4. Advertisement
5. Data collection and analytics
SaaS platforms benefit businesses by reducing the cost of setting up and maintaining in-house technology infrastructure.
So, it is not surprising why companies want to use them.
When creating your enterprise SaaS marketing strategy, you must understand that it differs from small-medium business (SMB) marketing. There are several differences between enterprise SaaS marketing and SMB SaaS marketing. Here are a few of them:
Simply said, targeting enterprise customers is immensely beneficial for a SaaS business. Here’s why.
This is the most obvious reason a SaaS business targets enterprise businesses. Unlike smaller businesses, enterprise businesses have larger requirements. Their technological needs are often expansive.
In addition, enterprise businesses also have larger budgets to spend. Such huge budgets allow them to buy premium software solutions, provided they can solve their problems.
You have better chances to sell them high-ticket products and platforms, which will obviously bring you more profits. You can also profit if you have a great product that can add value to the enterprise business.
Enterprise businesses tend to make purchase decisions for a long time because they invest a lot of time considering the product, evaluating it, and integrating it into their systems. Hence, they don't change the products unless necessary.
In short, most enterprise businesses create long-term relationships with their vendors, which means you can upsell them more services and add-ons. Moreover, delivering impeccable customer service and product support can convert them into brand advocates.
Working with an enterprise business can bring you more growth opportunities.
When you can cater to a large organization's dynamic and challenging needs, you can use the experience to sell your SaaS products to similar clients.
The success you have already had with an enterprise business can be leveraged and replicated with other similar businesses as well.
Repeat the same with enough prospects, and you are always in for impressive results.
When a leading enterprise business works with you, it confirms that you provide a stellar, dependable SaaS platform. Most enterprise businesses have extensive requirements and expectations, and working with them makes your brand seem more credible.
Such an image can improve your sales, as many similar businesses may want to use your services as they know your product works for others.
This will demonstrate your brand as more reliable, and sales will follow.
These are some of the biggest advantages of working with an enterprise business for your business from a growth perspective.
But it is a harder job to do. There are several challenges, and you must navigate them to establish yourself as a dependable B2B SaaS brand for enterprise organizations.
The enterprise sales process has numerous challenges it needs to overcome. It is never easy or simple.
Understanding these challenges and devising adequate strategies to face them is one of the crucial aspects of all enterprise SaaS marketing strategies.
The following are the biggest hurdles you need to tackle:
The primary concern of every enterprise marketer is the cost involved in outbound marketing.
Acquiring an enterprise client takes significantly more time and effort than acquiring an SMB client. Enterprise digital marketing is a more hands-on approach where you must nurture each lead from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel.
You must stay with your prospects throughout the journey, which is costly. Adequate resources are a must at your disposal when you enter enterprise sales to enable you to meet these challenges and keep your business afloat.
Enterprise sales don't happen overnight. It can take months to close a sale. It is not unheard of for enterprise sales to take a year or more.
All this points to a considerable challenge—your revenue will be delayed.
And you need to keep this in mind when you plan your marketing efforts and create the strategy.
As the sales cycle is painfully long, it is also important that you display patience, discipline, and motivation to close each of the leads you work with.
After you decide to chase a lead and start nurturing it for a while, it would be impossible for you to abandon it. You have already invested time and effort; it is futile to let it go.
Hence, you should work smartly to ensure smooth cash flow between sales and keep nurturing your leads to conversion.
Enterprise sales have a lot of ups and downs during the journey. You need to prepare yourself for it. One deal may go exceptionally well one day, and it can fall the wayside in another.
There is no guarantee that you will close a sale, even after you invest time and effort to nurture the lead. With many moving parts and decision-makers in an enterprise deal, it is way too complex for smooth navigation.
That's how enterprise sales have always been.
Understanding this and moving forward optimistically is the only course of action.
