Gary The Geek Blog

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a unique type of product. A SaaS company maintains servers and databases available to consumers all over the world through the Internet.

As to the SaaS business model, customers usually pay a subscription fee to access the application. Some subscriptions are based on how much data needs to be stored, the number of users who have app access, or the level of technical support received.

Developing an effective SaaS marketing strategy isn’t easy. While most companies can follow traditional methods, SaaS companies need to develop a marketing strategy differently.  

If you haven’t found approaches to develop a marketing strategy that works for your SaaS company yet, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Just keep reading on to learn what makes SaaS marketing uniquely challenging and what you can do about it. 

SaaS business model

The main reason we distinguish the SaaS business model from other models is that the SaaS model includes a number of factors that makes it uniquely different, such as:

1. Recurring payments

In SaaS businesses, customers do not buy the software. It provides a service, so you’ll have to worry about making recurring payments every month/year while using the service. 

Since SaaS companies provide a service, not a product, accounting for annual revenue can be a bit complex. When a customer subscribes to a service, you may get cash up front, but it can’t be counted as revenue until you’ve earned it. Until then, a customer can ask for a refund at any point if you don’t deliver your service in the promised way. 

As a result, revenue recognition is a crucial part of the SaaS business model.

2. Increased customer retention

In SaaS business models, retention is highly important because it is the thing that keeps you afloat. As it was said above, you can’t count on clients’ money until you’ve provided a complete term of service. For instance, if you’re signing clients up for 12 months but they leave after 2 months, you’ll lose 10 months of recurring revenue.

As a result, the SaaS business model requires tremendous effort to build customer relationships. 

3. Consistent updates

Unlike other products, SaaS products consistently provide small and frequent updates to their services to keep retention metrics high. 

One part of this comes from the specifics of the software business: software vulnerabilities can put user information at risk of being hacked. Hosting their own products also means that SaaS products can release updates whenever they need to. All this makes SaaS companies highly responsive to the customer needs and feedback.

The stages of SaaS businesses

A SaaS business’s life cycle can be broken down into three stages.

Early stage

In the early stage of a SaaS business, you’re unlikely to have many customers, and your product will still be in development. You may be seeking pre-seed funding or bootstrapping.

In the early stage, the team will still be small, and you may not start earning real profit yet.

At this stage, ask these main questions: Am I tracking necessary metrics? Have I chosen a business model that enables me to seek the right kind of funding?

Growth stage

The growth stage is where the product gains subscribers, and you begin to bring in MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue). To kick off your growth stage, you’ll need to raise more funds to invest in product development, iteration, and scaling. 

This is the time to ask yourself these questions: Have I established KPIs to track further scaling? Do I have a strong monetization strategy to seek investment?

Mature stage

If a SaaS company has reached the mature stage, it can be considered rooted. A company at the mature stage has a clearly defined target audience and a reliable product that serves people’s needs. Mature-stage companies can still seek and receive investment, but it’ll primarily aim to expand, scale, and outperform competitors.

The main question a SaaS company should ask at this stage is: Have we chosen the best possible pricing strategy? 

Marketing strategy for SaaS business model

Know the difference

SaaS businesses sell fast due to an incredibly fast sales cycle. When a user needs a SaaS solution, they often buy it on the spot. This means SaaS marketing needs to have an immediate draw to be effective. There will be people who don’t want to commit to a subscription, and that’s fine. If potential buyers don’t want to pay for a subscription, provide a free trial. You can also make a part of your service free to attract more users. Freebies encourage consumers to purchase. In SaaS marketing, giving away a trial version of the service can prove the brand’s credibility and lead to more sales.

Measure with the right metrics

To find out how many new customers you are bringing to the company, measure the success of your marketing strategy with metrics. Here’s the list of metrics you need to keep an eye on to understand how your marketing activities are performing.

— Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

— Lifetime Value (LTV) 

— Retention

— Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) 

— Free to Paying Customer Conversion Rate 

— Average Revenue per Customer

— Monthly Active Users

Create valuable content

There’s a reason why the best SaaS companies work hard on creating great blogs. Quality content enables businesses to promote their expertise and help prospects get to know the company. Providing cutting-edge insights and solutions to customers’ problems makes it easier to persuade customers to subscribe to the service.  

