Customer Acquisition and Churn Reduction Consulting
Welcome to 2013… it’s now time to figure out why your SaaS company even exists and what your market positioning is!
If you’re a SaaS or Cloud provider in the Email Marketing, CRM, Project Management, File Sharing, Collaboration, Marketing Automation, Analytics,… or frankly most horizontal product categories… it’s time to do some deep soul searching, market analysis, and customer development to figure out why you exist and what your market positioning is.
When creating your SaaS marketing plan, you must understand that your business model of choice is a fully-integrated architecture where all aspects of the business – product, support, revenue model, and marketing – are tightly-coupled.
Deviation from that model and understanding will affect growth, and most deviation occurs as a rift between marketing and product.
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” – Peter Drucker
What Drucker says is even more powerful when you consider your product to be part of your SaaS marketing plan.
And in SaaS, your marketing / promotion / customer acquisition methods must extend into the product in order to get the product to “sell itself.”
WARNING: In 2013, relying heavily on SEO to drive traffic to your website is a recipe for failure!
Okay, that might be a bit harsh… maybe SEO isn’t dead, but things have changed and you need to look beyond SEO to drive traffic to your website.
If you put all your eggs in Google’s basket by focusing only on SEO to generate traffic for your SaaS app, you could end up with much less traffic – especially quality, qualified, relevant traffic – than you’d like, which means less trial signups, less customers, and less revenue!
But don’t worry… there are plenty of other ways to drive traffic to your website besides SEO and I’ve put a list together just for you…
You need to develop a robust SaaS marketing plan – but sometimes you just need to do some quick tactical things to get the ball rolling. First, see the first part of this series SaaS Marketing Plan: 100 Places to Promote your App (Part 1)… and then read this post.
This is Part 1 in the series… here is SaaS Marketing Plan: 100 Places to Promote Your App (Part 2) if you want to jump ahead.
Marketing isn’t just advertising… it’s really the totality of your SaaS business: Product, Price, Promotion, and Place (Distribution)…
Okay, so you’ve got the product covered, right? If not, here are three books to get you started:
Nail It then Scale It by by Nathan Furr and Paul Ahlstrom (my new favorite book, btw), “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries and “The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development” by Patrick Vlaskovits & Brant Cooper.
In fact, whether you’re “there” yet or not, go read those books… 3 times each.
And of course you know how to price your app, right? If not, be sure to check out the SaaS Pricing Strategy Resource Guide.
So let’s cover one aspect of Promotion today; promoting your App in SaaS / Web App directories.
I’ve been asked if you can “quick start” a new venture or reinvigorate an existing offering with SaaS affiliate marketing?
Here’s the answer I generally give… “it depends.”
Okay, let me dig in a little deeper.
SaaS affiliate marketing can really super-charge your growth, BUT if you don’t have everything in alignment (or your ducks in a row), you won’t super-charge anything!
Think of it like this… if you have a super-charger and no engine to put it on, the super-charger doesn’t really help, right?
For SaaS affiliate marketing to work, you have to:
Not to mention your Pricing Strategy, landing pages, sign-up process, etc.
Plus you have to have a way to manage and communicate with your affiliates, keep them excited and above all… ensure they get paid for what they bring and get paid on time… every time.
The pushback I often get from that is “if I do all that, I might not need affiliates”… which is correct.
You don’t *need* a super-charger on your engine – the engine will get you down the road – but the super-charger makes you go FASTER… which is awesome.
I suppose that analogy could play out fast, but the bottom line is, you can waste a lot of time/money/resources chasing affiliate marketing too early when your time might be better spent optimizing your base first.
Put another way… if you don’t know what you’re selling or to whom, it will be hard for others to sell it for you!
Curious how we could Accelerate your Profitable Growth – including by creating or optimizing an Affiliate Program for you? Contact me and we’ll setup a time to discuss your options for improving and accelerating customer acquisition.
- Lincoln
(972) 200-9317
One benefit of SaaS Affiliate Marketing is knowing exactly what your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) will be!
Whether you’ve considered creating an affiliate marketing program for your SaaS or Web App – or not – or even if you currently have one, you NEED to watch my interview with Jack Born.
BTW, here are three vendors that will allow you to easily offer and manage an affiliate program for your SaaS or Web App:
Do you prefer to listen on the go? Download the .mp3 audio file (29.1MB) here.
The awesome folks at Wistia hooked me up with premium business video hosting!
I’ve wanted to get Jack in front of you for… well, since I met him because what he knows about Affiliate Marketing can absolutely change your SaaS or Web App business.
Jack is the king of Affiliate Marketing and he shares a TON of awesome information with us about how to get a MASSIVE online Salesforce working to send you customers.
