Five Important Tips when Building your SaaS Brand

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Providing both flexibility and a product or service that a client needs to elevate their business is needed in any SaaS brand. There are some important things to remember when building your SaaS company, in order to make it the best and most profitable one on the market. 

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According to Lighter Capital, around 92% of SaaS companies will fail within the first three years, despite whatever funding or growth they acquire. So this industry is definitely one that’s cut throat and needs constant attention. Here are five important tips when building your SaaS brand.

1. Create a product that solves an issue

The best SaaS products will have solved problems or issues for their clients. It sounds obvious but the reason why some SaaS companies fail is because they’re trying to provide something that no one asked for to begin with or has already been done. If it’s something that’s been done before, then you’re already going into a saturated market.

So when it comes to creating a product or service, you want to think about what problems it will solve for those clients you’re targeting. From entrepreneurs, employees in specific roles and business owners themselves, refine your product or service to what they need. Fulfilling a need is going to end up boosting your chances of prolonged success.

Need some real-life examples of successful SaaS companies? Here are just a few below that gives you an idea of providing a need for clients.

  • Asana solves the issue of confusion when it comes to projects and task management.
  • Slack helps improve communications between colleagues and outsourced staff.
  • Zendesk helps companies manage their customer service enquiries.
  • Mailchimp helps businesses sort their communications via email marketing and using automation technology.

Every product or service, not just from SaaS brands, are successful because they provide a solution and that’s something to lead with when it comes to your product or service. It’s also an objective that you can refer back to at every point when building your brand. Are you providing something that solves an issue?

2. Do both market and customer-focused research

There’s a reason why market research is constantly referred to when it comes to starting a business of any kind. If you don’t have the data or knowledge, then how can you expect to create something that caters to your target audience?

That’s why both market and customer-focused research is important to do from the beginning and throughout your brand’s existence. You want to continue doing market research because as you build and grow your SaaS brand, you might find that some of your products or services have started to cater to different customer types.

With that being said, here are a few tips for market and customer-focused research.

Conduct surveys

Surveys are a great way to collect data but it’s important to keep them short and sweet. Sage Journals say the ideal survey length is ten minutes, with the maximum being twenty. Anything too lengthy is going to put the individual off and they’re likely going to leave the survey half-way through.

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A good tip is to put a percentage or progress bar above the survey so that the individual filling it out knows how much they have left to do.

Use email 

Email is a really effective way of learning about your customers. You might already have collected plenty of emails already on your mailing list through previous CTAs on your website and sales already made.

Use these emails to help convert leads and to also find out more about what each individual client needs from your product or services.

Competition analysis

Focus shouldn’t always be on your competition but when it comes to starting up or growing your brand, it can help to look at what your competitors are doing and using. Look at what cloud computing models are being utilized by your competitors and track the success of their products or services that they provide.

Not only is it an insight into what works but it can also help to look at what’s failed or garnered less success. Perhaps you’ve spotted something they’ve missed and that you could do with your brand?

Never guess at who your target audience are because chances are, you won’t be directly on the mark and that can impact your level of success.

3. Remember to market yourself or get an agency to do it

With any business, marketing is an essential and frankly, critical part of running a successful brand. You want to understand how your product or service is different from others and this insight can help build a marketing strategy that hopefully has more chance of success.

There are plenty of ways you can approach marketing for your brand, so here are a few to get you started.

Offer a free trial of your service or product

Many SaaS brands will offer free trials or subscriptions for limited periods or they may have a basic membership that offers a few elements of the software. This serves as a taster for your clients and it’s also useful when you’re starting out and your company is not yet established.

Free trials can be for seven days, 14 or even 90 days, depending on how generous you’re feeling. It’s up to you how lengthy your free trials are but when prospective leads hear the word free, they’ll likely want to take advantage.

Use a marketing agency

Outsourcing can be useful to implement, especially when you’re not prioritizing marketing as you should be. Using Skale SaaS marketing agency as an example, means that your marketing is specific to SaaS. You can go wrong when choosing a marketing agency and some may not provide the right targeting or strategy.

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So with this in mind, when it comes to running a SaaS business, use marketing agencies or marketers with specialist knowledge of this industry.

4. Provide helpful demos of your product in action

There are going to be services and products that you have as a SaaS business that will need selling. According to Oberlo, 87% of marketing professionals will use video as a marketing tool and it’s something that you should be using too.

Seeing a product or service in action and how it’s used, is likely going to influence you more than just reading a written description of it. So when it comes to nurturing leads, why not offer them a free demo of your product or service?

By offering free demos, you get the opportunity to not only showcase your products/services but also to have a one-on-one conversation with the client. The sales agent can answer any questions or concerns that might be stopping them from purchasing. Using free demos will hopefully convert leads into more sales as a result.

5. Stay focused on customer satisfaction

And finally, when it comes to providing customer satisfaction, always stay focused on how you can improve your customer’s experience. After all, they are the ones that are responsible for the company’s profit and future existence on the market.

Keep an eye on the changes and updates in the SaaS industry and be sure to manage expectations of your customers over time. Providing a good product and value for money is important but the customer’s experience with you as a company is likely to be the most influential in return customers and spreading word of mouth.

Again, take a look at your competition and the changes they make and try to reflect this within your own business but making sure it accommodates your customers correctly.

Don’t get swayed by new ideas or even new potential markets if they have the chance to alienate your current customer base before it’s even established. There are plenty of ways to help provide customer satisfaction, here are a few suggestions:

  • Offer discounts and freebies where possible.
  • Regularly ask for customer feedback to help them feel involved with the brand’s growth.
  • Interact with your customers via social media to expand your reach beyond just your own country.
  • Exceed expectations and offer more where you can to loyal clients and customers.
  • Offer various levels of membership or subscription if possible.
  • Respond quickly to problems and solve them as fast as you can.
  • Put the right communications in place to help customers get in touch when they need to.

With the right attention to detail and focus on what matters, your SaaS brand has every chance of continued success. Think about the core objectives which are to provide a product that clients need and want. Make sure you focus on providing value for your customers in order to keep retention high and don’t forget to market your business.

Using all these tips above will hopefully drive much success and longevity to your SaaS company for years to come! No doubt this success will also be well deserved with all the effort and time that goes into it.

Author Bio: Natalie Redman

Email – natalieannredman92@gmail.com

Freelance writer for many clients including Skale, Natalie has two years of copywriting experience. Natalie has a wide range of experience copywriting for web pages for businesses across many industries. She’s also an owner of two blog websites and a Youtube content creator.