How to put all your brain and heart into the development of something of value in times of a crisis with all the uncertainty around us? How to beef up your product marketing for more acquisition and sales when the demand is low and nobody is looking for something new to buy. Is there more opportunity for a smarter product management when development is scarce?
Having a clear direction for your business at a high level, your marketing strategy or product roadmap during the current pandemic is hard.
Resources are limited, product demos are cancelled, events are rescheduled and many businesses are cutting spends on software and services.
Getting ready for the rebound and securing more business are critical for the future of any organization, but quite hard.
What can you do? The other day I thought about this as I helped a client, SaaS event management software some months and I’ve realized that some of the things that we’ve done are actually quite relevant right now! OK, it’s true that major events went offline and event managers are not looking for software, but there are some quick ‘wins’ for businesses that are ‘on hold’. Don’t you want to secure future business?
At my current employer, D-EDGE, we’ve worked hard with my team to prioritize the delivery and speed up the development of new Cancellations reports in our business intelligence product to be here for our customers and provide immediate value. It’s not about invoicing and doing business as usual, it’s about providing VALUE fast. It’s about ‘giving back’ and helping your customers in hard times. We’ve also released a Recovery Tracker which shows hoteliers in different countries the ‘pulse’ of future bookings and the trend for recovering.
Based on my recent experience in various projects, I’ve identified a few things that many businesses regardless of their industry may apply right now.
Product:
Competitive Benchmarking
It’s important to know the strengths of the product that we are building or promoting, its positioning, market share and perform a competitive review in terms of of both features and marketing.
I’ll not go into detail as it’s the idea of this article, but, hey, if you haven’t had the time to do a competitive benchmarking for a while, no excuse not to dedicate time right now 🙂
What I can share that conducting a competitive benchmarking at a high level in terms of product features + marketing (copy, flow, content campaigns) gave me a big advantage to be able to show value shortly for the B2B event management software. It turned out that the major competitor with the biggest share on the market is offering paid features that the client had for free. Also, the product technologies of the giant were too obsolete and the UI wasn’t modern at all. Not to think about the patched features which they put together after several product acquisitions and, hence, minimum investment in a seamless product experience.
However, their product marketing was at quite a high level which explained all the business that they’ve been recently getting.
Action items out of this:
- Better showcase features
- Explain the different subscriptions in a better way
- Highlight UX and ease of use
Fix our top product marketing items (free trial experience, explanation of features, better descriptions for the different subscriptions, piggyback on competitors).
Give back – show data and trends from aggregated data sources
Businesses exist to generate money. We get that. However, tough times should (I hope!) remind us that it’s crucial to give back!
As I’ve said, you can provide value by giving data for free to your customers and the community. This will establish you as a leader and may help you get more eyeballs on your product 🙂
For example, if you are a portal for real estates online, you definitely have data about all the properties by a country, region, their price increase or decrease, number of newly published ads etc. Is your data showing that the real estate business is recovering?
If you are platform of online events, do you know how many events got cancelled vs. rescheduled due to the Covid-19 outbreak.
OK, I think that you got the point, if you have all this aggregated data from various sources, just use it, build some nice data visualizations to tell a story or visualize trends. This can mean a lot for your product, future business, leads acquisition or simply give back.
‘Steal’ business
Don’t like the word ‘steal’ in this case, but it’s the best that comes to mind to convey my idea. Some competitors may go out of business and this can represent an opportunity for you, watch out and seize the opportunity to get new future clients.
Also, many competitors can freeze their aggressive product roadmaps. Now it’s the time to capitalize on that and ship a new feature faster 😉
Adapt – A/B testing to redefine existing roadmap
If there is something that we’ve learnt during these tough times, it’s that we should be better than ever to pivot and adapt.
This client and that big client, those important enhancements, a new API…Your list is endless and you may not dedicate the time that you always want to do A/B testing.
We all know that experimentation and A/B testing are important to iterate and refine your product roadmap continuously regardless of whether we are talking about a website or software.
Guess what, take a step back now, have a look at your experimentation framework, previous insights and adapt what you have or start from scratch to execute on some A/B testing to redefine your Q3 and Q4 roadmap.
Marketing:
Improve Free Trial Conversions
Get those FREE visitors convert to download your software for FREE! In the world of SaaS where many companies offer a free trial prior to purchasing software, you really want to turn your acquisition into real converting trial users.
A few months ago this is the first thing that I worked with my client. The visitor’s journey on the website was fine, BUT loads of visitors didn’t sign up for a trial! Why? A very good software which offers a slew of features that the major competitor is charging for.
I’ve conducted a full analysis of the main pages, traffic and the visitor’s journey to identify the bottlenecks, opportunities and form hypotheses.
I’ll not get into details, but it could look straightforward, but there are so many things that can go wrong or just not polished if you don’t have product marketing!
- Get your free trial CTA right!
