This is How to Create B2B SaaS Platform Success in 2020

In America and many other countries across the globe, ‘tis the season for holiday celebrations and strangers swapping spit under the mistletoe. For entrepreneurs, it’s the time of year for extra customer service tickets, financial analysis, and Q4 reports. If part of your New Year’s Resolution is to scale your company or generate higher financial returns from your B2B SaaS business, you’ve come to the right place.

First, read a summary of the state of the SaaS industry to power your goals. Then, learn six quick tips to get more from your efforts in 2020. And, if you stay tuned until the end, there are a few quick bonus tips sprinkled throughout.

Is SaaS the Future?

There will always be a place for software in individual hard drives. Just as some baristas will always prefer a french press to a drip coffee machine, some writers will always prefer local word processing software and manual typewriters over cloud-hosted alternatives. Still, it’s clear that SaaS is here to stay.

While SaaS is a reasonably established market, according to Synergy Research Group, it currently only makes up 15% of total enterprise software spending. And, as technology has rapidly evolved in recent years, it will continue to do so.

SaaS future predictions:

• The global SaaS market is expected to grow to $220 billion by 2022 from $134 billion in 2018 (Research and Markets).
• High-performance computing will take over proprietary infrastructures (Forrester).
• Quantum computing dynamics will unlock new workloads and insights (Deloitte).
• The use of AI will continue to play an increasingly significant role in SaaS (Research and Markets).
• The breakout of emotionally intelligent interfaces will impact SaaS user experience (Deloitte).
• Serverless computing and service meshes will disrupt SaaS infrastructure (Forrester).
• Cloud security will become more pivotal to SaaS operations (Forrester).
• Business investment in cloud software will double (Deloitte).

The future of SaaS is so bright, you better put on your shades.

Who are some of the Most Influential B2B SaaS Brands Today?

When creating a growth strategy, one crucial step is to check out your competitors. Depending on your niche in the industry, your competition will vary. But, all B2B SaaS brands can benefit from following the leaders.

Today, according to Synergy, Microsoft, Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle, and SAP are today’s top SaaS brands. Their 2018 and 2019 annual growth percentages ranged from 20-45%.

And, according to Crunchbase’s highest 30-day trend scores this month, here are the top up-and-coming B2B SaaS startups to watch.

	Cyral provides security products that protect companies from data breaches that arise as software APIs evolve.
	Funnel.io is a marketing and advertising dashboard that integrates with over 500 data sources.
	Swell is a small business growth platform with a focus on customer satisfaction to manage online reviews, communication, and more.
	Practifi is a business management platform for global financial advice companies that offers insights, automations, and more.
	m1neral is an AI platform that applies automations and process streamlining.

As a decision-maker at a B2B SaaS company, keep an eye on the above brands. 

Bonus: Many people use the tool to notify themselves about their own brand. But, I like to set Google Alerts that clue me in when news appears about interesting SaaS companies. It’s an effective and easy way to stay updated and generate new ideas for B2B SaaS platforms including interface evolution and marketing.

Now, Learn 6 Quick Tips to Effectively Promote Your SaaS Business This Year

From the trends and tips above, you can research and power your operations. But, your next steps will primarily be based on internal data. So, here’s where you should invest your marketing spend. 

1. Make Sure Your Buyer Personas are On-Point

A customer-centric business is a successful business. And, at the heart of your marketing strategy should be buyer personas. 

In his research, Stephen Zoeller found that companies who exceed their lead generation and financial goals are 2X more likely to use buyer personas than those who miss the mark. 

As your company grows and scales, you will collect more data about the demographics and typical behavior of your target audience. Use this data to refresh your buyer personas annually. 

From your internal reports, collect the following answers: 

• Who are your most financially-lucrative users? 
• What do these users have in common and how are they different? 
• Do you see any behavioral trends?

Now, there are some questions that Google Analytics can’t answer. So, take the time to interview your prospects and users. For this task, enlist your support team. It makes users more likely to communicate with you if your company’s head of customer support reaches out for a one-on-one conversation. 

Hearing from the support department rather than the marketing team will make your user feel as if the conversation is about them and not about your profits. 

Bonus: If you manage to get top-users engaged, try to use this opportunity to create a case study too.

2. Invest in a Branding Analysis

Even if your platform solves a ton of problems for users, an outdated brand can make your leads feel like they’re going to get the short end of the stick if they sign up with you. Frankly, poor aesthetics can bring about poor conversions. 

According to Gu Yi Chen, brand image has a direct impact on shoppers’ purchase decisions and their subsequent perception of your company. So, find an expert and enlist their help with a branding analysis. Then, implement their advice. 

A few years back, when working on a campaign to promote a leading online logo creator, I  learned that some brands update their logo and branding package as often as every 18 months. So, if you’re afraid that your prospects won’t recognize you if you adjust your image, don’t be. 

3. Offer a Free Trial of Your Platform

Have you implemented a free trial offer yet? If not, it’s time. Here’s why. 

