Do you want to break through the highly competitive SaaS market to get your brand noticed?
According to the 2021 State of SaaSOps Report published by BetterCloud, the number of companies using SaaS solutions increased by 38% between 2020 and 2021.
The marketing world has evolved in recent years, so you’ll need to get creative with SaaS marketing strategies that can significantly impact your business.
(Source: Jelvix)
There are so many options for advertising SaaS, but if you’re looking to maximize your advertising budget, SaaS PPC (pay-per-click) advertising might be the right fit for you.
To help you maximize your investment in PPC advertising, we’ve put together this SaaS PPC guide to give you an overview of what will work best for your company.
We’ll cover:
- Introduction to SaaS PPC advertising
- How does SaaS marketing differ from traditional marketing?
- Why do PPC campaigns fail?
- 5 Reasons SaaS brands need PPC
- 9 Elements of a successful SaaS PPC campaign
- Top paid marketing channels for SaaS
Let’s begin!
Introduction to SaaS PPC advertising
SaaS PPC advertising can help your business get more customers and improve its conversion rate, but it can be confusing if you’re new to it. To help you get started with this powerful form of advertising SaaS, let’s go over the basics of SaaS PPC advertising and how to use it effectively.
What is PPC advertising?
(Source: Popup Smart)
PPC advertising, also known as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, is an excellent way to promote and drive interest in your SaaS product or service. PPC ads offer many advantages to SaaS businesses, including affordability, real-time targeting of prospective customers, and effectively tracking ROI.
What is SaaS PPC advertising?
To grow the customer base in your subscription-based business, you’ll need to start creating SaaS advertising campaigns. Like Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads help you bring potential clients to your website, SaaS ads can help expand your customer base.
These SaaS ad types are generally tailored toward online businesses with a lot of recurring revenue—namely software and apps.
The best way to get users to try your SaaS software product or convert existing customers into paying users is through targeted paid marketing.
SaaS product marketing offers two huge advantages over other marketing channels such as organic search, social media, and email marketing:
- it allows you to spend money on the keywords and phrases that your target audience searches on Google and other search engines;
- it gives you more control over the look of your ad campaigns than organic search does.
How Does SaaS Marketing Differ from Traditional Marketing?
How does SaaS marketing differ from the traditional marketing you might be used to?
(Source: Compare Soft)
Here are three ways:
1. Converting Customers is Quite Different in SaaS:
Prospects need to take a much more active role in closing a sale than they would in traditional B2B marketing. Instead of waiting for someone to call them, prospects need to actively seek out information about your product and decide whether or not it’s right for them.
2. There’s No Room for Error:
Unlike many traditional b2b marketing channels, which often have long sales cycles, SaaS ads must quickly convert if they must be successful.
There’s no room for error when setting up your SaaS ads or choosing keywords; you must ensure that every aspect of your SaaS PPC campaign is optimized before launching it into cyberspace.
3. You Don’t Always Know What Works:
Sometimes it seems like SaaS PPC ads are magic—you spend $100 and earn $1,000. Other times, however, things don’t go quite as planned. And unlike traditional marketing, where you might notice a decline in interest after a certain point, it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly why your ads aren’t converting if you are new to SaaS PPC.
The good news is that there are several tools to help you figure out what isn’t working and how to fix it. But you need to have the required expertise to leverage these tools.
Why Do PPC Campaigns Fail?
An effective PPC campaign aims to bring new business to your company, but it can be challenging for marketers who don’t know what they’re doing.
Let’s analyze 3 reasons why a SaaS PPC campaign may fail:
1) Poorly Written Ad Copy
Poorly written ad copy can result in click-through rates (CTR) being significantly lower than you expected. The biggest problem with poorly written ads is that they don’t provide enough information to encourage customers to learn more or take action.
(Source: Soft Progidy)
For example, if you leave out vital information in ads like service offerings or pricing information, you may not be able to convert your target audience.
Furthermore, if you aren’t using words that your target audience uses, they won’t be able to relate and may move on to another ad.
When writing ad copy for SaaS PPC campaigns, make sure you write like a human instead of a robot. For example, don’t use abbreviations or industry jargon unless your target audience will understand it right away.
Also, try to avoid buzzwords as they often come off as salesy.
2) Lack of Landing Page Optimization
The purpose of a landing page is to convert visitors into leads or customers. If you don’t provide enough information on your landing pages, you may miss out on potential conversions.