Your product can be a powerful marketing machine and your
customers can be your extended marketing team.
Here are some of the strategies that work:
- Integrations: integrate your app with other apps and create a
marketing campaign around it. The vendor that you integrated your
app with should give you visibility on their blog, newsletter and
website. This is a great way to tap into audiences of complementary
products.
- Tweet for Discount: Brightpod asks customers to tweet for a
discount.
- Powered By: Use the power of "Powered By" to amplify your
product presence. Give out badges to your power customers and they
will happily put them on their website who doesn't like being
thought of as awesome!
Channels to Ignore
During the starting phase of the SaaS company, it is important
to focus on few core marketing activities and weed out the ones
that suck time and money. The following items provide low ROI
during the very early starges of growth :
- Booths at Events
- Road Shows
- Building a Reseller Channel
- Affiliate Marketing
Reseller Channels, especially, can be very counter productive
in the early days. When there are few customers, partners are
afraid to invest and be early movers. Resellers typically prefer to
resell a hot (or least warm) product. However, after reaching a
certain growth milestone the channel and affiliate networks work
pretty well to push your product to edges of the market.
- Marketing Team Compositions:
- Marketing Manager (director/head)
- Website Team Roles
- Web Developer
- Web / Creative Designer
- Automation Engineer
- SEM Team Roles
- Adwords, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn Ads
- Display Ads
- Inbound Team Roles
- SEO
- Social Media
- Content Creation
- Content Distribution
- Outbound Team Roles
- Email Marketing
- Cold Calling