SaaS Marketing Strategies Your Competitors Use To Crush You

0:00in this video I'm going to talk through seven SAS marketing strategies competitors are using to crush you and even if they're not you should consider adding some of these strategies to Your Arsenal I'm Rob Walling I've started six companies I've had multiple exits I've written three books on building startups and I've invested in more than 100 of them so to start us off I'm not going to be covering what I call the big five SAS marketing strategies these are SEO content cold Outreach integration marketing and pay-per-click advertising or PPC as many call it these are the standard five marketing approaches that many many B2B SAS companies should

0:35evaluate and usually it's one two or three of these that should be your first experiments as a SAS founder or a SAS marketer so I'm not going to dive into those here in fact if you want to see a video that does deep dive into any one or all of those marketing approaches feel free to post a comment and we will take it under advisement so let's kick us off with number one which is versus or alternative to pages for great examples of this head to the footer of userlist.com and you'll see they have alternative 2x competitor alternative to Y competitor and then they have all

1:09alternative pages and you can click down there and see a huge list of how they compare to their competitors and if you're doing it right alternative Pages can and will rank in Google in essence this is kind of an SEO play that when someone types in alternative to XYZ tool that you rank on that first page or hopefully in the top three then they find your product and they start exploring versus pages are similar to this this is where you say my product versus ex-competitor my product versus y competitor and this works better if you are a very well-known company and people are actually searching on your brand and

1:46and it's bottom of the funnel right this is where someone knows that the problem they're trying to solve they know that they're maybe down to two or three tools they're trying to compare and if you want to rank for that and you want to you know basically have your message in front of their eyes at that moment that's when you kick out versus pages so alternative twos can be a little higher up in the funnel and those can bring you traffic even before you are a heavy brand name but you're almost piggybacking on the brands of your competitors strategy two is using captera you know captera it's that site

2:17that ranks in Google that maybe is a little annoying because you search for best XYZ software you know best marketing automation software and captera often ranks in the top five for a lot of these terms and they're essentially a directory of software Solutions of SAS companies and other types of software and you yourself can use captera if you get some reviews you get your customers to you know give you positive reviews and then it's essentially a pay-per-click model so you do need some budget to rank in captera and to do well but the buyers who come through captera are extremely well qualified and they are basically looking

2:50to make a purchase decision and so the cost per click in captera might be high but the conversion rates are also extremely high and there are several companies in tinyseed which is my accelerator that I run for SAS that are making captera work in fact I'm doing a session in the next week or two at an event that we're running called microcomp remote and it's focused on early stage SAS marketing approaches that's from November 1st through the 3rd and I'm sitting down with Iran galberin he's the founder of gym desk and he's having amazing success with captera and our whole session we're gonna do about 30 minutes on how he's utilizing captera

3:26if you're interested in attending that head to Microsoft remote.com and pick up a ticket we're also going to have the co-founder of forget the funnel the CMO of crisp and the VP of marketing at sparktoro joining me to do some talks on early stage marketing microcomprevote.com if you're interested strategy number three is virality and they're they're Strong by reality and there's weak virality now there's really really strong virality which is where you have like Facebook virality friends invite friends automatically you have a viral coefficient that's greater than one etc etc in B2B SAS strong virality is even been weaker than that right so they're strong in Weak virality and B2B

4:03SAS strong is where you have something like sinewell which is electronic signature or savvical which is a scheduling and calendaring app and when I send either of their links out it kind of says hey you're signing this via savvical so when I send the link out to a new person who has never used signwell or Savvy cow they obviously see the site that they're on right they can see the domain name and they're aware of this amazing scheduling experience or this amazing document signing experience that is a pretty strong viral Loop because for every new customer that signs up almost inevitably they're sending it to one five or hundreds of other people the

4:37weak SAS viral Loop is where you have a powered by link my last startup was an email service provider and we had a little email capture widget that you could embed on your website and to that we added powered by drip at the bottom and that powered by link sent us some traffic it was a viral Loop but it was definitely weaker than you know the previous strong examples I gave many apps don't have this ability but if you have a free plan a free trial or a really low priced plan you could consider making that include a powered by Link in the communications or in any

5:10type of visual elements that are on the lower price plan encouraging some people to upgrade to get rid of those and to capture that virality on those lower price plans strategy number four content marketing with proprietary data and so this is publishing findings by mining data in your app it's mining user data anonymously and the first time I saw this done really really well was MailChimp and they would put these blog posts and these reports out mining a billion emails that had been sent in the past three weeks or five billion emails sent in the past month and they'd say here average open rates here average