Provide a service 

In Software-as-a-Service, ‘service’ is the key word. While it’s important to provide top-notch services that cater to the customer’ needs, the word ‘service’ also means adding a personal touch. For SaaS products, providing first-class customer support is crucial. Make it effortless for customers to get in touch with you. Provide several channels so that customers can easily reach you. These channels might include live chat, social media channels, email, community chats, etc. To eliminate the number of questions received, provide exhaustive FAQs, knowledge bases, and guides to help customers navigate your service and understand its value as early on as possible. 

Author’s bio: Anna Grechko is a marketing enthusiast and knows the field inside out. She is the marketing specialist at Smart IT. Sharing knowledge is a big part of her career, so Anna actively seeks to spread good vibes, and collaborates with the great tech and marketing minds of the world.

In the modern market, there are many technologies and infrastructures that non-profit organizations can use. Private, community and public clouds can be noted here separately.

Community cloud is an infrastructure that is shared between organizations with similar concepts, security policies, and other settings. Moreover, the number of consumers in such a cloud is greater than in a private one, but less than in the public cloud. The Salesforce ecommerce technology is very popular and has several advantages:

• reduction of operating and development costs;
• increasing of work speed in the cloud, reducing of work load due to thorough planning and ability to independently perform many functions;
• customization of parameters as you wish;
• increase of productivity by assigning priorities to tasks;
• Improving of productivity and high work efficiency.

Most non-profit organizations use the ecommerce platform Salesforce created to promote their own interests.

Salesforce for non profits: organization types

Salesforce ecommerce integration is useful for nonprofits. Thanks to cloud computing and the chosen CRM technology, companies’ representatives will be able to easily interact with their partners and customers. At the same time, the number of employees does not really matter. From several dozens to several thousand people can use the services of a non-profit organization offered on the website https://advancedcommunities.com/non-profits/.

Services of the Salesforce community cloud ecommerce are available for the following types of companies:

• foundations;
• private charities;
• state corporations;
• public associations.

The main focus of charitable organizations is to raise funds. Using the selected technology of the Salesforce nonprofit donation, you will be able to optimize this feature at any stage of cooperation.

In addition to the basic functionality, you can conduct operational analytics to find out how interesting and useful your activities are for users and partners. Performance of each employee will be displayed in a convenient format.

How to choose products and payment methods in Salesforce ecommerce

With this product, it has become much easier to make payments and view additional information. Sales will be conducted without the need to activate additional options. Salesforce charity users will be able to transfer funds or make purchases easily thanks to improved usability. More information about it is available at https://advancedcommunities.com/components/ac-ecommerce/.

All products and services are divided into convenient categories, which minimizes the time spent searching for the right product. Each potential customer will be able to select the product of interest and add it to the basket, and then configure the management of their own order and its shipping.

To pay for products, it is allowed to use:

• credit card;
• debit card;
• offline payment.

Choosing the convenient payment technology in Salesforce for charities expands the online service capabilities. This allows you to pay for products in a few minutes and not worry about the security of payments. If users prefer to pay for the goods when they are delivered, you can also choose the “upon receipt” payment method.

Online stores owners, who uses the selected technology of the non profit success pack Salesforce offers, notice that the process of managing goods and their sales has been greatly simplified. You can offer a specific sorting features or filters, after which each client will select the necessary product in a few minutes.

Salesforce b2b ecommerce basic principles

Business technologies are able to simplify the sale of goods and provision of services to other businesses. Any non-profit or charitable organization can take advantage of the offered package from Advanced Communities. Salesforce free for charities technology is especially popular, since it is intended for the convenience of making payments and using of the functions by consumers.

Before getting a licensed version of the product, it is enough to register on the portal. After that, for each direction in which the organization is developing a package of services will be offered. Thanks to a carefully developed installation and operating manual, it will be possible to quickly adapt the functionality of the product for your business. If you fail to complete the installation yourself, the company’s specialists will be able to do this for a fee.

After your online store or other type of enterprise received our product, you can engage in customer acquisition. For this, you should carefully study the categories of products and select their potential audience. A large number of sections will allow users to choose exactly the product they need without wasting time studying unnecessary items.

An important step is to configure:

• sorting options;
• information about each item;
• personal account and its functionality;
• payment methods.

Each client will be able to view which items have already been ordered, as well as monitor the stage of shipment or delivery of the items purchased.

