The SaaS industry is very competitive, which is why attracting and retaining an audience is challenging. Standing out and capturing the interest of potential users requires some effort. A loyal audience is essential not just for revenue generation but also for sustaining long-term growth and gaining a competitive edge.
Despite challenges, following strategic steps from the outset can significantly increase your chances of success. By identifying and understanding your target audience, developing a strong go-to-market strategy, and continuously leveraging data-driven insights, you can tailor your efforts to effectively meet customer needs. In fact, you want to build a strong foundation and ensure your product resonates with the right people and keeps them engaged over time.
In this article, we explore essential tips and strategies for finding and growing an audience for your SaaS product. We cover the importance of conducting thorough market research, creating detailed buyer personas, and developing a robust go-to-market strategy. Additionally, we will discuss the significance of data analytics to give you a comprehensive understanding of how to effectively attract and retain a dedicated audience for your product.
Identifying and understanding your target audience
The first step in attracting customers and building an audience for your product should be to survey and understand your target audience.
Conduct market research
Knowing who your clients are and what they need will allow you to adapt your goals and tailor your offerings, marketing strategies, and customer service to meet their specific needs. Therefore, conducting thorough market research is a must for every founder.
Here are a few ways to do so:
- Conduct surveys or interviews: Directly question your customers or a selection of industry professionals to gather data directly from current or potential future users. Tools like SurveyMonkey or Typeform can help in designing effective surveys. Ask about their pain points, preferences, and behaviors.
- Analyze market data: Use market research reports and analytics tools to understand trends and behaviors within your target market. Google Analytics and SEMrush can provide insights into what your potential customers are searching for and how they interact with similar products.
- Engage on social media: Use LinkedIn, Twitter, and industry-specific forums, which are valuable for observing discussions, gauging interests, and identifying common pain points.
- Customer feedback: Continuously collect and analyze feedback from your current customers. This can be done through NPS surveys, customer support interactions, and reviews. NPS (Net Promoter Score) measures customer satisfaction and loyalty by asking customers to rate their likelihood of recommending your product to others on a scale from 0 to 10 (learn more in the last part of this article).
For instance, at Fincome, conscious of the importance of knowing our target audience, we decided to try our best to better understand our current and future customers’ needs and expectations. That’s why in our early stages, we conducted over 1,000 interviews with SaaS executives to understand their primary challenges.
This deeper understanding allowed us to tailor our product features to address specific pain points, such as disparate data sources or time-consuming aggregating and processing data siloed within different tools to produce actionable metrics.
Create detailed buyer personas
Another good way to know your customers is to create detailed buyer personas to help you understand and anticipate the needs of different segments of your audience, which notably helps effective marketing and product development.
Start by collecting demographic information such as age, gender, location, and job title. This data can be gathered from your customer database, social media insights, or external market research. Next, identify behavioral patterns by examining how different segments of your audience behave, including :
- their purchasing habits ;
- the type of content they engage with ;
- their preferred communication channels.
Finally, add the previously collected data on industry pain points and needs.
Once you have it all, document and share detailed personas with your team that include demographic details, behavior patterns, needs, and pain points. Make sure to keep them updated. This will help you constantly remember who you are addressing.
For example, Guillaume Odier, the co-founder and CEO of Captain Data, successfully implemented buyer personas to align his company’s product and marketing strategies.
According to him, it's crucial to identify your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and continuously refine your business model and target markets. This process is an ongoing journey for founders, often requiring you to pivot and adapt to feedback or market conditions. Tools like customer journey maps can help in understanding and refining positioning. They will allow you to visualize the steps your customers take when interacting with your product, helping you identify potential opportunities for improvement.
Source: https://delighted.com/blog/guide-to-customer-journey-mapping
Additionally, Guillaume emphasizes that understanding which customers bring the highest return on investment with the least effort is key. This helps in focusing on the right market segments and avoiding misalignment.
Developing a strong go-to-market strategy
A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is the plan that outlines how your company will launch its product to the market, attract customers, and achieve competitive advantage. It encompasses all the processes, tactics, and strategies you want to use to ensure your product reaches the right audience effectively.
Product-market fit
Your product-market fit is an indicator of the degree to which your product satisfies market demand. It’s crucial because achieving it means that your product has found a clear value proposition and resonates well with your target audience. Continuously refining it is essential as market conditions and customer needs evolve over time.
Toinon Georget, CEO at Waalaxy, emphasizes the importance of product-market fit and highlights that indicators of market fit are signals such as willingness to pay and virality.
