SAAS PRODUCT LAUNCH MARKETING PLAN: INSIGHTS & FOCUS AREAS

Creating a SaaS product marketing plan is a piece of cake: you download a template from the web, fill it in with the sales-y language,—and mission accomplished.

Creating a SaaS product marketing strategy that actually works is not as easy. It’s a multistage process for companies with a vision, experience, patience, perseverance, and curiosity. Not to mention tons of cash and a qualified and motivated team.

Below we lay out the scene for the process, including tips from SaaS marketers with solid experience and a proven history of creating and implementing successful product launching strategies.

Brief Intro to SaaS Marketing

One of the key factors that will define your journey to a champion SaaS product launch is the price of your monthly or annual subscription. If you are in the $10-20 monthly subscription plan niche, your approach to a product launch, choice of channels, and KPIs will be different from those selling a $7-10K per annum software solution.

It’s like selling a bag vs selling a sewing machine that can sew a bag. 

SMB and startups need solutions addressing their immediate needs cheaply and with a fast learning curve. 

Enterprises, on the other hand, are used to signing big checks for marketing, HRM, and accounting software solutions that integrate easily with their existing tech stacks and have a wealth of features for their specific industries.

With this critical differentiating factor in mind, let’s delve into the next question:

What Is the Role of SaaS Product Marketing?

There are two missions that a SaaS marketer faces on a large scale:

• To create traction among users, where Customer Acquisition Cost [CAC] is low and retention rate hovers around 99%.
• To instill confidence in existing and potential investors that the user’s interest will grow with new features.

On a more granular level, PR and digital marketing professionals need to ensure a steady stream of new customers, good product awareness, and nurture loyalty by converting them into brand advocates.

SaaS Product Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing

A savvy digital marketer without previous experience of how to launch a SaaS product needs to grasp these pivotal differences between the two journeys:

• A one-time sale of a physical product can be an impulse purchase, but that’s hardly the case with Software as a Service solutions.
• Even B2C SaaS products have longer conversion windows and require more effort to drive the LTV. This is particularly relevant for companies with per month pricing models.
• You are selling a fast-evolving product to a user, so selling its core feature, brand values, and mission are more important than in traditional marketing where you know your final product is final.
• Your Unique Value Proposition needs to be well-defined and articulated to mold user expectations, keep churn rate low, and grow acquisition.
• There are multiple monetization methods that are constantly evolving, meaning that freemium is still a relevant model.
• The KPIs are drastically different for a SaaS product, and so are the “industry averages” [for example it costs an average of $120 to attract a potential user to try a SaaS product on a freemium pricing plan].
• When working on a SaaS product launch marketing plan, you are spoiled for market intelligence. You competitors—those still kicking and already failed—leave a huge digital trace of how and why they succeeded or failed. This is hardly ever the case with the physical products or services where you can learn from the best, at the risk of becoming a victim of suvivorship fallacy.

Now let’s highlight some of the common pitfalls that await marketers on their path to a SaaS product launch.

How To Launch A SaaS Product: Challenges 

After reading this paragraph, the outlook may seem gloomy, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Hang in there and we will tell you all about how to win on this SaaS launch product journey. We just need you to know your potential pitfalls.

Getting Traction: Not a One-Month Deal

Getting traction may sound like a two-week matter in the era of Facebook, YouTube, and Google ads. Immediate results are guaranteed. You pay, you get traffic.

Not exactly. You need to build up your user database gradually, warm them up, and build rapport even more than with physical products or one-time purchases.

The Art of Selling Free Products

Don’t be deceived by that Freemium license. Selling free stuff is way more difficult than it appears.

• People suspect there’s a catch
• Customers don’t value products that are free, compared to those they pay for 
• Users can’t be bothered to try your software
• Clients don’t have space for another app
• One mistake in your product’s design or a few seconds of downtime will result in your service getting a poor review, so you are getting a negative outcome that you paid for.

Selling Without MVP

In most cases, when a digital marketer or a marketing director starts working on a SaaS Product Launch Strategy, they may not have a single line of code written or a single feature of the program developed yet.

So you will be tasked with the mission to mold a product as well as find ways to market it.

Multiple Platforms with Different Rules

Product Hunt? Capterra? Facebook Ads? LinkedIn Group? WhatApp Messaging?

The arsenal of tools is nearly endless and you don’t have time to master them or the luxury of a learning curve.

If your Marketing Lead doesn’t know what works and what doesn’t, they are letting your company down.

Planning your marketing activities ahead is a non-negotiable requirement. These are key stages of this sophisticated process:

Stages of SaaS Marketing: The Launch Milestone Edition

Knowing your priorities, ICP, product, competition, and best channels is critical for a successful launch of a SaaS product. There’s no such a thing as a slow start. In fact, you need to start working on your user base from day one to ensure a solid TOFU for Day Zero.

SaaS Pre-Launch Phase

The pre launch strategies usually involve a number of marketing activities, like creating a landing page, establishing a social media presence, starting building an email list, and doing influencer marketing.

