In the competitive world of Software as a Service (SaaS), generating buzz and driving success requires a well-crafted public relations (PR) strategy. With countless SaaS companies vying for attention, it’s essential to stand out from the crowd and captivate your target audience. In this article, we will dive into the ultimate SaaS PR strategy that will help your brand generate buzz and drive success.
Whether you’re a startup or an established SaaS company, mastering the art of PR is crucial for building brand awareness, attracting new customers, and gaining industry credibility. From crafting compelling press releases and conducting media outreach to strategically leveraging social media and influencer partnerships, we’ll explore proven PR tactics that will make your SaaS brand shine. By incorporating keyword-focused content and harnessing the power of storytelling, you can create a memorable brand narrative that resonates with your target market. Join us as we unlock the secrets of successful SaaS PR and discover the strategies that can skyrocket your brand’s visibility and growth in this fiercely competitive industry.
Typically, a successful PR plan includes elements designed to grab the consumer’s interest with your product at the top of the sales funnel. Once you’ve captured someone’s attention, you need to lure them along the buyer’s journey and eventually encourage them to make a purchase. Furthermore, developing a valuable PR plan for your business optimizes ROI by ensuring that your material is designed for success. Ultimately, the best SaaS companies strike an optimal balance between innovation and utility. In order to succeed, you must provide something unique and unusual, as well as something that makes perfect sense. In this article, we will look at building the best PR strategy for your SaaS startup.
Why Your SaaS Company Needs PR
1) Helps you gain market visibility
The SaaS market is becoming increasingly saturated as the SaaS model grows in popularity, particularly in hotbeds like San Francisco. As a result, public relations is critical in raising awareness about how your SaaS company stands out from the competition and why you matter in the market as a whole. Even if you’ve just launched the next Salesforce, no one will know until you and the media outlets that matter to your prospects are talking about it.
2) Positions your brand in a prominent spot
When providing material to reporters, you must find a means to communicate your overarching value proposition to prospects properly. It’s easy to become lost in jargon in a specialized field. A condensed message can work as the perfect building block for your initial PR positioning. The businesses with the most successful media outreach are usually those that have mastered the art of the 30-second sales pitch (which is vital to staying alive in the dog-eat-dog world of SaaS). Once you’ve already hammered down your opening messaging, it’ll be a lot easier to construct your company story with your target media from there.
3) Cuts down long, complicated sales cycles
Long, convoluted sales cycles are typical in SaaS organizations, primarily if you have a mid-to-large-sized business. That’s where SaaS PR can help by generating materials that your sales team can use to answer inquiries and provide further information to prospects during the sales process. These assets can take the form of a thought leadership article that answers prospects’ questions about why their company needs a solution like yours to solve a specific problem. A product feature that walks prospects through the ins and outs of your solution’s capabilities, or a case study that shows real-world results are both good ways to do tthis. Your sales team can use these media placements as sales assets to proactively address prospects’ queries and concerns, resulting in a faster sales cycle for your company.
How To Build A Compelling SEO and PR Strategy For SaaS
Three alarming numbers are from a recent publication by BMC in September 2021:
- The SaaS market is now increasing at an annual rate of 18%.
- By the end of 2021, 99% of businesses will have implemented one or more SaaS solutions.
- Almost 78% of small enterprises have previously made a SaaS investment.
1) Market research
The research phase of any effective process begins with assessing your market, audience, competitors, and brand perception. In addition to your current resources, it’s critical to determine who your online competitors are, bearing in mind that these may differ from the competitors that your company’s executive team is aware of. You must decide who your competitors will be both on social media and in search engines.
Your competitor list is crucial because it will be impossible to grasp how to beat them if you don’t analyze their ads, landing pages, content, domain authority, website experience, and so on. A question that needs to be raised in the research process is how will your customers find you? In order to determine how your customers will find you, it’s important to figure out what words and phrases potential clients and customers are using to find brands like yours. Identifying the most commonly used keywords in your niche will help you to optimize your online presence. By using these keywords in your content, you’ll make it easier for customers to find you through organic searches across different search engines. You can figure out what keywords clients associate with your services by asking a few basic questions:
- What are the topics of their discussions?
- What words do people use to characterize your service?
- What are the questions they’re posing?
- Which terms reveal their intentions and intended outcomes?
PR outreach and link building are crucial for a cohesive organic approach. It is critical to learn the language of your target market. This will help you to talk to them in a way that they can relate to.
2) Craft engaging blog content
You’ve done your research. You’re aware of the search terms and keywords that your SaaS company is aiming for. You’ve identified a gap in the market that you need to fill. It is now time to get to work on developing compelling content. The best part is that the rules don’t change just because you’re a SaaS company. Here are our best tips for creating standout content:
- Make your title as keyword-friendly as possible. Just as your product should do what it says on the tin, your content should deliver what you promise in the headline.
- Link to relevant sources, such as products, services, and other relevant blogs on your own page, as well as external ones.