- Mention FREE and make sure to highlight it + no credit card
- Free account forever
- Easy sign up process, no headaches
- A free trial dedicated page with minimum info required, clear positioning and elements to ensure the conversion (quite a lot of CRO was needed along the way)
Low hanging Fruit
Remember the preliminary product analysis and competitor research. The insights serve as the foundation for a good list of action items for ‘quick’ wins.
Action items in my case:
- Change messaging above the fold on the homepage, better copywriting to explain the benefits of the product
- Change the hero image, make it more human and related to the business (I cannot share more details about this project due to NDA, I wish I could show you before and after.) Being customer-centric and human-oriented to show that human connection and use of technology (hey, B2B event management is all about networking and people communication, right?)
- Free trial, no credit card required
- Unlimited free trial
- Improve CTA buttons on the homepage
- Improvement of the features page
When you know that a feature is important for a segment of clients and your main competitor is charging for it, hey, you should make sure that you inform that you give it in a less expensive subscription package.
Revamp the Pricing page
Is your pricing clear? It’s not all about the $, but do you explain what, which features and clear product benefits relate to the subscription that you’re asking for. I like the Mailchimp pricing page quite a lot, look at the clean columns, CTAs which stand out and the comprehensive list of features which link to a separate detail feature page. Very well done!
OK, many of the items here look quite no-brainer, but….This is what you found out once you implement the improvements and you reap the rewards of new paying and trial users 😀 SaaS businesses sometimes need an outside view to drive key improvements in user activation, onboarding, retention and monetization.
Competitor Comparison Pages – Gold for Conversions
Let me share a secret with you. One of the biggest wins (along with the improved free trial tactics described above) was my strategy + implementation of a competitor comparison page.
SaaS marketing is quite different from any other marketing (e.g. ecommerce is quite a different world 😉 There are plenty of software vendors who do a great job to piggyback on competitors by building...competitor comparison pages. Sometimes the market leader is not developing the best product, it’s the one with the most creative marketing and nimble enough to get traction with organic content techniques. Don’t be left behind!
My client had many competitors in the market, but one stood out (the one with the best marketing indeed). That product has many organic searches for their product name on Google and software marketplaces online.
Competitors comparison pages are something that I love! One of my top organic marketing tactics for SaaS and software companies is to get such a page asap if the demand for the competitor brand exists! As soon as I’ve learnt that my client has a far easier product with better UX and stronger features, I was thinking, wow, why don’t we talk openly about this. How do we compare to top competitors, especially the big X one.
To build such a page, it’s instrumental to know the strength of your software + investigate why users churn, why they are leaving the big X.
Before you decide to go after such a page and build out that meaty content and apply the best of your SaaS copywriting, do your homework first, please 🙂 Remember that the idea of the competitor page is to rank for branded queries with less competition of your competitor, e.g. your brand vs. brand Y
Process to estimate your opportunity:
Volume and demand for the main keywords:
- Check volume of the competitor’s brand product
- Check volume for alternative to product X
- Check what’s showing up in Google for X vs Y (your product vs competitor)
- Free + competitor name
- Apart from the pure search volumes above to estimate the opportunity, make sure that you do a thorough research in terms of the complaints that users had about the competitor’s product. Why are they looking for an alternative? Old UI, a bunch of incompatible features, wrapped in a cranky ‘product’ box?
- Are there any missing features?
- What are the limits of each subscription offered?
- Is the customer support bad?
- A good competitor comparison page will let you shine, explain why and how you are offering a solution for those pain paints, how do you serve user’s need in a better way?
- Hey, it’s all about $, is there something that you share in regards to your pricing?
This was my case, many, many wins in terms of product subscriptions, flexiblity, good features and FREE, serious investment in the product and easy-to-use UI which is exactly what event professionals need in a software!
- Clear product benefit
Would the user save on using your software as an alternative? How much? What’s the benefit for them? Is there an easy migration process of all the data from the competitor’s tool to yours?
As simple as it may sound, just do your initial comparison to understand how your software compares to the competitor and jot down your findings side-by-side, it’s just about highlighting the missing elements in the competitor’s product and reiterating how you solve this!
- Testimonials
A good competitor comparison page is incomplete if you don’t have that social proof. Reviews or/and testimonials are your secret ‘weapon’, they are powerful as users trust businesses with positive testimonials more. In the end of the day, you also want to establish yourself as an industry leader, so don’t forget to include logo of the companies that worked with you and featured testimonials!
I don’t want to be repetitive, but if you have a free trial, don’t hesitate and put a good CTA to invite visitors to try your software for you. No credit card required, easy to use and frictionless user experience?
Please make sure that your copy, design and layout properly incorporate these important elements 🙂
Some examples which I’ve liked when I looked at what others did before I prepared the design requirements, main marketing messages and copywriting. Look at the clear headings, buttons, animated gifs, clear list of features 🙂
Sorry for my English if I have mistakes, I am not native and don’t shine with the best blogging skills, but I am glad that I’ve shared some ideas from my experience!
I hope that you’ve learnt a thing or two. Remember that action is what makes a difference, get started with your effective tactics right now!