SaaS marketing and positioning – is it different? Most definitely.

Why is SaaS marketing different?

If you’re reading this then you know what SaaS is, so no need to go through the definition. So why is SaaS marketing different to standard technology marketing? There’s a number of factors but two are key:

Flexibility – the vision of cloud is to be ‘always available’ and more importantly for users having the ability to change supplier/product when they want
Positioning – every offering is a cloud offering (even when it isn’t) so the market is crowded and positioning and differentiation for your product is everything.

To meet both of these factors for SaaS marketing you need to ask two key questions in addition to the traditional 4 Ps of marketing (product, price, place and promotion):

“Why do we exist in the eyes of our prospects (and customers)?”

“What importance/relevance do we hold for their business?”

While generically the 4 Ps are still relevant these two points are crucial in SaaS marketing and define if you live or die in the SaaS environment (well your product and company!). SaaS operation is now so standard that some companies don’t even mention it in positioning as it is taken for granted. So being a SaaS product merely ensures you are being considered. Nothing else.

With the flexibility of choice and more importantly to you, the flexibility of switching, why should they choose you and why should they stay with you? The market will no longer consider products that lock them in (unless they are unique and they never are, no matter how much you kid yourself there is always someone out there with a like-me product, probably not as good but if it’s easy to switch they are a competitor and you are not unique in the eyes of the customer & prospect).

Whether you like it or not you need to be seen to be transparent, mobile and open. That’s what the market wants – not always what you want, but now essential. So having met the customer challenge you need to meet your key objective:

Give customers and prospects enough reasons to stay with you now and as they move forward in their journey.

SaaS marketing is different

And this is where the SaaS marketing starts to really differ. No longer can you do a feature/function/benefit analysis, create a data sheet and send it out via a marketing email. It just doesn’t cut it for the SaaS environment. You need to regularly – as regularly as you can – tell the audience why your product is amazing, why it’s developing, what’s new, what’s happening, what’s coming. OK I can hear the CTO starting to worry – don’t! Marketing isn’t lying or being generous with the truth. It’s positioning the truth to your audience. How you want and when you want, with information that your customers and prospects need and desire. They want to know they have made the right choice, that they are working with a fast moving, flexible and key solution to their business. And they want to see that you are transparent, mobile and open – there are those values again. So the end result is that they want you, they need you, they are transfixed with your vision and have the desire to see and use your new developments. And of course they won’t look around or look to change (even though they want that safety net of being able to change) but will stay with you forever – well that’s the goal! And as we know ‘Forever is a long time. But I wouldn’t mind spending it by your side.’*

Don’t get caught up in the big launch and leave it syndrome, the fixed update schedule. Start to look at the updates – and yes even if they are bug fixes they become updates with the right spin. Turn them into snippets of information, related to business benefits, supported by use cases and customer delivery, savings, budget controls whatever will work for you and your market.

SaaS marketing channels

Then use the vast array of marketing channels available to you, don’t just send out a press release, that’s for the big news. Use the social channels to your advantage LinkedIn, LinkedIn Groups, twitter, slack, stride, Instagram, facebook – but only the channels your target audience is using to keep updated.

Your audience will see notices regularly, they will see that you are still and are remaining flexible, but more importantly you are positioning yourself, in their mind, as the only, invaluable choice. Yes you’ll lose some customers along the way, that’s their choice or their corporate drivers to adhere to corporate buying regimes or save money. But if you follow this route you will be in the game. All you need is to make sure the product keeps evolving and stays relevant. Oh, oh, there’s the CTO again!

Two Decades of SaaS Marketing Experience

In the two decades that I’ve been involved I’ve been lucky enough to work with many companies in the SaaS space from security product solutions from RSA Security, managed security services from NTT Security Solutions and McAfee SaaS Email and Web Security through to SAP HANA SOLUTIONS from itelligence, Sitecore Saas based CMS and Microsoft Azure from 3chillies. I’ve seen how the market area has changed and more importantly how marketing SaaS products and services has changed and become different and more focused.

The views above are based on my working knowledge of SaaS marketing and cherry picking what works and what doesn’t. The points above just touch the surface for ongoing promotion – they don;t touch on strategy, vision, planning etc etc, there is so much more to say and do to implement a cohesive and comprehensive SaaS marketing strategy – but then you’ve probably heard enough for now!

You know what SaaS is

At the beginning of this article I said ‘If you’re reading this then you know what SaaS is’. However, what you might not know is how SaaS evolved. It wasn’t always this way, going back we had the idea of an intergalactic computer network way back in the 1960’s – the idea was there but the technology, infrastructure and ability were sadly lacking. It developed into ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) but that took 9 years to 1969. Then after that came ‘closed open networks’ – yes it doesn’t make sense – mainly developed and brought to market by vendors such as IBM.

1960 - Intergalactic Computer Network 25%

1969 - ARPANET 50%

1999 - Salesforce.com 100%

The idea of the open cloud environment started to become a reality in 1999, and has to be credited initially to Salesforce who delivered their CRM to the cloud to be used by anybody in 1999. A decade after this connectivity bandwidths started to become viable for cloud apps and SaaS took off. It was this move by Salesforce that really captured the imagination as it was a ‘killer app’ that people wanted without the major hardware. The rest is SaaS history.

You can read the whole history of cloud computing in this article. http://searchcio.techtarget.com/essentialguide/The-history-of-cloud-computing-and-whats-coming-next-A-CIO-guide