This technology is perfectly suitable not only for online stores but also for Salesforce fundraising nonprofits. When a user wants to make a donation, he will be able to easily transfer the required amount in a convenient way. Availability of a personal account and ability to monitor each operation is an indisputable advantage for customers and partners of the organization.

When it comes to marketing a business, it is one of the most important things that any business owner could possibly do for their business these days. However, there is so much more to marketing your business than just talking to your family and friends about it, or even writing an article about it online. You see, marketing can be a pretty expensive thing sometimes, but you just cannot ignore the fact that it is one of the most important building blocks for your small business.

When it comes to finding customers for your small business, knowing how to reach out to all the right people with your marketing efforts is very important. With this in mind, if you would like to market your small business but are not really sure how to do it properly, some websites like OmdömesStalle might be able to provide you with some valuable information. Now, while it is true that marketing can be a pretty expensive thing sometimes, it is important to note that you don’t need to spend a lot of money to start marketing your small business. That being said, here are four essential marketing tips that you can adopt to start growing your small business!

Establish Your Identity

When it comes to starting a small business, establishing your unique identity in the market should be one of your top priorities. If you successfully manage to get your branding strategy right, you will begin to see the results in no time, but if you get it wrong at the beginning, it might end up being a very expensive mistake for you as a business owner.

Have a Good Business Website

A good business website is one of the most important things that any small business owner could possibly have these days. There are many easy-to-use tools that you can use to build an attractive website for your small business. Keep in mind that first impressions are the most important, and an attractive business website can only add credibility to your small business.

Experiment With Social Media

Creating a social media page for your small business is an extremely smart thing to do. However, one of the most common mistakes that many small businesses make is that they create a business page on pretty much every social media platform on the market. But what you really need to do is prioritize the most important social media platforms for your business marketing strategy.

Take Full Advantage of Free Online Courses

There are many small business owners out there who are willing to educate themselves about the idea of marketing a small business. That being said, there are many free online courses that you can use to learn more about what it takes to successfully market a small business. One of the main advantages of these courses is that they can be taken at your own pace, and most of them (if not all of them) are easily accessible from all sorts of devices. Try to take as many of these courses as possible and stay in charge of your small business.

Nowadays, when we want to buy products either from online stores or even local stores, we often find ourselves running to the Internet to search for the company we are hoping to patronize. In some cases, it could be to find their website and check if they sell the product we are interested in and if the product meets the specifications you are looking for. In other cases, it is to look at the reviews that people have left for the company to see if it is good enough for you to patronize the company. There are also other times when we need a particular product or service but we don’t know which company we can buy them from. Thus, in this case, we do not have any online store in mind. So we could search for something like where can I get this item or service. A lot of links would come up that could include review sites. We would want to check and compare a few of the companies that were listed in the search results and we might also check out for reviews of the few companies during the process of comparing them. If you have been wondering why people trust reviews or why you should trust reviews, then you should continue reading these reviews.

Neutral comments
The reviews about a company are mostly given by or are supposed to be given by a neutral person who knows the importance of reviews. This is an individual who does not have any stake or interest with the online store, except that they have patronized the store. Thus, they are only going to be speaking of their knowledge of that company, which would be their experience when they visited the store. Considering that it is not compulsory or even mandatory to leave reviews, they would only be talking if they want to and based on the mood the company left them. If the services of the company made them happy, they would comment happily and in a positive manner. If, on the other hand, the company made them angry, they would comment angrily and in a negative manner. Nobody would lose money to a company and review the company the best in the world.

Trust in the reviews platform
Another reason why people trust reviews enough to base their decision of patronizing an online store or not highly on reviews is because they trust the reviews platform. They are aware that the review company is a trustworthy one where you cannot pay to rig reviews, where all the positive and negative reviews they have ever left have not suddenly disappear and probably, they had tried putting in multiple reviews for a company under different names and both reviews got deleted immediately. Thus, they believe the company is trustworthy and has effective mechanisms in weeding out spam comments.

Knowing that people would talk when they are wronged
Another reason why people trust reviews, especially companies with no negative reviews or just a few is that they know that the probability a customer will complain when a company wrongs them is like 80 percent. This is compared to just like 20 percent that would comment if the company gave them satisfactory service.