When you’re a marketer whose main responsibility is to get as many qualified leads as possible, and end goal is to have your customers bought your SaaS product or web application, then you need to know exactly where, when and how to use certain marketing tools.
But right before heading into the tools, marketers would need to build the big pictures of what is going on with the entire digital marketing funnel or process. This is where most inexperienced marketers lack, or simply do not care enough.
Firstly, it is about getting web traffic to your website (or landing pages).
Marketers publish marketing messages on social media or social network sites such as Facebook. Then they put up and run some Facebook ads in order to get their published content more visibility from more qualified people. Now some of the people who saw the social media ads have clicked through and landed on one of the pages of your SaaS product’s website.
Another scenario is similar, but this time it is through using Google Ads or Bing Ads i.e. Advertising through search engines. Again, users searched one of your keywords, clicked through your paid search ad, and arrived on your landing page.
Next is what you do with the people who have arrived on your website (or landing pages).
Marketers now have an email newsletter subscription form on their landing page, hoping some of the users are going to subscribe and leave their email addresses. Behind the subscription form, there is at least one email marketing automation tool. They would use email marketing automation tools to continuously build their customer database or mailing list from zero.
Marketers who work for mid-size to large companies (with larger budget for marketing and customer retention) would use Salesforce as both the customer relationship management (CRM) tool and the automation tool behind the scene.
The idea initially most marketers would believe is to make it easier for sales people to follow up on the leads and convert the leads into paid customers of the SaaS product. But somehow it is gradually diminishing the gap between salespersons and marketers.
Some SaaS products or web applications are more straightforward and would require almost no help from the marketers or customer service team. Users would be able to self create free trial accounts to test the SaaS product.
Of course even after a customer has signed up with the SaaS application successfully, he/she may not be using it enough due to many unknown reasons. It is time for the salespersons to get in touch and follow up with the customers. This is more important than you would think because this is one of the most effective ways to get a customer to renew using the SaaS application for a second year.
Richard Wright is a blogger with a passion for technology who has been writing about the latest in the world of gadgets and gizmos. They are an avid reader of Science-Fiction novels and love to spend time with their wife and kids.
