Contents
B2B SaaS Marketing Series | Part 1
There are many channels and ways to reach your customer.
My favourite is through Facebook Advertising.
Why?
Scalability with Facebook Advertising
With content marketing or Google Search Ads, you’re limited to the number of people that are actively looking for a solution. With Facebook, you can reach a much wider audience and target with a fairly high degree of accuracy.
It’s interesting to see that a lot of SaaS companies that spend a ton of money on Google Ads, LinkedIn and Twitter but not on Facebook which means that there’s that much more opportunity for those that are doing FB ads.
My guess for this is that there’s probably still a misconception that FB/IG is only for social stuff since you’re not there for work but rather to chill and check out your friends’ updates.
I’ve converted enough B2B SaaS priced anywhere from $20 to $1000+ (enterprise plans) per month directly from Facebook and Instagram to say that there’s a good chance it will work for your SaaS business.
Focus
Once you’re driving paid traffic, you pay attention to your entire funnel. Since you’re spending money, you’re more likely to be disciplined, otherwise you’re just throwing money down the drain.
Once traffic starts coming, you can analyze where the bottlenecks are and test different hypotheses to overcome those bottlenecks.
Maybe the visitor doesn’t understand how they can benefit from using your software? Maybe you’ve targeted the wrong people? Maybe the pricing is confusing? Maybe your website looks scammy?
Going through this exercise will ensure that you get your fundamentals right including a product market fit, that your offer is compelling and your messaging is on point.
Some people seem to think that just having affiliates will solve all of their sales problems. The truth is that no serious affiliate wants to expend money and effort on broken websites. They do however want to promote businesses that have a sales funnel that actually works since they know it’s going to convert clicks to trials and sales.
Getting Started
Know Your Customer
You’ll need a detailed idea of who your ideal customer is so that you know the ways you can reach your prospect and the language you’ll use to reach them.
A few questions to get you started:
- What does the typical day look like for your customer?
- What does their environment look like?
- Where do they hangout? What websites do they regularly visit?
- What publications do they read?
- What are their world views? Beliefs?
- What are their frustrations?
- What do they usually read?
- What other software do they use?
- Do they use a software similar to yours? What existing solutions are they using instead of your software?
- What’s in it for the customer to use your product?
- How is it unique?
- How do they know they can trust you?
- Why do they need to use the software now?
- What kind of purchasing power do they have?
I’ll generally answer these questions on Roam Research (I previously used Google Drive for this which will of course more than suffice) and will continually update it as I learn along the way.
Use these questions to help you build your customer avatar. There’s a good resource from HubSpot on this.
Building Your Facebook Audience
After building up the customer avatar, I’ll brainstorm interests.
I’ll start with a list of all relevant interests along with the size of the audience. To speed up the process, I use ConnectExplore.
Let’s say that we have a software that’s useful for farmers.
I’ll start my search with a bunch of keywords that I think is relevant.
I’ll also check competitor rankings on SimilarWeb and SEMRush to see if there are other keywords and ideas that might be useful and add them to the list as well. Once I’ve got a list, ConnectExplore will show me similar interests.
I’ll go through these and add the relevant ones to my list.
Next, I’ll go through my list of other software products that customers may already be using as well as other major products generally (like machinery brand names).
There might be some big players already on the market that either directly competes with our software. This is something that will result from the research process above but you can usually gather such data from industry publications. It’s also useful to look at which companies have advertised on industry journals and publications generally. If they’re not major players, they’re less likely to have an interest you can target.
Now I’ll start filtering the interests. I’ll look for a balance between the most relevant and ideal audience size. The selection will be driven by how big the ad budget is. If we’ve got a small budget, then go for extremely relevant and smaller audiences. If you’ve got a larger budget, then you can go wider and loosen the audience selection.
You might get people suggesting that you should just go with broad targeting. My experience is that when your targeting is very specific as is the case with a lot of SaaS businesses, then it generally doesn’t make much sense to start with very broad targeting, especially if your pixel isn’t trained.
In the next article in the series, I’ll show you how to build up the Facebook Campaigns and what campaign goals you should optimize for.
Let me know if you have any questions in the meantime.
Stay tuned!