To all the SaaS companies out there, raise your hands if you have ever made advertising mistakes while conducting a paid advertising campaign for your B2B SaaS product!
Have you ever committed a faux pas?
In the unfolding SaaS industry, making a mistake is common especially when it comes to campaigns.
There is nothing wrong with it, as it is a crowded space, and ticking all the boxes in the checklist and managing the results from all the angles may take time. But to ensure that you are investing time and resources in the right direction, understanding and assessing the prevalent mistakes can gain you the maximum ROI while advertising for Saas companies.
The competition is becoming fierce day-by-day, as going by the stats, in the last five years, SaaS markets have grown 3x & by 2023, the industry’s revenue is expected to reach $171 billion [Source]. And to sustain in the cut-throat competition, there is no room for making repetitive errors in modern digital marketing. So, it is the right time to make positive changes to your marketing and advertising efforts.
In this article, we have explored and discussed some of the prevalent saas advertising mistakes in conducting digital advertising for SaaS & how to avoid them. Read through this to know about the best practices shared and glance at some exciting data about digital advertising.
The success of any SaaS business relies on an understanding of the fundamentals of why SaaS marketing is different. Choosing your business goals, the proper channels, and the right target keywords can impact your ROI.
Your best practice or marketing tactics and mistakes are based on what you are trying to achieve, the platform you choose, and what advice you ponder. You also need to understand the difference between your target audience and the pain points to whom you are appealing and related factors associated with your current marketing situation.
Digital advertising for SaaS is a growth channel that you can’t avoid while strategizing the growth advisory. Even mastering and extracting the best possible result by aligning the business goals may be daunting, but it’s crucial for business growth.
Suggested Read: [SaaS Marketing Strategy: A Step By Step Guide]
The thrust to rank high in the SERPs is becoming more aggressive to grab the audience’s attention & to make the business discoverable. The upsurge of social media as a marketing tool has made the competitor more prominent, so now, while advertising SaaS products, solving the puzzle of paid acquisition needs to be solved without a doubt.
Hovering over the data of Digital Marketing ROI, in SaaS PPC channel has bought 199% ROI in 2021 [Source]. According to the Gartner Survey, CMO or marketing leaders are confident about paid media in the coming months, with 74% of the marketing leaders increasing spending on digital advertising and 66% spending more on paid search. [Source].
Are you hiring a Saas advertising company for a digital ad campaign for your SaaS product? Or do you have to set up an ad campaign in-house for your SaaS brand? Enure to monitor the campaigns to steer away from the following rampant mistakes in advertising to avoid the pitfall.
Here are the most common advertising mistakes in SaaS and let’s check how you can avoid them:
Let’s deep dive into each!
Determining the target audience is a critical factor that decides the success and failure of your campaign. When you try to hit a broader audience, you can hardly impact the market. And targeting a narrow audience can affect your reach and exposure. To send a clear message about the product, you must have a clear buyer persona and ideal audience profile.
When you set up the digital ad campaign, having a determined target audience with a well-crafted buyer persona can help you understand whom you are addressing in the product campaign. Hitting the right set of audiences can bring better campaign results.
In a campaign, aligning your strategy with the right audience is an approach that can save you time & money while can help to increase conversion.
Plenty of digital marketers & SaaS advertising agencies makes one common mistake: running identical ad campaigns in multiple channels expecting a better result. While you advertise for a SaaS product, context is among the vital parameters you should consider.
While you set the campaign, assess the pain points the product is solving and its relevance to the audience you are targeting on that particular channel.
Adjust your campaign at each platform to grab the audience’s attention; focus on promoting content such as case studies infographics and blend your product USPs. Understanding the media, you have chosen and the platform’s users is a significant factor you should consider while setting up your campaigns.
Suggested Read: [5 Best Performance Marketing Channels & Strategies to Enhance the ROI]
In a competitive marketplace of SaaS, sales conversion is often a primary parameter of growth; often, it overshadows the focus required in crafting brand awareness. But it is a trickier attribute that should not be ignored, as sustaining familiarity is crucial.
If you cannot make an impression of the brands in the user’s mind, the audience will hardly sign up for a new tool. Hence create an awareness-focused campaign and strategically plant the seed to bring brand awareness through advertising. It can help you build a loyal customer base, quickly pushing prospects to the bottom of the sales funnels.
Besides, for those prospects who are reluctant to deal with the nuisance of switching, you can grab their attention with a successful brand awareness campaign & win them over with a compelling pitch.
Here also, the importance of SEO comes; if you are putting less effort into SEO, you are losing opportunities. To make yourself acquainted in your field, spend time & resources to enhance your rankings; otherwise, you can lose out to your competitors. Focus on branded keywords after thorough keyword research, focus on E-A-T, YMYL, and other aspects of SEO to make the business visible.
Are you among those who are reluctant to document the advertising process? Then you are already in the loop of a common mistake in SaaS advertising! Data says marketers who document their marketing process are 466% more likely to report success. [Source]
Often many digital marketers can understand the vitality of the documenting process after jeopardizing an opportunity or messing up an ad campaign. You don’t want to be on that list.
So ensure to systematically approach the advertising and marketing process with a structured method. Ideate, prioritize, test, and assess the frameworks you should adhere to. Besides having a documentation process by your side, you can make data-driven informed decisions. It helps to streamline your work process, and the whole team can move in one direction to achieve the goal.
