Earlier, marketing teams would spend months figuring out their target audience's needs.
Building the perfect marketing strategy for SaaS was often a matter of experiment or gut feeling. Decision-making relied more on the trial and error method than data. But this traditional approach won't work with the SaaS world getting more data-centric.
Customers are becoming picky about the brand messages they read and the SaaS products they buy. They have zero tolerance for content that doesn’t address their pain points. This is why marketers should know what they exactly want and create marketing strategies based on data.
Accurate data is crucial to building effective demand-generation campaigns based on relevant metrics and can help drive quality leads and business revenue.
In fact, reports state that businesses leveraging data-driven marketing strategies drive five to eight times more ROI than firms that don't.
In this article, we will share what data-driven marketing means for SaaS and the top six reasons marketers should switch to it. So, let’s get started!
What Is Data-Driven Marketing for SaaS?
Data-driven marketing is a comprehensive strategy that uses valuable data - acquired through consumer interactions and various analytical tools - to gain better insights into consumer behavior and preferences.
There's absolutely zero guesswork involved!
Leveraging data-driven insights empowers SaaS marketers to create demand-generation campaigns and deliver positive customer experiences. For instance, emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics are well-equipped with data gathering, processing, and analyzing features. Besides, these tools can track relevant demand-generation metrics like customer acquisition costs, conversion rates, and more. So, marketers can analyze these insights to optimize campaigns according to the brand’s core audience and make informed decisions to engage and retain them.
A Harvard Business Review survey revealed that 58% of respondents experienced a significant increase in customer loyalty because of data-activated marketing. On the other hand, 60% of SaaS companies surveyed were able to enhance customer experience.
Moreover, an eMarketer and InsiderIntelligence report states that over 40% of businesses plan to increase their data-driven marketing budgets because of its numerous benefits.
6 Reasons Marketers Should Switch to Data-Driven Marketing
Here are six reasons to switch to a data-driven marketing strategy.
#1: Identify and Understand the Target Audience
There are dozens of "how to" marketing guides depicting the best strategies for marketing ROI success.
But the truth is, if your target audience doesn't connect with it, things will fall apart.
With a data-driven marketing strategy, you can identify the target market's needs, pain points, ongoing trends, and more. This allows you to -
- Attract Qualified Leads: With data, you can identify the audience’s needs, behavior, and more. With these insights, you can create demand-generation campaigns that boost their awareness and interest in your SaaS products. This can help attract qualified leads and ease your journey to customer acquisition and retention.
- Boost Customer Retention: Putting customers at the core of marketing strategy ensure they get what they're looking for, thus strengthening relationships.
This data-powered, customer-centric SaaS marketing approach can boost customer retention in the long term.
#2: Produce High-Quality, Relevant Content
Identifying the target audience alone doesn't guarantee a successful content strategy.
Creating actionable content that works requires consistently tracking the ever-evolving needs of the target market and industry trends.
With data-powered, fresh customer insights, marketers can make informed decisions as opposed to relying on instincts or throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks.
For instance, marketers can leverage data in the following content creation stages across marketing channels:
- Before Content Creation: Determine the type of SaaS content and format the audience is interested in. For that, use data-powered tools like Google Analytics (website), Facebook Insights (social media), and more for content optimization.
- During Content Development: Data can help create strategic, high-quality content that leads will engage with. Derive insights from the latest SaaS industry trends and perform a competitive analysis.
- Post Content Creation: Analyze how well the SaaS content has performed and update content strategy according to the upcoming trends. Leverage advanced analytics tools with prescriptive and predictive analytics to achieve the goal.
This approach can imbibe a sense of trust and drive audience loyalty toward your SaaS brand. This can be a massive advantage to your bottom line.
And, there’s proof - Reports confirm that loyal customers end up being worth ten times their initial purchase. Leveraging data-activated marketing can dramatically minimize the efforts required to attract, nurture, and retain customers.
#3: Strengthen Their Omnichannel Marketing Strategies
The customer journey isn't straightforward.
It’s a meandering path where customers interact with businesses on several platforms, using multiple devices—often simultaneously.
For instance, the leads generated through Instagram will respond differently than LinkedIn-acquired leads. Similarly, leads conversing through mobile devices might respond faster than web users.
So, to deliver a superior customer experience while ensuring consistent brand messaging across platforms, channels, and devices, you need a solid data-driven omnichannel marketing strategy.
Data can strengthen your omnichannel marketing by helping you deliver -
- Personalized content and ads informed by customers' past interactions with specific SaaS pages or products
- Seamless purchase path even when the users switch platforms or devices
- Consistent vision, tone, and branding across all platforms
With a data-driven omnichannel marketing approach, you can identify the best and least-performing channels and what messages evoke the desired user behavior.
Moreover, it helps identify the most suitable content format according to the marketing channels, including social media, email, or blog posts.
Here's an example of data-driven omnichannel marketing in action.
When implemented correctly, this approach benefits customers and brands.
In fact, according to Invesp, companies leveraging strategic omnichannel marketing can retain 89% of their customers.
#4: Track KPIs and Improve Marketing ROI
The first sentence of the marketing bible reads: "Track your KPIs."
KPIs are more than just numbers and metrics - they help determine where your team's marketing budget, effort, and time is going and whether it's worthwhile. In short, KPI tracking serves as a benchmark for improvement. However, determining what metrics to track can be difficult as they vary according to stakeholders' needs.
Most marketers who follow the go-with-your-gut approach fail to convince C-suite of budget decisions. Here, marketers essentially need data-driven, customizable marketing ROI dashboards!
The marketing ROI dashboards should communicate accurate data-driven insights that answer specific audience questions. For instance, CMOs could need an overview (the big picture) of marketing campaign performance and its impact on ROI and revenue growth. They could also want to ensure the marketing, sales, and customer support alignment. When these teams are aligned, monitoring marketing performance and making informed decisions to achieve the goals becomes easy.