Another challenge you may encounter is the lack of proper information about where your lead is on their journey. There are multiple decision-makers and influencers in an enterprise. Hence, they would have a different understanding of what you offer them.
Not all of them may know about their issue and the problem they are trying to solve with a SaaS platform.
With these many elements at play, it would be hard for you to understand what is happening. Marketers will also find it hard to make the right move without proper information.
When you are creating your enterprise marketing strategy, always have these challenges in mind. It helps you craft your plan to increase sales and revenue and effectively address these challenges.
An enterprise SaaS marketing strategy needs to encompass everything from understanding your audience to measuring your strategy's performance and many phases in between.
The following will help you create an impeccable enterprise SaaS marketing strategy:
The audience is the foundation of every marketing strategy, and it stays the same with your enterprise SaaS marketing strategy.
Start developing the strategy by defining your target audience. You may define your target audience as a business with a specific size or from an industry. It can also be businesses looking to solve specific pain points that your solution can solve.
After defining your target audience, research and learn more about their specific traits and preferences.
Based on the insights, start tailoring your strategy considering everything you know about your target audience.
You must establish what your platform or solution brings to its users. Instead of focusing on the features, you must focus on the benefits your prospects can enjoy.
The value proposition is never about you. It is always about the users. Think about the benefits of using your product, how it resolves your audience's problems, and how it can help them improve their ROIs, customer satisfaction, and revenue.
When establishing these elements, they need to be direct, unique, and compelling to your target audience to come to you.
And all these need to be communicated well, too.
You can use any marketing channel, such as paid advertisement, email marketing, social media, conferences, content marketing, etc., for marketing.
There are many marketing channels, so choosing one channel might be harder. The golden rule here is to choose a channel where your audience is more active. The channel must also align with your budgetary constraints.
Some of the top channels you can focus on are:
Picking the right channel is imperative because it determines the effectiveness of your ads.
For example, targeting ads to C-Suite executives on Instagram and TikTok will not work because you won't find them there. You would do better to market on LinkedIn, where these decision-makers are.
There is no denying that content is critical to any SaaS marketing strategy. Without content, your marketing strategy is never complete.
By content, we mean blogs, articles, ebooks, videos, infographics, and everything you can use to engage with your target group.
Therefore, when you create content, it must be informative and engaging. It needs to attend to the needs of the audience. While providing information, the content must also be able to put forth your image as an industry authority.
More than anything, it must help protect your brand and product as the solution to their pain points.
Always remember that hundreds of businesses could offer your target audience the service or product you offer.
Why should anyone buy from you?
The efforts must clearly convey why buying from you matters. Doing so will help you build trust with your target group.
Therefore, you need to create a consistent brand identity and message across all marketing channels to send your audience a message of trust and reliability.
When done right, branding works like a charm, says Forbes.
After creating your marketing strategy, you must keep observing and measuring it to improve it. That's a crucial element of having an enterprise SaaS marketing strategy.
Tracking the success of your marketing efforts is fundamental to understanding what is working and what needs improvement.
Creating a perfect strategy right from the beginning is impossible. The idea is to learn from the feedback and insights you get with each marketing campaign. You can use metrics like your site traffic, social media engagement, acquisition cost, conversion rates, etc.
After collecting enough data to drive insights, look at your strategy and campaigns to see where your focus must be and where to reallocate resources.
The more adjustments you make to your strategy based on real-life insights, the better it becomes.
Now that we have learned about enterprise SaaS marketing and its challenges let us not delve into actionable strategies you can use as a SaaS business in 2023.
The best enterprise SaaS marketing strategy in 2023 is content marketing. With Google's helpful content update, the role of quality content has become even more important for businesses. 73% of marketers include content marketing as part of their marketing strategy, says a report published by Content Marketing Institute.
The key to using content marketing to its fullest is understanding customer behavior changes according to trends, and the strategy must reflect this shift.
If your content marketing strategy fails to acknowledge this, all your efforts will be in vain.