5:46click rates spam rates and at times they would even break it down by country or by by industry really interesting stuff that they obviously had at their fingertips and it was all anonymized so there was no privacy issues and they turned it into fascinating content working that really only a company with that type of reach could do another example is the microcomp state of independent SAS report where we survey hundreds and hundreds of bootstrapped and mostly bootstrap SAS Founders and we get their thoughts on hiring and where their mrr is and their growth and marketing approaches they're using all types of questions and we put together

6:18this pretty amazing report that helps you know those mostly bootstrap SAS Founders but it's also a form of content marketing right it's also a way to to show that microconf is a leader in this Space strategy number five is free tools also known as engineering as marketing this one of course is popular among makers developers designers and even folks these days doing it via no code Builder's gonna build right makers want to make realize that free tools have to be marketed too you can't just push it out on the internet and expect people to find it so it's almost like a second product even if it's free that you have

6:50to then go market usually these free tools are an SEO play and you're trying to rank for a term like free website grader free website speed test free SEO rank tracker and you truly do have a free tool that you're giving away and if you rank in Google then that creates that flywheel of traffic and then and then you're essentially promoting your own product I have two really good examples of this one is hubspot's famous website greater one of the co-founders of HubSpot darmash has spoken many times about this and talked about how much traffic that's generated for them another example is SEO testings free rank tracker they actually just launched

7:23it a few weeks ago and are having quite a bit of success and interest in that tool as well I have two more strategies to share with you but before I do that I want to remind you that marketing strategies and marketing tactics and driving a bunch of traffic without having a really solid funnel that's converting well can be a waste of time because you can drive a lot of leads in and then if you're bleeding them out at the trial phase or at the conversion phase to customer you know there's a lot of places where you can basically have a leaky bucket and you don't want to waste

7:50your time focusing on that so to make sure your funnel is performing at its peak check out a companion video to this one it's called best customer acquisition funnels for SAS startups we put that out just a couple months ago it's very much in the spirit of this video it's highly relevant highly focused it makes great use of your time and it'll help you take a look at your funnel to make sure it's optimized before you dive in to driving traffic using the strategies I'm sharing in this one strategy number six is influencer marketing and this may sound ridiculous and like something you should do with a

8:19b2c company but even B2B SAS can use this essentially it's affiliate marketing but it's not affiliate marketing in the way you're thinking typically you think of affiliate marketing as setting up an affiliate plan and hoping Affiliates sign up that's not what this is this is setting up an affiliate plan and then going out and recruiting influencers in your space so if you're an email service provider you go find people teaching others how to do email marketing or how to start in for product businesses and course businesses you know talking to Makers anyone who would need an email list anyone who is teaching those folks how to build one there are going to be an

8:52influencer that may want to make 20 30 Commission on your recurring SAS fee and if you're in a different space let's say you're selling legal software well obviously you'd look for the legal influencers people who have podcasts websites about law software legal Tech they are out there you know there's events that do this influencers sometimes you know they may want to get paid up front for advertising and oftentimes as a mostly bootstrap SAS founder you don't have that budget but if you can work out affiliate deals this is where it comes down to having such a strong Network I have to talk about that like don't build an audience but build a

9:25network because if you have a network of influencers who are already warm and you're not doing cold Outreach it can be a real leg up and an unfair advantage in a space the seventh and final strategy is in-person events you may have started your SAS company to have a great lifestyle and make 10 20 grand a month and replace your full-time day job without leaving your house right make money while you sleep and those are great businesses right those are lifestyle SAS businesses but there are many spaces where the annual contract values are so high that they absolutely justify going to in-person events and oftentimes Founders don't want to do

9:58that and so if you go to those events where the influencers are speaking where your potential customers are there and if you're selling to the government or education construction firms legal you know there's these big industries that aren't always online and you can reach them at these in-person events nothing like an in-person meeting to get you know a connection and a conversation going if your ACV your annual contract value is twenty thousand fifty thousand a hundred thousand dollars it's absolutely Justified to spend ten thousand dollars going to an event because it will pay itself back if you land even one contract if you enjoyed this video I'd love it if you'd hit the

10:35like button subscribe to the channel we have tons more videos just like this coming out every week we're shipping tactical summer high level but it's all about building launching and growing SAS companies I'll see in the next video

10:52[Music] thank you [Music]