So, if your CMO asks how your team is performing, the dashboard should highlight the following key marketing metrics.
- Revenue growth
- Gross profit margin
- Monthly recurring revenue (MRR)
- Churn
Similarly, a marketing manager would want a bird's eye view of all marketing campaigns, including advertising activities, market research, brand management, customer service, and more.
Hence, the dashboard should help them track metrics, such as lead conversion rates, customer lifetime value, and more.
Moreover, the dashboard should be equipped with advanced analytics tools like predictive and prescriptive analytics to help marketers derive insights from data and provide the next-best actions (NBAs). A data-driven marketing ROI dashboard offering such clarity can help marketers prove marketing's impact on revenue and achieve long-term strategic goals.
#5: Enhance SaaS Product Pricing Strategies
According to McKinsey, 75% of a typical firm's revenue comes from its standard products.
This means creating the right SaaS product pricing strategy can help stimulate the sales pipeline. On the contrary, wrong pricing decisions can impact revenue growth.
Traditionally, marketers factor in specific insights that would influence product pricing strategies. For instance, they focus on finding the cost of the next-best competitive SaaS product and value offerings to customers to build their product pricing strategy.
This approach is straightforward for organizations with a handful of SaaS products. However, things become challenging when SaaS product numbers balloon. So, marketers - don't bury your heads in the sand. It's high time you discard these "tried and tested" historical practices.
Analyzing customer data and industry trends is the key to improving your SaaS product pricing strategy. This calls for the zoom-in approach.
Begin with collecting in-depth, granular data, like manufacturing costs, profit margins, customer needs, buying budgets, previous purchase patterns, and more.
Leverage this data to find an optimal price your target market is willing to pay and decide pricing patterns that unlock value.
Here are a few crucial SaaS product pricing strategies to consider.
- Value-Based Pricing: Analyze customer needs and preferences to gauge the perceived value of your product. Determine its pricing based on how valuable your audience finds the product.
- Tiered Pricing: Leverage target market insights and build customized versions of your SaaS product. Offer various pricing plans depending on the features and functionalities.
- Pay-As-You-Go Pricing: Allow customers to only pay for their SaaS service usage. For instance, if you are an email software provider, ask customers to pay for the number of emails they create and send using your product.
Next, measure the effectiveness of your SaaS product pricing to understand what works and what doesn’t.
With a data-driven approach, you can keep an eye on metrics that measure the effectiveness of the pricing strategy. For instance, you can assess the monthly recurring revenue (MRR), customer lifetime value (LTV), customer acquisition cost (CAC), annual recurring revenue (ARR), churn rate, and more.
This way, you can experiment, track, and make informed decisions for the best business outcomes.
#6: Build Superior Customer Experience (CX)
Remember when mentioning a prospective customer’s name in the email would be considered a key engagement strategy?
Well, those days are long gone. Today, you need a robust and strategic approach to boost CX.
Remember that customers hit by a wave of irrelevant advertising and messages take no time to leave a brand. On the other hand, fully engaged customers contribute to 23% of the revenue growth. Customer engagement is everything!
To keep customers intact and coming back for more, offer superior CX. (that goes far beyond just the personalized email subject line!) That's where data comes into play.
Leverage data to -
- Understand your target market, their specific needs, and how ready your SaaS business is to meet them.
- Define the end-to-end customer life cycle and align it with how the target market should feel about your SaaS firm.
- Build and equip your marketing teams with the right data-driven analytics tools and training to ensure customer needs are being met.
- Create personalized omnichannel marketing strategies to engage customers at every touch point, including social, website, email, blogs, and more.
- Consistently deliver on your brand promise and track marketing ROI performance to boost customer satisfaction.
- Maintain competitive positioning and continuously work on improving customer retention rates.
Leverage Revlitix to Up Your Data-Driven Marketing Game
Implementing data-driven marketing strategies needs rigorous efforts.
Marketers require fetching mountains of data from multiple sources to derive accurate insights and track crucial KPIs for improving marketing processes. There's a lot on their plate!
In such instances, deploying Revlitix, the ultimate, power-packed revenue marketing platform, can ease the hassles.
With Revlitix's advanced marketing analytics capabilities (that leverage predictive and prescriptive analytics), you can uncover actionable and accurate insights from volumes of data across channels.
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Built and vetted by experts with over 15 years of experience, Revlitix is the only dashboard marketers will ever need.
Revlitix offers -
- Over 100+ pre-designed, drag-and-drop marketing ROI dashboards with a 30-second set-up (Not kidding!) This helps create customized, impressive dashboards directly - you do not need to start it from scratch.
- Quick integration with advanced Martech platforms in only three clicks - Google Ads, Bing Ads, Google Analytics, Hubspot, LinkedIn, Salesforce, and Google Search Console. This helps you build strategic campaigns and track their results while improving their effectiveness.
- No-code, easy-to-use capabilities - you don't have to write a single line of code. So, leverage the drag-and-drop elements and set up a marketing dashboard within minutes.
- KPIs metrics tracking - customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer lifetime value (CLTV), and others. You have the freedom to select the KPIs as per your stakeholder's needs.
Conclusion
Data breathes life into marketing campaigns.
From creating personalized marketing strategies for distinct channels to tracking campaign performance and predicting future customer behavior, data can help marketers understand the core audience needs and make accurate business decisions.
If your B2B SaaS marketing strategy isn't data-driven, it will fail to achieve revenue goals. For marketing to be effective, it must be data-driven. The six reasons shared in this post are proof of it. Leverage data-driven marketing best practices to take your SaaS business to the next level!
