The ever-changing and extremely fast growing public SaaS market is predicted to reach a value of $157 billion this year.
The industry is also already extremely competitive, with four out of five businesses using a SaaS platform. And the need for SaaS services continues to increase as the world transitions to remote working policies in an attempt to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Although SaaS businesses are currently some of the companies benefiting the most as the world remains on lockdown, with stocks trading at up to 10 times their trading revenue, they still need to continue marketing their services.
One of the easiest ways to increase online exposure for any business is to build up its digital footprint.
However, without a tangible product to sell, this is often a difficult task for SaaS businesses — who instead offer software as a service to their clients.
This is why owned media is any SaaS businesses’ best friend.
1. Content
For customers, information about the service they are paying for is key. With so much of it available at the click of a button, it is vital that SaaS businesses create their own content that is specifically tailored to their customers, so that they can find out exactly what they are paying for.
SaaS media can come in the form of website content, blogs, long-form articles, newsletters, toolkits, playbooks, infographics and even social media posts.
And the best thing about it, is that while helping customers make informed decisions about the services they are paying for, SaaS businesses can tailor this content to their own advantage, in order to eventually bring in future leads.
When it comes to blog posts and website content, writers can optimize it to rank highly for SEO or ensure it is ‘evergreen,’ like this SaaS media blog post by Salesforce, meaning that it will always be useful for clients, no matter when they read it.
If it’s a blogpost, for example, the content can then be shared on social media to generate immediate interaction from existing and potential customers.
Depending on the social network, posts can also sometimes be targeted towards a specific audience demographic, which SaaS businesses can tailor to fit their own market.
2. Community
Owned media can also be used to help solidify or form relationships, both between SaaS businesses and their customers, as well as among customers themselves.
Eventually, enough of these types of relationships will allow SaaS businesses to form a community with their own client base, which will help them to generate trust from their clients.
SaaS media that encourages audience interaction, such as webinars, and that is guaranteed to capture more people’s attention for a longer period of time, like podcasts, is a great way to form a community.
With podcasts and webinars, their recurring (sometimes weekly) episode format helps to generate a loyal audience who will familiarize themselves with the content and come back for more.
These forms of media also allow the audience to feel like they are getting to know individual team members, and this personal feel helps to generate a sense of confidence, which will solidify customer relationships and encourage them to recommend the service.
Hubspot’s podcast Skill Up, which provides advice, commentary and strategy to help drive business growth, is a great example of this.
Setting up this sort of a network can also help SaaS businesses to lean on each other in times of crisis, such as the one businesses across the world are currently experiencing due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
3. Cost
Investing in owned media is always going to be more of a shrewd long-term investment than covering the costs of advertising externally.
Externally-sourced advertising, also referred to as ‘paid media’ covers all publicity a SaaS business gains from paid advertising to increase traffic.
While some of these advertising options could also be relatively low-budget, such as paid social media advertising, or display advertising, others, such as content marketing and offline ads, can be much more costly.
If a SaaS business decides to invest in hiring a staff writer, for example, they can create various forms of owned media: from blog posts, to long-form content, and even social media copies.
When it comes to other forms of owned saas media – such as video lectures, animations or infographics – although the cost of hiring team members with these skills can seem like a large commitment at the time, the ROI they will generate will be constant.
At Publicize, we made an introductory video for our new business-tech marketplace Swap Shop to both explain our new product and engage our stakeholders from day dot.
Therefore, owned media is ultimately a very cost-effective way of increasing a SaaS company’s digital footprint.
Wrapping up
When it comes to SaaS PR and online marketing, owned media is a cost-effective outlet for demonstrating your SaaS company’s industry credibility, and ultimately generating leads. Meanwhile, SaaS owned media helps to form your business’ own online community and helps develop relationships with prospects and stakeholders alike.
Developing an owned media strategy and investing in the capacity to be able to see it through is an essential part of developing SaaS businesses’ digital footprints, especially while they continue to ride the wave of an ever-changing SaaS market.
