In the world of software marketing, nothing matters more than your customers. Without them, you've got no subscription revenue, no recurring sources of income, and no business. So you'd better do everything you can to align your SaaS services with what your customers are seeking.
When you achieve SaaS customer alignment, you reap the rewards, which include recurring revenue growth, low acquisition costs, and reduced churn rates.
Take a look at these steps your company needs to take in order to achieve SaaS customer alignment.
If you're going to grow your company, you're going to need to know your customers. You need to know how they think, what motivates them, and what they want. Without this information, you won't know with precision that you're delivering what your customers want – you'll just be hoping and praying that you're delivering the right SaaS products at the places and prices.
And that's no way to run a business.
So get to know your customers. Seek meaningful feedback from real, live customers. Analyze it. Understand it. And then use it to deliver the software marketing solutions your customers want.
Once you have gotten to know your customers (really, really gotten to know them), you're going to want to put them into buckets so you can keep track of them, measure their engagement, and look for trends related to demographics.
It's tempting to simply dump customers into arbitrary and unimportant buckets. Companies do it all the time because they're measuring things that really don't matter – industry or date of purchase, for example. A customer's industry might matter, but it's probably not the most important metric. And a "date of purchase" category probably only matters internally; there's really no meaningful information to be gleaned from it.
Instead, make sure that the metrics you are measuring are tied to motivational factors. Measure market segments, buyer personae, and churn cohorts, and try to create buckets filled with customer populations. Then use this information to track your customers over time, understand their motivations, and align your SaaS services with what your customers truly want.
At the end of the day, SaaS marketing comes down to four fundamentals of marketing: price, product, need, and customers. These are the four key building blocks of a strong structure that leads to customer alignment – for every business, not just software marketing.
Make sure your price point appeals to customers but also allows you to recover the acquisition cost of a customer in a relatively short amount of time. Make everything about your product easy to understand, from its value proposition to its setup to its use. Create software marketing solutions that solve real-world problems. Know your customers.
When it comes to building your business, nothing matters more than your customers. Focus on these three strategies and you'll be more likely to have SaaS customer alignment – and that's the only way to reap all the rewards of a successful software marketing company.