According to Toinon, to test the market for your SaaS B2B, you should identify a problem and find the best solutions. In the case of Waalaxy, the idea was “to make the LinkedIn prospectus accessible to as many people as possible,” Toinon said. They achieved a 0 to €1M growth quickly, thanks to a good market fit, strong traction, and ear-to-ear feed, as well as focusing on serving those new customers with the best, simple, and accessible product.
Toinon uses the following framework to test the market and determine, within two days, whether an idea has market potential.
- With LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s free trial, look for three types of profiles for potential users. Using an automated prospecting tool (e.g. Waalaxy) you can create distinct lists with one or two campaigns each, to test your messages. The idea is to contact potential clients to discuss solutions you could bring to an identified problem in their sector. Rather than selling, your prospect should help you to understand and interrogate their needs.
- Create a landing page and structure an impactful speech to define your value proposition, describe your product and present key factors differentiating you from concurrents.
- Beta testing. Create a LinkedIn page with “CEO” or “Growth Manager” @ the product you will launch, and collect all the subscriptions to the beta. Doing so will give you a point of contact with the people interested in your product with whom you can discuss and interact.
- Prospecting. Try to guide the potential clients to your website to see how many convert. Out of 1000 contacted people, if you get more than 30 conversions, you know you have a market potential, and you should move forward!
Pricing strategy
Setting the right pricing strategy is essential for attracting and retaining customers. Notably, it can be helpful to adopt a value-based pricing model, which means the company prices its product based on the value it provides to its customers. This approach allows you to align pricing with the perceived value and ROI customers get from using your product.
Freemium model and continuous optimization
Offering a freemium model where users can access basic features for free and pay for premium features is a good way to attract a larger user base and convert free users into paying customers over time. By continuously testing and optimizing the pricing strategy, you can ensure that it remains competitive and reflects the value your business delivers.
Adapting pricing models to specific needs
Additionally, we discussed with Emeric Ernoult, CEO and co-founder of AgoraPulse, who offered three crucial pieces of advice to master pricing during the start-up phase, emphasizing the need for thoughtful consideration. In the SaaS industry, pricing strategies should be flexible and regularly updated, ideally once or twice a year, to reflect market changes and business growth. Emeric highlights the necessity of adapting pricing models to the specific needs of different business approaches, such as Product-Led Growth (PLG) and sales-driven strategies.
Gradual adjustments
He also advises against overhauling the entire pricing structure at once. Instead, making gradual, one-element-at-a-time adjustments allows businesses to measure the impact of each change and make more informed decisions, reducing the risk of adverse outcomes.
Balancing price points
Lastly, Emeric warns against setting prices too low, which can undervalue products and limit growth, and against setting prices too high, which can alienate potential customers. He emphasizes finding a balanced price point that maximizes perceived value while remaining affordable for the target market based on customer willingness to pay and the product's value proposition.
Channel strategy
Finally, having a channel strategy, which involves selecting and optimizing the paths through which your product reaches the customer, is crucial for maximizing market reach and ensuring efficient product distribution.
To develop an effective channel strategy, identify the most appropriate channels for your target audience. This could include direct sales, partnerships, online marketplaces, and resellers. Each channel has its own advantages and considerations. For example, direct sales allow for greater control over customer relationships, while partnerships can extend your reach through established networks.
As Victor Cheng - CEO Advisor, investor and Board member - highlights, SaaS companies using direct distribution channels can deeply engage with customers, gather valuable feedback, and quickly adapt their offerings to meet specific needs. On the other hand, partnerships can significantly extend a company's reach by leveraging established networks. By partnering with resellers or distributors, SaaS can tap into existing customer bases, expanding their market presence without the need for a large sales force. This approach, however, may require trade-offs in control over the customer experience.
Again, a successful channel strategy requires continuous evaluation and optimization. Monitor the performance of each channel, gather feedback, and adjust your approach based on the data. You can diversify your channels and leverage the strengths of each to increase your product’s visibility and accessibility to a broader audience.
📌 TL;DR - Developing a solid go-to-market strategy involves achieving product-market fit, crafting an effective pricing strategy, and optimizing your channel strategy. Ensure your product meets market demand and resonates with your audience, use value-based and flexible pricing models, and select the right channels for product distribution to maximize reach. Regularly adjust your strategies to stay aligned with market changes.
Creating content
Creating content (on social media, websites, blogs…) is key for engaging your audience and driving traffic to your SaaS product.