Hence, create a flexible enterprise content marketing strategy that uses multiple forms of content, such as:
An example of a brand doing this incredibly well is HubSpot:
Yes, the good, old SEO. You can bring high-quality traffic that is easier to convert with a well-formulated SaaS SEO strategy, and you can do that without spending money on aggressive search ads and promotions.
While SEO can bring you results, it takes time to show the results of your hard work.
There are two elements you need to focus on:
This is all about optimizing your website and its pages to earn organic traffic from search engines. On-page SEO prepares the website for search engines to come, visit, and index so that they can later show this page to relevant keywords.
Some of the on-page SEO strategies are:
Off-page SEO is all about creating relevant and high-quality backlinks from authority websites. However, let the quantity of these links not fool you, as quality is more important.
If you are wondering if all these are worth your efforts, Backlinkho increased its organic traffic by 110% by using the skyscraper link-building technique in 14 days.
You can try the same and improve your traffic for sure.
Most businesses run PPC campaigns to lure searchers to their websites, hoping they can convert them. Usually, PPC campaigns can certainly perform well and bring you high-quality traffic.
That's why you need to include PPC as one of the enterprise marketing strategies for your SaaS offerings.
With the help of PPC campaigns, you can:
However, when it comes to B2B SaaS, you must approach PPC carefully, as users do not always trust the ads.
In addition, well-optimized ads from smaller businesses can also outrank your ad if its quality score is low. Be inventive with PPC and optimize the same effect to generate the results you want to see with your search campaigns.
Repurposing content to meet new requirements and industry trends is another marketing strategy that SaaS businesses can adopt. It can be used as an independent strategy or with your entire content marketing strategy.
Transform your existing content into different formats, such as blog posts or webinars. The most preferred formats include social media posts, infographics, or podcasts.
When repurposing content, reduce the cost of producing new content and reach an even wider audience. With the help of such content, reinforce your brand message across multiple platforms.
Doing this consistently as part of your content marketing strategy can improve your reach and brand image.
Email marketing is another proven effective SaaS marketing strategy you can follow. It lets you keep your existing customers engaged and entice prospects to buy your SaaS product simultaneously.
You may use a variety of emails in your strategy, such as:
All these types of emails help you drive engagement with your brand, which can ultimately lead to conversions.
Based on the customers' behavior and choices, you can also segment them to send emails that fit their selection.
This makes your email marketing more targeted and personalized, which makes the emails more value-adding to the recipients.
Creating a social media marketing strategy helps businesses connect with their target audience across multiple social media platforms, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Over 73% of B2B businesses use social media to make buying decisions. A solid social media strategy for your business is always a wise decision.
Creating and sharing content on social media that your ideal audience would love to engage with is the backbone of all winning social media strategies. Engaging with your audience on social media consistently shows how user-centric and proactive your brand is.
As people start trusting you, more organic traffic will follow, leading to higher conversion.
Therefore, focus on the following three elements when you create your social media strategy for your SaaS business:
When you take care of these elements, sales, and conversion will take care of themselves.
Retaining a customer is much easier in B2B SaaS and more cost-effective than finding a new customer. A strong customer retention strategy is what you need to keep your customers satisfied and happy with you.
You can include numerous elements in your customer retention strategies, such as:
When done correctly, each of these can foster loyalty and bring down churns.
An impressive customer retention strategy helps B2B SaaS businesses reduce customer acquisition rates while improving lifetime value and bolstering brand image.
Videos help businesses capture the attention of their customers successfully. With most social media platforms moving their focus to short-term videos, you must also have a strategy exclusive to video content.
There are multiple ways you can use video to your advantage. One of the best examples of this is Zapier.
Zapier's YouTube channel is full of high-quality, helpful content that users can use anytime.
Salesforce also does a similar job.
You can create explainer videos, product demos, customer testimonials, etc., as part of your video marketing strategy.