The impact of this stage on the overall success of Software as a Service sales is huge. The key success factors are [in the order of importance]:

1. The strength of the product’s Unique Value Proposition against existing offerings
2. Your marketing director’s creativity & experience in SaaS product marketing.
3. Your funding available for marketing activities

SaaS Launch Phase

Announcing a SaaS product launch should be planned to a tee.

Are there companies that managed to pivot and reinvent their products after a weak launch? Sure. Does a big celebrity-studded launch party guarantee sustainable commercial success? No. But a successful launch event, both online and offline, is a good way to gain subscribers.

SaaS Post-Launch Phase

Getting great online reviews is critical for MAU growth, so review sites like Capterra and G2, as well as App Store reviews for your mobile app version are essential. 

Many will combine this with influencer marketing, and employ UGC methods.

Needless to say, Facebook and YouTube ads, as well as TikTok and LinkedIn promotions are all on the menu.

Referral program? By all means. BIG YES! It worked for DropBox and it may well work for your Software as a Service post-launch.

Best SaaS Product Launch Strategy: Keep It Focused

One of the best approaches we see work for software products marketing time after time is to keep it focused.

There are many channels, companies, monetization methods, and technologies out there. But don’t disperse your attention across all of them.

Choosing the top 2-3 options and pursuing them is a great strategy. Just make sure you select them with an understanding of the market and your ICP.

TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, Google Ads, LinkedIn, Instagram, and podcasts are all at your disposal as marketing channels. But it’s best to ace 2-3 of them really well, rather than do something OK-ish in all of them.

Similarly, you may have a long list of features that would benefit your users, but narrowing down on the critical features right now to move your product down the SDLC is what you need to focus on.

Sure you can attach 7-8 payment systems from the get-go. But if you are still not sure if the product is going to have enough traction to pay for itself, choose the most essential payment options only for the sake of time and money saving. If your product is great, you can always add more features later on.

SaaS Product Launch Marketing Plan: 7 Must-Have-Steps for Every Project

No two SaaS projects are alike, but this blueprint algorithm works for the majority of projects.

Know Your Playing Field: Target Market & User Research

Any marketing strategy starts with the product discovery phase and knowing your parameters matters a lot.

As it stand with SaaS products, you should end up with a few deliverables after this mission: 

• Addressable market overview with market segments, total revenues, forecasts, trends
• Buying potential of your target market, average check, and top products
• A few User Persona profiles or ICPs

This market research exercise and resulting knowledge is designed to shorten the distance between your business idea and reality.

Know Your Competition to Learn Their Pitfalls 

To paraphrase a common proverb, keep your friends close, but keep a closer eye on your competition.

• Have a leaderboard with existing and failed products and their funding, monetization methods, top marketing channels, investors profile, development roadmap, and lessons learned. Zoom in to the finest detail to learn from their successes and failures.
• Check out adjacent… everything for insights. By everything we mean, that it’s worth giving a quick study to similar products in other niches [think FinTech & Accounting Software Development, or Restaurant Tech and Food Tech], or if you are making a SaaS for Brazil’s market, check out what the US and China have come up with for their markets. You cannot copy from these adjacent fields, you can gather insights that you can translate on your industry, model, and geography.
• Have a detailed feature comparison table of existing products so you can save time doing the groundwork. 

All of the market, ICP, and competitive research documentation should be:

• Perpetual work-in-progress, ever evolving and frequently reviewed
• Visual, detailed, and clear
• Available for all team members to review and edit at any time

This simple research step lays ground to finding better success factors for your product.

Create a Landing Page to Build Email List & Fine-Tune Messaging

Sujan Patel believes things get real when you create a landing page. Turning an ephemeral business idea into something digitally solid is a major milestone in the SaaS marketing roadmap.

But most importantly, you can start collecting emails to grow your user base for the day of the launch. You can also get an insight into your user way of thinking and A/B test how they can react to messaging.

Choose Your Strategy and Stick to it

When prioritizing channels and activities for your marketing strategy plan, consider high-ROI levers.

• Is it going to be referral program driven?
• Are you going to encourage USG?
• Is your strongest point the cheapest price point among competitors and are you going to bombard the cheapest audience available on Facebook with an awareness ad campaign?
• Are you going to speak to your decision-maker, [e.i. Director of Human Resources] by doing some LinkedIn Group and vanity marketing?

Whichever channels and marketing activities you choose, they have to be aligned with your overall product positioning and business goals. Work your way from the most impactful activity and channel to the least efficient one and don’t disperse your attention until you have honed the top converting channel.

Unveil Your Brand Story Early on While it Matters

When it comes to promoting SaaS products, the business and technical part are critical to customer retention and growth. If your product is subpar, your pricing is wrong and your customer service is essentially non-existent. You’ll rarely convert your clients into brand advocates. No brand story can compensate for those glaring mistakes.

