3 Most Common SaaS Marketing Challenges And How To Solve Them

No matter what industry you work in, the way people buy has evolved. More and more of the buying process happens before prospects reach out to a company’s sales team, relying heavily on peer reviews and online research. 

The SaaS industry is no different. Your prospects want to be able to find the answer to their questions instantly and come to their own conclusion as to which solution fits their needs best – preferably with as little human interaction as possible.  

However, many companies still struggle to focus on the questions their potential clients have during this research stage, and so create content that shouts about how amazing their solution is and all the bells and whistles that makes them better than their competitors. 

But, what if you were to look beyond the solution your software provides? Could you create content that also focuses on the pain point that you solve? By formulating a marketing strategy that starts to answer the questions and challenges that your ideal customers are Googling throughout their buyer’s journey, you’ll begin to build that all-important trust that will lead eventually lead to closing the deal and build lasting customer relationships.   

Sounds simple right? 

Before you jump into planning your customer-centric marketing plan, there are a few hurdles we’ve seen clients struggle with in the past. Read on to see what marketing challenges you should watch out for and how we’ve worked to help other software companies overcome. 

Challenge 1: Aligning marketing and sales teams 

When sales and marketing teams are working in silos, it can be easy for both to only focus on lead generation and closing new customers (which of course are both very important). 

However, any SaaS business that wants to be able to predictability scale, knows the importance of retaining customers, as well as bringing in new ones. By aligning the sales and marketing teams to work towards a shared revenue goal, everyone is able to prioritise resources to the areas of the business as needed. 

This shared revenue goal now becomes a chance to upsell customers through the joint efforts of marketing and sales. Both teams are also now enabled to share insights to what marketing collateral is needed to help engage prospects by answering the questions that the sales team are being asked on a regular basis. 

By introducing regular sales and marketing (or smarketing) meetings to your teams, communication will improve, leading to higher quality content, and a more streamlined sales process where your team keeps on top of what educational content has been created – and where to find it when a lead requests it. 

This is something we actively practice here at SpotDev too. From having sales input in our marketing strategy, we have seen a lift in organic traffic with our content strategy. We’ve done this by including blog titles that answer FAQs our sales team had noted.  This has resulted in an increase in high quality leads as we closed the feedback loop between the leads coming through the website and those that progressed in our own sales cycle. 

Challenge 2: Generating leads 

Have you ever put together a great marketing campaign, launched it into the world and then waited and waited, and waited for few people to engage with it? This can be a very frustrating position to be in. 

So how can you avoid this happening in the future? Here at SpotDev, we have found the best process for providing successful marketing campaigns is to start with a strong foundation. By really understanding who your ideal customer target is and their pains, needs and desires, you can produce highly targeted, lead generating, digital marketing campaigns that attract highly qualified leads straight from your website. 

By focusing your efforts on the long term, evergreen campaigns, you will be able to develop the lead generation tactics based on the pain points of your ideal customers. You must then continue to test and optimise these to increase the success rate. Your campaigns will then continue to repeatedly grow your sales pipeline. 

As your content grows to support your evergreen campaigns, your PPC leads will increase, and your organic traffic will get a boost. Creating valuable content will help to draw more and more of your ideal customers to your website, eventually diminishing your reliance on paid traffic. 

Challenge 3: Delighting customers 

If you are looking to grow your SaaS business, it is impossible to ignore the importance of retaining clients. Depending on the size of your business, communicating to customers to help keep them engaged and actively using your software will fall into marketing’s remit. 

However, as marketing manager will tell you, it can be difficult to prioritise these “nice-to-have” touchpoints when you’re focused on bringing in new leads for your sales team to work. So how can your business have it all? 

By following our proven process, we help tackle these priority challenges based on the needs and goals of the business. By having a roadmap which provides clear 3-6 month plan can help the full business focus their efforts to achieve their growth goals, if you would like to find out more about the SpotDev SaaS Growth Formula and how it can help your business hit its growth targets, download our free guide today or speak to a member of our growth team to discuss your marketing challenges.