How to Build a SaaS Customer Acquisition Strategy
SaaS companies often make the mistake of allocating disproportionately fewer resources to customer acquisition. Underestimating your sales cycle length.
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Key takeaways
- SaaS companies often make the mistake of allocating disproportionately fewer resources to customer acquisition.
- You cannot expect your future customers to invest in your brand and business if you don’t have an online presence!
- One company’s approach will not work for everyone, but once you take the leap, you might find that acquiring customers is simpler than you originally imagined.
SaaS companies often make the mistake of allocating disproportionately fewer resources to customer acquisition. Underestimating your sales cycle length and using the customer acquisition strategy of another business model can be unnecessary speedbumps on your path to success. The same acquisition strategies that work for traditional business models like eCommerce and Digital Marketplaces may not pan out the same for SaaS companies.
This begs the question: what SaaS acquisition strategies work, and how can you develop them? This guide will look closely at how you can build strategies to acquire customers. We’ll also examine simple mistakes to avoid at the beginning.
The Basics of Customer Acquisition Strategy #
Before delving into the hows of acquiring customers, it’s important to know your basics first.
A Customer Acquisition Strategy is simply a plan to help you obtain new customers and establish connections. However, you must remember that before you acquire any new customers, you must form a connection or relationship with them first.
In SaaS, forming a relationship with your clients is crucial because, in today’s world, more and more consumers want to invest and purchase products and services that pay close attention to their customers and their wants.
While e-commerce platforms have the ability to develop relationships with their clients after they purchase a product, SaaS platforms don’t have the same luxury. Research shows that the average SaaS sales cycle is just under three months long. This is partly due to factors like high product costs and privacy problems, among others.
When building a set of strategies, there are a few key questions you need to ask yourself.
- How much of your total budget are you willing to invest in customer acquisition?
- How do you plan to assign acquisition responsibilities to your employees?
- Where and how does marketing fit into the process of acquisition?
- What methods do you plan on employing to build a steady and dedicated customer base?
- What does your timeline look like in terms of customer acquisition?
Once you answer the question listed above, you’ll be able to assess how customer acquisition will impact your organization and its overall structure. It’s worth noting that the strategies for acquiring customers differ from one business to the next – you cannot implement the exact strategies a different company uses for itself.
Remember to consider the effectiveness of your strategy and how much it costs to acquire customers. Calculating CAC or Customer Acquisition Costs will help determine how much your investments impact your overall profit margins. The lower your CAC is, the more money you can reinvest into your business and its development. Additionally, you must ensure that the clients you invest in are worth the time and effort! You must also calculate the Lifetime Value of the Customer or LTV.
While it might seem as though you’re doing an awful lot of math, it’s crucial to remind yourself that acquiring customers in the field of SaaS takes time and effort. The data you acquire will help you reevaluate your ROI and provide you with insight into which areas of the business require more focus and investments and where your strengths and weaknesses lie in terms of marketing.
Now that we’ve got the basics down, let’s look more closely at how to go about building a SaaS Customer Acquisition Strategy.
How to Build and Develop Effective SaaS Customer Acquisition Strategies #
- Figure out what your target market is.
Instead of running before learning how to walk by spending time and money on coming up with customer acquisition strategies, remember that you must conduct research and identify your target market. If you fail to figure out the market, you risk selling yourself to customers who don’t particularly care about or need your software as a service. Therefore, a critical question that you need to ask yourself is this: who is my SaaS for?
This questions answer lies in the product you’re selling or the value of the service that you provide.
For instance, a company like Squarespace provides teach-savvy and teach-illiterate folks with a platform enabling them to create their websites. Their target market is clear – Squarespace caters to people from all walks of life and provides them with the tools they need to maintain their websites. Customers can sell products, share or host content, track their sites analytic, and promote their brands.
Therefore, once you identify your target market and your main competition, you’ll be better able to assess what customer acquisition strategies and methods will benefit your company the most.
- Create and maintain brand awareness.
While this second strategy might sound obvious, it’s one that we often forget to label a priority. Creating and maintaining brand awareness is what helps you earn a sale and gain higher profits. You cannot expect your future customers to invest in your brand and business if you don’t have an online presence!
