Agile Approach to SaaS Marketing

The emergence of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has encouraged us to follow technological trends and adapt to any new changes the SaaS world has to offer. 

Statistics show that right now, the SaaS market is growing by 21% each year. This means that the SaaS market is growing fast and in order to keep up with its pace, you need to have an agile approach. 

Overall, in the SaaS world, when your customer isn’t ready to buy, quick campaigns won’t convince customers to buy right away. Your marketing activities need to reflect on this, or your team will totally be disconnected from the buyer’s journey.

Therefore, let’s not waste any more time because in this article, we will learn more about how you can create an agile approach for your SaaS marketing strategy.

The definition of an Agile approach in SaaS marketing

An Agile approach in SaaS marketing allows online businesses to adjust their strategies based on the latest SaaS market changes and reach their potential customers as soon as possible. The approach involved four important components: 

• Planning
• Executing
• Measuring
• Making adjustments 

All of these components seek to modify your SaaS marketing strategy, focusing on frequent experimentations, frequent releases, and non-stop commitment toward the customer’s satisfaction.

5 Key steps to follow for creating an Agile approach 

Many SaaS companies are starting to get rid of traditional marketing methods. Instead of wasting lots of resources and time trying to prepare for your campaign, it’s now time to create an agile approach and be in full control over the outcome. 

1. Hire a B2B SaaS content marketing agency 

If you want to learn more about creating the right approach for your business, you need to ask the experts, and in this case, it’s the B2B SaaS agency. They have multiple approaches that can help you create the ideal SaaS marketing strategy and their main approaches include: 

• SEO content briefs for your key personas: Search engine optimization (SEO) is the backbone of holding a SaaS company together. B2B SaaS agencies are always following the most recent trends in SEO. This impacts signups, conversions, and MRR. Therefore, working with one means you’ll continuously receive SEO content briefs that align with your SaaS marketing strategy. 

• On-page optimization and content development: A B2B content marketing agency for SaaS is also great at scaling your business, capturing new SQLs, and retaining customers. On-page SEO includes optimizing for search intent, internal links, URLs, title tags, and more. Google pays close attention to this and will rank your site lower when they aren’t well-optimized. 

• Link-building: Backlinks are crucial for boosting domain authority and SERP rankings, which increase direct leads to your site, where eventually, they can become SQLs and after, customers. 
• Conversion rate optimization (CRO): Most B2B SaaS marketing agencies will improve SEO rankings by creating high-quality content. This is a huge factor that does impact rankings, but you need to also prioritize PQL/SQL growth when formulating your content strategy. 

When running a business, it’s quite difficult to stay updated with current SEO trends. Therefore, hiring an agency can definitely save you time. The amount of money you invest in hiring an agency will pay off in the long term. They are there for a reason, to save you time and attract new customers.

2. Comply with data privacy standards

While you are aiming to create your agile SaaS marketing strategy, you need to keep in mind that you’re going to collect data. There are many different data privacy laws around the world. However, it all depends on where you live and which area you are doing business in. 

The largest consumer data privacy acts in the world are: 

• The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Act: Considered as the toughest data privacy act in the world and includes hundreds of pages worth of requirements that need to be followed for all organizations worldwide. Even though it says it accounts for all businesses that are in the EU and do business within it, the GDPR still has enough power to fine you if you fail to comply with data privacy regulations. 
• The California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA): Is the same as the GDPR, but accounts for all businesses in the state of California and those doing business in it. As of January 1st, 2023, the CPRA imposed new regulations. 

Other than those, a growing data privacy act is the Texas Consumer Privacy Act. After California, Texas is the second largest state in the U.S.A. to adapt such a large data privacy law. 

Similar to other data privacy laws, the Texas Privacy Act grants residents the same rights, including: 

• Correcting errors in personal data 
• Deleting personal data that is provided or obtained by the provider 
• Giving out copies of personal data if they are available in a readily usable format 
• Opt out personal data that is being used for advertising purposes and selling personal data 

Moreover, new implementations will take place with the Texas Consumer Privacy Act from July 1st, 2024, having a longer period to comply with global opt-out technology provisions that will take place on January 1st, 2025.

3. Understand the buyer journey 

Many SaaS companies don’t put enough focus on the buyer journey, but are relatively too campaign-focused. Traditional campaigns aren’t the right way to go, and the truth is that they’ll only cost you more time and effort, which won’t give you too much value. 

Focus more on demand generation activities instead of lead generation. Start gaining trust from customers and don’t look like those desperate SaaS vendor people trying to desperately take a demo. Your audience won’t ever want a demo if they don’t trust or know you. 

The real question to know here is how to get your buyer’s journey right. Well, here are some small tips to follow: 

• Do enough research and figure out what the motive was for someone to buy your product
• Don’t think the buyer journey has an end, this will only set you up for failure. Instead, see it as there is plenty of marketing left to do
• Identify all of your weak spots and find out the weak points of your customers 
• Try up-selling and cross-selling methods as a powerful weapon to convert over and over again

Each step is important, but always remember that you need to first gain the audience’s trust to be successful in this part. 

4. Include user stories

User stories are one of the best tactics for aligning with agile principles. User stories make sure that the project requirements are being delivered in accordance with the user’s needs. We mentioned before that you need to build trust in your buyer journey for your customers to buy from you. 

Well, statistics show that 88% of consumers trust user reviews and stories much more than personal recommendations. The more positive stories you have, the faster you can build trust with your users. 

5. Experiment deliberately 

In agile marketing, it’s important to adopt strategies that are based on experiments. Experiments allow you to make small changes over time, testing them in a short period of time and analyzing the results along the way. 

This cycle will keep running until you’ve created your ideal SaaS marketing strategy with the results you are looking for. Agile marketing is about testing and improving over time, so you can benefit long-term. 

The benefits you get from implementing an agile approach

Setting up agile marketing approaches has a wide range of benefits provided to SaaS marketers. That’s why it has emerged as a popular approach for digital marketers for business growth. In short, the benefits of agile marketing include: 

• Speed and productivity: The modern-day market wants you to be fast about your approaches. Agile marketing achieves this by changing the way your team plans and executes their marketing activities. Agile teams are cross-functional and capable of finishing projects on their own. 

• Collaboration and transparency: Agile marketing improves collaboration between SaaS marketing teams. There are plenty of tools available to help improve collaboration and many of them point out uprising issues during daily meetings. 

• Flexibility: The flexibility here lies in planning. Since you are making changes through experiments, it allows SaaS marketers to change their market dynamics instantly. 
• Satisfaction: Agile teams are more motivated most of the time, leading to a much more engaged team compared to traditional teams. The agile methodology has more control over their team and projects. 

Of course, there are many more benefits to it, but it’ll all depend on how you implement all of these practices. 

The whole point 

While traditional marketing seems highly attractive to many SaaS marketers, it’s no longer the right method to approach. The agile approach is adaptive, flexible, and life-changing for a business. 

Today’s market has a low barrier to entry and this means that it’s moving at a pace like never before. That’s why we need to adapt to changes more than ever before and make sure that we are ahead of our competitors.