An advantage of B2B SaaS video content is that it can be repurposed for social media marketing and campaigns for better brand reach and awareness.
After creating and applying your enterprise B2B SaaS marketing strategy, the next phase is observing and evaluating your strategies.
You must know what is working and what needs work. You also must be willing to let off certain aspects of your strategy if that does not work.
This brings us to the most important part of your marketing strategy—how to measure the performance and optimize it, and what tools must you use for measuring?
Your marketing tech stack must include the following:
A CRM platform is a must to manage your marketing strategy. These platforms help you manage leads, nurture customer relations, and ensure operational efficiency.
Some of the most popular CRM tools you can use are:
A Content Management System, or CMS, is crucial for businesses leveraging content marketing for growth and sales. You can easily create, publish, and manage content online with a CMS.
A few of the top CMS platforms you can rely on are:
You may be required to work on multiple projects and delegate the same to diverse teams. To manage these projects efficiently, you must have a project management tool.
Some popular project management tools are:
The next set of tools you must have are analytics tools. They help you track, analyze, and create insights from your campaigns. Also, improve your campaigns and make better decisions based on the insights.
A few top analytics tools are:
When you have set these tools up for use, the next move is to determine what metrics and KPIs to track.
The following are the best elements you can track:
How much you spend to acquire a paying customer is the cost of customer acquisition, and it is the best metric you can calculate to understand if your strategies are paying off.
You can divide the total marketing cost by the number of customers to find the CAC. The CAC can also be determined for each marketing channel you use, which will help you know what channels work for you and what do not.
Based on the analysis, you can optimize campaigns, A/B test ads, or reallocate resources to channels that deliver higher CAC.
This is another metric you can measure to see if your strategy is working. Lifetime customer value, or LCV, is the total profit you make from a single customer. You can compare the same with the CAC for that customer to understand your single customer ROIs.
You can break this down into multiple factors, such as marketing channels, demographics, etc., and understand what factors give you value.
With the help of these insights, you can optimize your campaign and ads accordingly for better budget performance.
The number of customers you lose in a year is another metric you can track to understand your customer retention strategy's effectiveness.
Check whether the churn rate has decreased or gone up based on the data.
If the rate is high, dig deeper to understand and address the reasons. If the rate has gone down from the previous year, find out what you have done differently and the strategies you used.
Use the same strategies more aggressively. You can also work with existing customers to learn what improvements they expect and why they stay.
The data you collect can then be used to improve your SaaS product's churn rate.
This is the number of visitors to your website who have given you their contact details. It could be their email addresses, phone numbers, etc.
Not all visitors must give you their contact addresses.
But you can improve the rate by testing your landing page design and content. You can conduct the test several times for a certain interval and see what brings you more leads.
Use the ones working best to maximize the visitor-to-lead conversion.
While these are common metrics you can track and optimize, they often depend on your industry, the nature of your SaaS platform, and your target audience. Consider this as well while creating your SaaS B2B enterprise marketing strategy.
You can wait for the campaigns to run, and once you have enough data, you can start improving the strategy and your metrics.
An actionable enterprise SaaS marketing strategy is crucial to growing your sales and revenue. Without the right approach, all your marketing efforts may be futile. Creating a working SaaS marketing strategy based on your growth and income is one of the first things you must do.
Developing a reliable strategy to grow your business can only be done with the help of an experienced enterprise marketing agency. If you are searching for such an agency, we are one of the best in the market.
In recent years, we have worked with some of the most respected enterprise SaaS providers and helped them grow their revenue.
The TripleDart team, consisting of marketing gurus, social media strategists, and content marketing experts, is our biggest asset. Working together based on your business goals, we create marketing strategies that drives results.
If you want to work with an enterprise SEO agency to help you deliver value to your customers and satisfy them, TripleDart is the best option.
Contact us now and learn how our enterprise SaaS marketing strategies can help you scale your enterprise SaaS marketing and achieve sustainable growth.
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