You can create an image for yourself by implementing various marketing strategies, such as putting together a dedicated email list of clients and communicating with them through bi-monthly updates. You can also pay for advertisements on social networking platforms and optimize your content according to current search engine-optimized practices. You can deliberately start to tailor your brands image and improve your web presence based on the marketing strategies that work best for you.
Regardless of your marketing strategies, it’s important to remember that reaching as many prospective clients at once should be your end goal.
- Maintain a well-developed website.
When it comes to building customer acquisition strategies, it’s imperative that you make a good first impression, particularly in terms of what your brand looks like online. If your website is still being developed or isn’t pleasing to look at, you run the risk of losing clients because they don’t like what they see. However, if your website is user-friendly, caters to the clients you want to work with, and acts as an example of what you’re selling, acquiring customers becomes much easier in the long run.
- Ensure that your customers are at the forefront of your business.
Acquiring a wide range of clients and ensuring that they stick with you means that you need to put them first at all times. While showing them how beneficial your product or service is can be helpful, it isn’t enough to make them come back to you repeatedly. You need to show your customers how your business gains benefits from you. For instance, you could maintain a constant channel of communication with your customers by opening a chat tool on all the pages of your company’s website. Depending on what your business offers, you could offer your customers the chance to interact with a bot or a live agent that helps them whenever they need it.
Ultimately, you must ask yourself whether you are helping your customers get their full needs met by your SaaS company; if not, how can you earn their trust and help them?
- Showcase well-developed content.
If your site does not display content catering to your target market, your company’s potential to perform well on search engines decreases. Whether you’re offering a product or service, ensure that you’ve conducted enough research on the search queries related to your brand, and address them. When you address your customers directly and give them direct information, you avoid bombarding them with irrelevant content!
- Encourage clients to continue exploring your site.
Once your brand gains more recognition, there is a high possibility that you will start to generate more clients who want to engage with you. Therefore, make sure that your site is optimized so that you can easily encourage potential clients to explore the services you offer. For instance, direct them to the pricing page if you offer a subscription-based service! You could also offer a trial period or a money-back guarantee if they aren’t satisfied with your services.
What Common Mistakes Should You Avoid When Executing Customer Acquisition Strategies? #
- Not making use of SaaS metrics to better your acquisition strategies.
If you’re just starting out in SaaS, it’s unlikely that your strategies will work perfectly well the first time around. Don’t worry too much about this, but use the metrics to experiment with your chosen strategies to understand what works best for your budget and capabilities. If you refrain from keeping a close eye on the market and the changes that take place within it, you’ll come to find that you aren’t altering your customer acquisition strategies as the market changes.
- Focusing on the results and not the solutions.
Customers connect better with businesses and companies that listen and give back to their clients. If you tend to throw your achievements in your customers’ faces but do little to listen and implement their feedback, you’re likely to lose money and customers at the same time. Instead of tooting your own horn, ensure that your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) strategy focuses on bettering a customers experience while reflecting your overall brand values.
Conclusion #
Customer acquisition strategies are varied, complex, and best studied through a case study model. This guide was designed to give you a headstart, but there will likely be an interim of trial and error as you experiment with what works in your niche market. One company’s approach will not work for everyone, but once you take the leap, you might find that acquiring customers is simpler than you originally imagined.
Related reading
- 7 Reasons Why SaaS Will Skyrocket Your Company's Growth
- How To Plan An MVP For A B2B SaaS Marketing Startup
- How to Backup SaaS Data
Questions and answers
How to Build and Develop Effective SaaS Customer Acquisition Strategies? #
- Figure out what your target market is. Instead of running before learning how to walk by spending time and money on coming up with customer acquisition strategies, remember that you must conduct research and identify your target market.
What Common Mistakes Should You Avoid When Executing Customer Acquisition Strategies? #
- Not making use of SaaS metrics to better your acquisition strategies. If you’re just starting out in SaaS, it’s unlikely that your strategies will work perfectly well the first time around.