A SaaS Guide to Winning your Audience and Beating the Competition

It’s no doubt; you have been toiling away, coding, linking and designing. Finally, you have a unique product that you are sure will cause ripples and revolutionize the market. Well, you may be sure about it, but what about your potential customers? We can bet that they have no idea, at least not yet.

At this point, it is time to face the facts; if you thought creating a unique SaaS product is enough to attract potential customers and drive in sales, think again. Considering the stiff competition experienced in the market today, you cannot afford to sit back and hope for some magic to happen. For you to stand out in a market that churns out new products, apps and software, you need to learn and master two factors persistently:

• Create and position your SaaS product as the best available in solving a specific problem
• Create a direct rapport with your target audience and win their trust

Marketing a SaaS product can be easier said than done. This is especially so considering it is not a tangible product but rather a service that lives in the cloud.  In most cases, only a few companies would need the service. As such, you will need to become specific and to the point as a SaaS marketer. By simplifying the concept to the decision makers in a company, you are already halfway through your marketing efforts.

Creating a winning marketing strategy boils down to adopting a unique selling point (USP). Even so, a solid USP alone is not enough. This should be complemented by really good content, and this should lead you to attract the right audience.

So, how do you stand out from the crowd and beat the competition as a SaaS marketer?

Identify your audience

You may create the best products in the world or come up with sizzling content, but if you do not identify your target audience, your efforts are in vain. In most cases, SaaS brands would come out thinking they have their target audience sorted, only for their analytics to prove otherwise much later. Identifying and targeting your audience doesn’t have to be too complicated. You can keep it simple by doing the following:

• Delving into any analytics at your disposal to learn about and understand the primary demographics of your significant client pool.
• Using surveys to determine more specific details about your target audience. This could be through social media and email lists.

Consider interviewing a few of your most loyal customers. This should help you understand more about your product from the user’s point of view. At the same time, it enables you to understand more about their business and how best you can tailor your product to suit their needs.

Remember, it is not enough to determine your audience. You ought to know exactly what the customer wants and work towards fulfilling their wishes. Some of the notable ways you can use to determine what your customers want include asking them, checking out your competitors and performing keyword research.

Determining your USP (Unique Selling Point)

You have your products well laid out, alright. We will also agree that your product is set to change lives, but so are many others! How can you translate the working mechanism of your SaaS product in a way that will stick in the minds of your target market? The answer lies in how best you can package your product’s USP. All the coding and endless networking you went through before the final product will mean nothing to the customer if you do not break it down into simple, digestible language that will set your product apart.

If you are struggling to convey the true value of your products through a USP, here is what you can do:

• Pick out the most unique features of your product from the general list
• Do the same for its benefits
• Determine the most pressing needs of your target market and identify how best your product can meet them.
• Determine notable ways your product is unique from its competitors. The uniqueness may even be in the form of some experience you add to the equation or how it runs a common feature differently.

If you are looking to create a solid sales relationship as a SaaS marketer, you ought to master three primary attributes about your product. The products should be:

• Unique to you
• Defensible
• Valuable to the customer

As a SaaS company or marketer, the ability to leverage intelligent marketing will determine the pace of your growth in an increasingly competitive market. SaaS conversions need not be complicated. It all boils down to implementing strategic marketing efforts that create value. This, however, has to start with adopting a buyer’s perspective in sales messaging. Finally, you will need to master the art of retention marketing as this will come in handy in regards to the success of your SaaS product.