Everyone’s interested these days, in how to sell software as a service. Being one of the biggest burgeoning industries out there, allowing niche software designs to become practical to design and market, it opens up a ton of room to capitalize on new ideas and innovate in whole new industries.
However, just as SaaS itself is a new way of looking at the purpose of the web, and the nature of software’s future, it requires a new way of thinking with advertising and sales, as well. With that in mind, we’re going to talk about how to sell software as a service through online media platforms.
Of course, given the web-based nature of SaaS, most of its advertising is going to be digital and web-based as well. Most people today spend more time with the internet as their main means of communications and media access, where radio, television and print are fading into obscurity.
People are far less receptive to these advertising models, even when they use the media they circulate over, as well. Commercial interruptions in television and radio broadcasts are rude, obnoxious and desensitizing, and they just don’t work the way they used to.
So, given the digital nature of SaaS, and the paradigm shift in marketing overall, have made the web just the obvious place to go. Online media consists of three overall marketing platforms, overall, that you can use.
The first is outright advertisement, integrating banners, interstitials and the like into web content, and pre-roll ads into video players. The problem here is that people avidly use ad blockers (I confess I do), because these have gotten just as obnoxious as the linear media advertising models they replaced.
Another way to sell your SaaS online is to use SEO. SEO, or search engine optimization, is mostly summarized by designing your page’s meta tags to comply with search engine indexing. Along with this, you place keywords matching popular searches organically into the text content to certain densities.
These all result in bringing higher ranks in search results. With SEO marketing to sell your stuff, you also cover a large part of the base of taking care of publishing lots of information about your software, comparisons to competition, and open discussion of the many things it can do, or problems it can solve.
There’s also the social media marketing strategy, which isn’t just good for SaaS but for everyone. We’ve talked about it in the past.
Now, with internet marketing as your base, the best way to sell to people is to go freemium. While freemium has its obstacles to overcome like any other model, it also gives people the freedom to dabble in what you are selling, and if they like it, to upgrade and pay.
So, using solid internet media to market, and direct users to a free trial or free lower echelon version of your SaaS is the easy ramp and platform with which to bring in customers in the current business and cultural climates.
If you want to know how to sell software as a service, this is a good starting point. But, don’t stop your research here!
