Conversion Rate Optimization: How to Improve Your SaaS Marketing Strategy
Marketing in the B2B sector can be a difficult beast to tame.
About 88% of B2B marketers are using content marketing in their marketing strategies, because it has been proven to work well and generate more than three times as many leads as traditional marketing methods. However, not everyone is doing it right. Creating content that is engaging, useful and markets your services is no easy feat. Many marketers struggle to produce relevant material that’s little more than promotional blog content, surreptitiously designed to drive sales rather than offer helpful advice.
It goes without saying that SAAS marketing can be amongst the most mystifying fields of marketing to master. How do you market something that has no physical presence and is constantly changing? Marketing is hard enough as it is, but marketing a software as a service that only a handful of B2B companies will be interested in?
Well, that’s next level marketing. This is where we separate the truly driven and motivated marketers from the lazy and undisciplined.
Conversion Rate Optimization: Examining Your SaaS Marketing Strategy
When marketing for a SaaS, there are a few elements one needs to take into consideration to ensure the maximum return on investment.
What methods are you implementing in your marketing plan? Some SaaS marketing is designed to push web visitors to take a trial, schedule a demo, purchase directly onsite, or simply submit a form to get things rolling. Depending on the type of SaaS you’re marketing, your methods can change slightly.
Regardless, your focus needs to be on conversion rate optimization.
Conversion rate optimization(CRO) is a systematic way to convert browsers into action takers. This is a method that can be used to improve any key performance indicators(KPI’s) that are important to your business. If you’re paying for traffic to your site, a higher conversion rate means a better return on your investment. It’s also more cost effective to convert the visitors you already have, as opposed to bringing in new visitors. Ultimately, you’re doing deep research and gathering data, analyzing your site and marketing strategy to find new areas of opportunity to improve the performance of your business.
So how do you get started with optimization? How do you begin the process of converting your current visitors into valuable and consistent customers?
Well, there are a couple key things you’ll need to keep in mind, before you really delve in and start hacking and slashing away at your current marketing strategy.
For starters, CRO is first and foremost about growth. There’s no point to any of this if the people you’re acquiring are the wrong fit for your business. Keep the focus on optimizing to find more customers who not only love your product and services, but who will also help your business grow, by spreading the word.
Second, there are no magic templates for higher conversions and you don’t know what will work. There’s no “best way to do something” or “100% proven to work methods”. There are no things that always surefire and nobody knows what will work. What worked for another business may definitely not work out for your business. Anyone who claims to have the perfect, infallible solution to your marketing problems is either lying or after your money or just ignorant. Stay away on the random guessing and “tests that always win” and focus on what’s happening and understanding why it’s happening.
Your CRO Plan: Applying Tactics vs Building Your Own Plan
When it comes to constructing a conversion rate optimization plan, people generally take one of two approaches: applying CRO tactics or building a CRO plan. Personally, I feel it’s a much smarter approach to build your own plan that’s catered specifically to the needs and goals of your business.
With the tactic approach, you have a starting place, but there’s a lot more guesswork involved. You’ll really just be relying on tips and tricks that have worked for others and hoping for the best. Moreover, the focus is mainly on elemental concerns and there’s little attention paid to analyzing customer behavior and site data.
On the other hand, when you build your own conversion rate optimization plan you’re gathering and analyzing data and attempting to figure out what all that data means before trying fix things. Instead of guessing, you’re forming hypotheses based on the gathered results and then constructing a plan of action to test your hypotheses. It’s necessary to understand that this a consistent, structured and ongoing process of improving your website over time. There are no quick fixes here and if you want to see results, you’re going to have to put the time and effort in.
Constructing Your Conversion Rate Optimization Plan
Before beginning your optimizing strategy, you’ll need to know what you are measuring and attempting optimize. It’s very important that you understand what drives these conversions. For example, your business offers a form on your website that allows visitors to try out your services for a free trial period. The free trial usually results in converting the visitor into a customer, once they’ve seen your services are the real deal. This is the conversion you want to measure and optimize. Ask yourself: what drives this conversion? Perhaps, it’s ad space on a thriving B2B blog or maybe it’s testimonials from other satisfied customers who have tried out your services. Whatever it is, the only way you’ll know what works is by isolating each variable and measuring how each user behaves under each set of circumstances.
Once you’ve figured out what it is you want to optimize, you’ll need to establish a baseline. Your baseline is your starting point, where your current performance stands. Unless you have numbers to compare them to, you won’t know if your optimizations are actually working. If you know what your baseline is can you measure the changes you make to figure out where the improvement is taking effect. You can establish your baseline by analyzing the metrics related to the optimization goals you initially set. Determine what your best sources of traffic are for these conversions and employ user testing around these goals to gain a better understanding of how successful your site is as meeting them. I strongly recommend you use an analytics software for this purpose; software like Google Analytics or KISSMetrics can provide you with all the tools you need to track and report what’s taking place on your site, day in and day out. You’ll also want to consider employing user surveys to gain insights directly from users and user testing software like Crazy Egg or Optimizely that allow you to directly observe how users are interacting with your site. These methods can all help you gain a better understanding of how your metrics relate to your optimization goals and in turn, establish a solid baseline. Now, whenever you make an alteration, you’ll be able to compare performance before and afterwards. This is how you determine whether your changes are making things better or worse.
The next step, after you’ve established your baseline, is to form testable hypotheses. Using the previously mentioned analytics tools and methods, you’ll identify the biggest barriers to your CRO goals and design potential tests to tackle those barriers. Take the information you get from analytics and user surveying to form a hypothesis that attempts to account for the underlying reasons in the problem areas that you have identified. Keep in mind, when designing your tests that it’s important to double and triple check your numbers and keep a written record of absolutely everything. Moreover, start off small, perhaps with some simple A/B tests. Don’t look for something that will be overly complicated to change and measure, instead focus on the priorities that show potential for improving conversion rates. If you end up making too many changes, you won’t know the exact cause for the result for any improvements in your conversion rate. Remember: simple, yet effective should be your focus, here.
Finally, after you’ve run your tests, measure the resulting data against your established baseline. The results from your tests, when compared with your baseline, should give you an indication of what your next step should be. If your tests were a smashing success, congratulations! Allow yourself one pat on the back. Cross this concern off of your list and move on to the next priority or maybe continue refining your strategy until it’s rock solid. If the test wasn’t successful, don’t worry, bucko. Turn that frown upside down, get to reanalyzing your data and start designing a new test. What matters is the end goal and I guarantee that you’ll learn as much from an unsuccessful test as a successful one.
Ultimately, regardless of the outcome of your initial round of testing, you need to keep in mind that optimization is an ongoing process. The ways in which we conduct business are ever evolving and clients’ needs change over time, so you’ll never really reach a point where you’ve run as much tests as possible. There will always be room for improvement, but if you care about your business and you’ve got the drive and hunger for success, you’ll understand that this is just another part of the job and what separates a “good” business from a truly great one.