But when it comes to the pre-launch stage of the software product marketing cycle, telling a brand story is critical for getting attention and creating a unique story.

Your motivation to create your Software as a Service, your team building process, and your previous Silicon Valley experience may all resonate with future clients. Using conferences and topical podcasts is one of the ways to create a digital trace of your humble beginnings.

Set Your KPIs, Know Your Prime Audience at Every Stage: User/Investor

CAC, ARR, Burn Rate, MAU, CLV, NPS, ASP, CRR are your best friends.

If you are not good at remembering acronyms, make sure your team has a savvy SaaS marketer who can keep an eye on these critical SaaS metrics and KPIs.

Depending on the stage of SaaS software development, you may need to achieve a certain milestone. It can be user-facing or investor-facing.

Create A Launch Party For Customers Of A SaaS Product

There are a few key factors that can help your party be the talk of the town before, during, and after launch:

1. The social capital of invited guests [if you have to pay for a star guest with extensive network, this might be worth it]
2. The quantity of booze in stock [just kidding.. kinda…]
3. The personalization in invitations from design to personal delivery  [your VIP guests may get a personal landing page closed from indexing with your founder’s personal video invite]
4. The concept: an invited guest speaker, a kind of F&ckupnights panel or discussion, live product demo on big screens [if you make kids use your product right there at the party, the message about intuitive interface is going to be clear]. If you ever recreate this idea, do tag Dev.Pro and give us kudos. 
5. The number of invited journalists or influencers who can livestream during the event, as well as create media buzz after the party.

However, make sure you leave all the fun to guests, as SaaS pre launch marketing is critical, but it’s only the initial stage.

B2B SaaS Product Launch Strategy: Best Practices

If you are looking for a golden product launch formula for SaaS, here’s a harsh reminder: there’s none. The playing field depends on dozens of factors. You will need to find your individual path. 

However, the tips below may work for many companies and they come from seasoned software product marketers.

Launch a Challenge Funnel for Your ICPs

Dan Martel shared a high-ROI activity as a preparatory step for a SaaS product launch. He recommends creating a Challenge Funnel to get your ICP interested in your product by creating.

The channel should be well-defined in terms of time, lasting 2, 4, or 8 weeks, for example. It’s also critical to get your challenge subscribers to get from point A to point B within this challenge. If your SaaS product offers email automation, you can create a Challenge Funnel to get X amount of email subscribers in a certain time frame. 

Not only does this activity smoothly bring your ICP to your product, which is offered at the end of the Challenge Funnel, but it also cuts your CAC. In fact, you can even make them pay to partake in the challenge, and they will take it more seriously.

Employ LinkedIn Prospecting by Establishing a Professional Group

When preparing to launch your SaaS product, you can start building your audience on LinkedIn by creating a professional group.

It’s a five-step process, which Dan swears by:

1. Send a connection request.
2. Create a professional group with an alluring name, something along the lines of “Director of XYZ+ Alliance” or “Consortia of XYZ Industry in XYZ State”.
3. Invite your new connections to join this group
4. Build rapport by sending them free [and useful] PDF 
5. Send a quick offer of help in your field of expertise

Needless to say, this activity is best done over a period of time to avoid triggering a behavior alert with LinkedIn’s algorithm.

Use Vanity Marketing: Put Others in Your Spotlight

Vanity marketing offers an array of advantages with little upfront investment. If you are looking for a silver bullet method to build your software product launch strategy, this may be it.

Leverage other people’s social capital by inviting them to partake in your podcast, blog, or video interview.

Not only do you attract more people to your marketing channels based on the authority figure you are interviewing, but you also get a boost in social media engagement when your guest shares your podcast to their audience.

Opt for Facebook Ads for A/B Testing, Not Websites

If you want to see which message or creative campaign resonates  best with your audience in the shortest time, it’s best to use Facebook ads.

A website may take too long to get the required number of visits organically, but Facebook will quickly identify your winner in terms of CTR or CPC.

If There’s an Opportunity for Gamification, Go for it

Recently a 40-year old friend shared how he started learning a new language with a popular app. He praised the gamification features extensively. He also mentioned matter-of-factly that, if it wasn’t for them, he wouldn’t last a day on the app.

The moral of the story? 

If you don’t think there’s a gamification opportunity at the pre-launch stage,  think twice. Embedding a treasure hunt into your launch party, making your users find a certain massage on the app or spicing up a referral program with cumulative bonus points are just a few of your options.

SaaS Product Development is Your Dish and Marketing is the Spice

No marketing program will make a subpar software solution sell rapidly.

You have to focus on market fit, product features, usability, customer service, and doing better than your competitors.

Then you can start creating your SaaS Product Launch Marketing Plan Template.

Looking to make your SaaS turn investor’s heads soonest and keep user’s eyes longest? Consider Dev.Pro for your SaaS product development.

SalesLoft is one of our favorite clients — read their review before contacting our tech-savvy sales team.

Quick SaaS Product Marketing Knowledge Bites