Did you know companies like AWeber, Evernote, Loop11, BigCommerce, SuccessFactors, LessAccounting, SurveyGizmo, and Unbounce are leveraging the power of the affiliate sales channel to accelerate sales right now?
So there’s got to be something to it, right?
But in my experience, far too many SaaS and Web App companies haven’t even considered affiliate marketing as many equate it with “Internet Marketing” and write it off as “it won’t work here.”
But that isn’t the case and I hope my conversation with Jack Born not only changes your view on Affiliate Marketing and how it relates to B2B SaaS & Web Apps, but takes it a step further and fires you up.
Jack is the go to guy that many of the top marketers turn to for finding and recruiting an affiliate salesforce. For example, he is the affiliate manager for World-Renowned Google Adwords expert, Perry Marshall.
Jack earned the nickname “The Alchemist” for his ability to transform average promotions into six figure campaigns.
Jack also pioneered the Tactical Triangle concept for rapidly growing conversion, traffic and profits. We talk about the Tactical Triangle concept during our conversation.
Once your done watching this video, head over to Jack’s site – Affiliate Sales Channel – and download his Tactical Triangle Marketing report.
When you do that you’ll also be notified of the webinar he and I are going to do that goes into specifics on the ideas we cover in this AMAZING conversation.
Curious how we could Accelerate your Profitable Growth – including by creating or optimizing an Affiliate Program for you? Contact me and we’ll setup a time to discuss your options for improving and accelerating customer acquisition.
- Lincoln
(972) 200-9317
I put together this list of my BEST SaaS Distribution & Promotion posts just for you. I hope it helps!
If you’re curious how I help SaaS and Web App vendors grow their businesses – and how I can help you grow yours - you can learn more and contact me here.
SaaS providers must understand the difference between consumers of their apps, producers of SaaS network effect data and how to monetize both.
First of all, lets be very clear: its not exploitation and the revenue streams are not hidden. SaaS network effect data (data exhaust, aggregate application data, etc.) is based on the position of the SaaS vendor as a proxy in a multi-tenant environment and the value that is created by the network effect data can be quite significant when leveraged correctly; both for the vendor and the ecosystem.
Regarding SaaS network effect Data, as a SaaS provider, you should:
I realize that journalists or analysts that attack providers for “exploiting” SaaS network effect data get hits when they spread FUD. I do feel that I have to defend the rights of the SaaS vendor from the negative attacks. I also need to remind my clients, readers, and followers that these folks are just spreading FUD and that leveraging, not exploiting, SaaS network effect data, is potentially a critical piece of the value derived from being a SaaS vendor.
Finally, I need to remind the users of SaaS that a credible, trustworthy vendor will leverage the SaaS network effect data in a way that provides value to you in a way you could never have expected from Legacy Software.
The problem with SaaS network effect data is that, just like SaaS itself, it is mis-understood. For example, too many SaaS vendors consider the de facto revenue model in SaaS to be monthly subscriptions, which is not only untrue, but limits the potential of the SaaS vendor substantially. In that same vein, most people think of “selling aggregate data” by a SaaS vendor as some sort of nefarious dumping of client-spefiic data to the highest bidder in a back-alley transaction. That is either an antiquated view, one that exemplifies the naivete of the author, or worse…
It is not only common practice, but highly accepted, to leverage SaaS network effect data in these functional areas and market verticals:
Note the inclusion of Healthcare in there; an industry with tight privacy laws (not just industry suggestions, but laws). All of these industries have been trading in data like this for years.
The SaaS provider needs to ensure they comply with the proper laws and industry governance and make the right ethical decisions, but anyone who makes a blanket statement that leveraging network effect data by a SaaS vendor is “exploitative” or otherwise inappropriate is simply trying to stir the pot by being “edgy” or is, even worse, incented to spread FUD.
Unfortunately, most providers don’t consider leveraging SaaS network effect data as a viable revenue stream, mostly because they do not understand what they have at their fingertips. This means they often fail to build into their system adequate data capture methods which prevents them from leveraging network effect data in any meaningful way.
If they don’t capture data in the right way, even if they do realize what they have later, they will have missed out on all of the data up to that point and will have to re-architect the system for improved data capture.
These are things that need to be considered during the early phases of product development, even if you won’t be able to fully monetize for a long time.
In fact, how long it will take to get to a point where you can derive revenue from SaaS network effect Data is something that is 100% unique to your business.
We leverage our proprietary SaaS Revenue Matrix with our clients to get past the false notion of “critical mass” for SaaS network effect data value.
If you’re curious how we could accelerate your Profitable Growth – including the exploitation of your SaaS network effect data – contact me and we’ll setup a time to discuss your options.
- Lincoln