Even if you do the internal math and find that a free trial offer doesn’t increase your paid subscription conversion rate, you can’t take the numbers at face value. This month alone, I’ve signed up for six free trials to write in-depth reviews for my writing clients. 

When reviews like this go live, the platforms written about have free, viral-ready press on various channels amongst audiences who are already interested. 

Not to mention that even when I don’t need the software for long-term use, I am likely to come across someone who does. And, If I love your SaaS, I will make a recommendation. Furthermore, there are thousands of writers like me who are likely to do the same. 

And, if you are going to implement a free-trial offer after reading this, I have one more piece of advice. Tom Tunguz says that usage and time-based trials have 2X higher conversion rates than others. So, consider letting users “send 100 messages for free” or “try free for 14 days” for an optimal paid subscription rate.  

4. Make Sure Your Lead-Gen Assets are Extremely Valuable

With the right clickbait, you can get almost anyone to give you their email address in exchange for a free offer. But, you can’t make them stay on your subscriber list. And, if a great lead unsubscribes, you can’t nurture them to convert. 

Alleviate this pain point by giving your website traffic hyper-valuable content. If a prospect loves the free resource you’ve provided, they’re more likely to stay on your subscriber list waiting for more like it. 

You may have heard of a tactic like private label (PLR) content that promises to make your lead generation process a walk in the park. If it sounds too-good-to-be-true, it usually is. 

For example, I found “Expert Interviews for Extra Traffic” with full publication rights for free on a popular PLR website. 

If I didn’t know better, I would think this sounds like a decent fit for an audience like mine. So, out of curiosity, I did a quick online search and saw that the content was selling on Walmart, eBay, Etsy, and Amazon among others.

And, when I did the same search on Amazon, I found 21 results for the same eBook in prices ranging from $0 with KindleUnlimited to $10.99 from an “author” who had designed a new cover for the product listing (none of which had any user reviews… hmm).  

The point here is that you don’t want to deliver content that has already saturated the market. Instead, if you want your users to trust you, create your own extraordinarily helpful content with them in mind. Share your unique, internal findings when they provide value. 

Salesforce, for example, publishes a library of helpful research, reports, guides, and multimedia content for the public and its users. Most of their content is created based on internal research and data collected from Salesforce platform users. 

This strategy of well-informed, original, and helpful content creation positions the brand as a thought leader on multiple topics while generating new platform leads. 

So, don’t be the brand that has a blog just because everyone else is doing it and you read somewhere that content is the most cost-effective marketing channel — be Salesforce.

5. Keep Voice Search in Mind When You Publish Content

In full disclosure, I am a Google woman. I worked with an SEO agency for a couple of years and learned a ton about how to keep search tactics up-to-date with Google’s 50+ monthly algorithm changes. But, I didn’t learn all that much about how Alexa and Siri answer questions. 

However, I do know that 72% of consumers have used voice search through a digital assistant, by the end of 2020, 75% of households will contain at least one smart speaker, over 50% of consumers expect that their digital assistants will help them make purchase decisions (Bing), and I am gradually becoming dependent on the Echo Dot that I got as a holiday gift to myself this year. 

As you implement new content tactics, don’t just think about how Google will rank your content. Instead, keep voice search in mind. The results you get from queries to Siri and Alexa are completely different than the results Google delivers. 

Soon, I will be doing an experiment where I ask an extensive series of questions to Alexa, Siri, and Bixby and find out how the three digital assistants respond to them. Stay tuned for that by subscribing to receive email updates from CopyNoise.  

6. Write Blog Content to Serve Your Audience (NOT Your Ego) 

I’ve said this over and over until my face turned blue, and I continue to see the same mistake. Many SaaS brands still use their blogs to talk about their brands way too much. So, if you’re still doing this, stop.

Yes, investors and researchers want to know all about you, but your users want to know how you and your platform can help them. 

For example, it’s natural to want to share your latest API updates and news about new integrations. Current users will find this information helpful, so there’s no reason you shouldn’t put it in front of them. But, when you publish blog posts to generate leads, you want to share solutions to your users’ greatest pain points. 

The SaaS sales platform, Close.io, has a blog that speaks to users at all stages of the subscription funnel. They post company news periodically but focus primarily on sales advice. 

When you create a content calendar, SEO is one factor. But, here is a great place to pull out those buyer personas and find out what your ideal audience wants. Ask yourself the following questions. 

• Who is my ideal subscriber? 
• What are my audience’s main problems? 
• How can I create content that helps my readers solve these problems? 

Think of search marketing as a secondary factor. Valuable solutions should take the first chair. 

Final Thoughts

When planning your 2020 B2B SaaS strategy, use this information to make informed decisions. AI and voice search are on the rise. You need to focus on your users if you want to reach your growth objectives. And, your online content should be well-thought-out for optimal impact. Now, if you want an expert to help you optimize your website copy, reach out to me with your content needs. And, subscribe to receive updated when I publish new content.