Informative and engaging content
Sharing informative and engaging content relevant to your audience is a powerful way to attract customers. High-quality blog posts or articles can :
- address common pain points ;
- provide valuable insights ;
- establish your company as a thought leader in the industry.
When writing these posts, integrate success stories and testimonials from satisfied customers or industry leaders to enhance your credibility and demonstrate your product’s tangible benefits.
Webinars and Workshops
Webinars and workshops are another good way to present your product’s value proposition in a more interactive and personalized manner, answer questions and understand what your audience's expectations and needs are. Additionally, you can provide live demos to showcase your product’s features and benefits in real time, allowing potential customers to see the value of your product firsthand. By doing so, you will demonstrate how your product solves specific problems while engaging your audience. Adding interactive Q&A sessions at the end of your presentations can enhance the weight of your engagement with your target audience.
For instance, with a conversion rate above 55%, webinars are considered essential by 9 out of 10 marketers, and 57% of them host up to 50 webinars annually to enhance brand awareness, generate leads, and improve sales.
Source: https://www.demandsage.com/webinar-statistics/
Leveraging Social Media
Finally, social media platforms are invaluable tools for reaching a broad audience and fostering engagement. The key is to share content consistently: regularly posting updates, articles, and case studies on platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook can help keep your audience engaged. Social media is also where you can build a community for your product and brand. Ensure you engage with followers via comments, direct messages, and community groups.
Data-driven insights
Every strategy you implement to boost your GTM, attract new customers, or try new marketing techniques needs to be supported by solid data analysis. Monitoring and analyzing relevant data will ensure you :
- To make the right decisions.
- To Invest in strong strategies to meet customer needs.
- To optimize your efforts.
Analytics
Tracking user behavior is the foundation of data-driven insights. Specialized tools can help you access and monitor valuable information on how users interact with your product. These tools help you examine user journeys, feature usage, and drop-off points more closely.
For example, a SaaS company might discover through analysis that a particular feature is underutilized, prompting targeted tutorials or redesign efforts to increase engagement.
Further, regularly gathering customer feedback through surveys and NPS tracking can provide insights into customer loyalty (e.g., by asking how likely they are to recommend your product to others). High NPS scores indicate strong customer satisfaction, while low scores highlight areas needing improvement.
Here are some key metrics to monitor and analyze:
- User acquisition rates: Track the number of new users gained over a specific period.
- Churn rates: Measure the rate at which customers stop using your service.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Calculate the total revenue expected from a customer over the duration of their relationship with your company.
- Feature usage: Identify which features are most and least used.
- Engagement rates: Measure how often users interact with your product.
- Conversion rates: Track the percentage of users who take a desired action, such as subscribing or purchasing.
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Measure customer satisfaction with your product or service.
Marketing strategies
Personalizing marketing efforts is an effective strategy for attracting and retaining customers. This involves customizing emails and offers based on user behavior and preferences.
To do so, you need to segment your audience based on factors such as industry, company size, and behavior; before adapting and delivering relevant content to each segment, which will improve engagement and conversion rates. For example, you can decide to send personalized onboarding emails based on the specific features a new user interacted with during their trial period.
Personalization is important in attracting and maintaining an audience for your product: about 80% of industry leaders say customers spend more (around 34% more) when they experience a personalized experience.
Additionally, Alexis Klahr, CFO at Kolsquare, recommends segmenting your data by customer size, region, or product lines to help tailor retention strategies to specific segments, thereby improving overall customer retention and profitability. Analyzing churn by different customer segments can reveal which groups are more likely to leave and why.
Finally, it is recommended to experiment with different marketing approaches and measure their effectiveness using A/B testing methods. This allows businesses to evaluate variants of a marketing tool, such as an email, landing page, website or ad, and measure which one performs better.
Overall, by leveraging your data, you can tailor your strategies and spend your resources where it matters the most to grow your customer base and maintain a large audience.
Conclusion
In conclusion, attracting and retaining an audience for your SaaS product requires understanding your target audience through market research, creating buyer personas, and developing a go-to-market strategy. This includes conducting surveys, analyzing market data, and engaging on social media. Use personalized marketing and continuous content creation like blogs and webinars to keep your audience engaged.
Going forward, you can focus on building a community around your product and leveraging customer feedback for continuous improvement. Engage with your audience through personalized communication and interactive content, and regularly evaluate your strategies to ensure they align with evolving customer needs and market trends to help grow and maintain a loyal customer base for your business.