Organizations that stand out at lead nurturing generate 50 percent more sales-ready leads at a 33 percent lower cost! [Source]. You have to be laser-focused in your lead nurturing strategy, and assessing your audience intent is crucial here.
To gain quality leads, content is essential, and you also need to understand the search intent. Ignoring the audience’s purpose is a prevalent mistake seen in SaaS advertising.
Assessing the audience’s intent helps you serve the right message to the right set of audiences. Otherwise, you have the risk of a poor conversion rate, and you may lose winning customers and build a base of prospects who will stick around for long terms. The entire approach also helps you determine if a lead matches your target customer model.
Your ad message should be concise, clear and crisp, and on-point. If your audiences cannot understand the underlying message, they will lose attention to your ad & product as a whole.
While drafting the ad copy and the text, SaaS companies should be sure to explain what their product does, what the features are, and how the product can solve the target audience’s issues. You should ensure that all these aspects are communicated via copy & captions.
While setting up the advertising message should clarify how your customers will benefit from the product. Or what the whole package includes, what is included in your standard packages, what kind of customer support you will provide.
When you outsource the ad services from SaaS advertising, ensure to discuss these business aspects clearly with them and monitor how that agency is setting up the message of the campaigns before releasing it out on different channels.
Measuring metrics is crucial! If you have yet to set your ad campaign KPIs, it is almost impossible to assess your campaign success rate and gauge scalability without the KPIs. And for digital marketing, it is a sin if you do not tie your ad campaign to metrics!
In a survey carried out by Foundation Team [Survey], 66.6% of marketers said they are guilty of not setting up metrics for the campaign. You do not want to join this tribe!
Ensure that before setting up your campaign, you have defined your goals and the metrics you are going to track are clear. And once the campaign ends, document the insights & learning; it will help you iterate for future campaigns taking the insights from advertising mistakes examples.
Besides, you can easily explain the result to the organization you are committed to. Here to add, if you are not reflecting on your past campaign result, you again are making mistakes. Take time and refer to your previous campaign, as it can positively help you! Experience & past learning does matter to draw success in future campaigns.
Are you a SaaS company not thinking about the long-term effects? You are making a mistake there. SaaS sales cycles allow a ‘shorter period,’ but if you are thinking of getting tons of conversions in a single touch, you are going wrong there.
For successful lead nurturing, you need to play long! It is essential in SaaS advertising to build related content and CTAs, to enrich your impact in each stage of the ad funnel. It will help your buyers to guide you to the next step.
An ad can guide prospects at each stage, so ensure that rather than simply dropping your lead in the sales funnel, direct them to calls to action via the next round of ads.
Marketing automation bloopers are more common than you imagine. Many digital marketers of a SaaS brand become victims of wrong marketing automation while advertising for SaaS products.
In a tech-driven era, where marketing relies on automation as it is time-saving, you should also be aware that automation backfires. If you are not vigilant, it can be a huge disadvantage!
So to avoid such mistakes when you opt for marketing automation tools, take time to cross-check your works. When any unforeseen error spills up, be prompt to own it up, as it depicts your humane sides, and enriches the audience’s reliability in you!
Whether you are experimenting or partnering up with any platforms, be precise to do your homework well. Rather than jumpstart, take one step at a time, research, learn, assess and prepare a complete plan backed by groundwork.
Bonus Tip: Regarding brand keywords, never go with the approach like why should we bid only on one term to rank organically? If you are hovering over such thoughts, hold on! It is a fact that the brand name often signals high intent, but why rely on an organic listing alone.
It may sometimes happen that you may not be able to rank organically on the brand name, but capitalization can bring recognition. Besides, when you blend the organic and paid listings, it can get more clicks and an immediate result.
However, ensure that you are not swept in to bash your market competitors in the bidding war. While bidding for your brand keyword, it is good to keep the acquisition cost thresholds in mind, just like you do with other keywords.
While you advertise for SaaS companies, adhering to certain best practices can help you get your desired result. Be laser-focused on your approach and check out for click frauds. Never shy away from pushing branding forefront, listen to your target audience & ensure to send targeted messages through ad funnels.
The digital marketing space is changing each day, and you need to head start to plan a paid media campaign to overshadow the competitors. Also, keep a tap into the digital advertising mistakes & prevalent paid advertising mistakes.
If you believe that the customer or the target audience is unaware of your steps or not watching you in the digital industry, you are wrong. From the moment you step into the industry, you are under-watched one or another way, so always be precise, transparent, and maintain authenticity & credibility while designing campaigns.
SaaS advertising & marketing are challenging, and while SaaS advertising companies offer their services for your brand, it is easy for them to act impulsive or cut corners in ad campaigns! So double-check each of their steps taken.
Sometimes mistakes may happen that may also derail you! But reflect on your learnings and goals, which will help you regain your target audience’s trust. Go out for new strategies, research, analyze, take calculated risks and learn from the above mistakes to bring your competitive greatness.
Are you seeking more SaaS growth advice to propel your marketing campaign? Try FirstPrinciples Growth Advisory. With our in-house Growth Experts, we create nano-targeted, consistent, and relevant strategies to build profitable & sustainable SaaS Products with a laser focus on User Experience.
FirstPrinciples will help you become discoverable in the crowd & assess adjusting to strengthen your marketing campaigns. The Marketing and SEO team will unlock new levels of growth. Reach out to us!
Pushkar Sinha