- Include data to give your piece more authority and to give your messages more weight.
- Include feedback and ideas from relevant individuals and stakeholders. This will come in handy when you’re trying to generate publicity.
- Develop a distinct tone of voice. You want your reader to enjoy reading your content and be dying to devour the article you’re writing.
- Include the targeted keyword, but don’t stuff it in. Dropping your keyword into every sentence will not only turn your readers off but will also get you penalized by search engines that will decrease your ranking.
Pressfarm is a PR agency that helps startups and established companies create memorable content to capture attention in the media as well as among their target audience. Their PR experts and writers work with companies to help them understand what it takes to stand out in their niche and create quality content that makes heads turn. With a professional press release, some compelling feature articles, and a creative media kit from Pressfarm, your brand can make a splash in your industry.
By submitting your brand to the right media outlets and startup directories, Pressfarm can boost your online presence, ensuring you rank in relevant search results. With a custom media list as well as a database of 1 million+ bloggers, journalists, and influencers, you can connect with the best storytellers and thought leaders in your niche. One of Pressfarm’s affordable PR packages could be exactly what you need to take your brand to the next level.
3) Build your SaaS website authority through link building and digital PR
Another critical aspect of any SaaS SEO strategy is site authority. Your site authority is determined by the number and quality of backlinks pointing to your website from other websites. While it’s critical to get many backlinks to your site, you should prioritize quality over quantity. Getting backlinks from quality sites will act as valuable social proof and establish you as a thought leader in the industry.
Link building tactics
We have four practical ideas for you to consider when it comes to SaaS-specific link building:
- Partnerships for integrations – If your SaaS product interfaces with other tools, you might reach out to the firms that your tool integrates with to see if you can be added to their integrations directory.
- Strategic partnerships – Your platform may not directly interact with other tools. Nevertheless, you might find that if users use it together with other tools, they have a better experience. For a time, let’s assume you’re writing a blog post. In this case, it can be helpful to write a blog article on your site about this suggestion, and then contact the other companies you mentioned to see if they’d be happy to link to and promote the piece you wrote about them on their social media accounts.
- Exclusive Data – SaaS products frequently collect a lot of fascinating user data that can be organized and used to bring value to others. Some of this information might be categorized into intriguing subjects to provide valuable insight on your website. In addition, other thought leaders in your industry might want to use some of this data on their sites as well. If other people are interested in this data, you can share it with them in return for them mentioning your brand as the source.
Securing high-ranking coverage and links for your SaaS brand through digital PR
There are many ways to generate links back to your brand or product. The most effective way to do this is by creating expert-led, valuable content as part of a digital PR campaign designed to capture attention and generate coverage for your brand. There is a myriad of ways to go about this:
- Develop expert opinion pieces and long-form essays directed at trade journals. These are examples of thought leadership pieces. They’re frequently centered on topics pertaining to the SaaS industry, its services, or its products. The technological market is massive, yet we all know who runs Tesla, Microsoft, and Amazon. Do you promote your company’s brains? Employees are the most valuable asset and the backbone of your success, so letting the press hear their thoughts and ideas is a terrific way to show off your company’s personality.
- Develop longer forms of thought-leadership content in the shape of whitepapers or eGuides. SaaS goods and services pervade practically every industry in this digital-first age, and organizations are constantly seeking professional advice. Producing whitepapers and eGuides on specific themes, such as the industry’s future or the growth of automation and new services will establish your firm as an industry leader and a “go-to” for enterprises. This is an effective way to grow your email list and generate sales leads.
-
Foundational PR is a phrase used at Hallam to explain the fundamentals of public relations. Foundational PR can be as basic as sending out press releases to provide business information and updates. You can use a well-developed press release to announce new hires (especially those who are well-known thought leaders or come with a wealth of experience), new product launches, or new initiatives.
- Newsjacking — while journalists receive hundreds of emails each day, they also use the internet to find answers to their questions. SaaS is a rapidly growing industry, and journalists are more interested in it. You can propose using your company experts as a tiny part of a larger news story. In order to do this, you need to use tools like Twitter ( use the #JournoRequest hashtag) and Response Source to find trending news topics and find out how you can plug your brand story into this bigger story. This strategy will prove to be quite beneficial if you keep it basic, relevant, and timely.
- Creative campaigns — Combine storytelling, creativity, technology, and data to produce exciting content on your owned media. These pieces have interesting hooks, are data-driven, and are designed to ensure that when your story is published, several journalists will link back to you as the source.
A perfect balance of all of these PR strategies will boost your SEO strategy. With the right content strategy, you can create valuable content that other brands in your industry will be happy to link to when they’re developing their own content. Earning links from other thought leaders is a major contributor to the growth of your SaaS company’s domain authority and online presence.
4) Implementing a thorough amplification strategy
Let’s assume that you’ve created a piece of engaging and instructive material on the SaaS sector. You’ve reused and promoted it to gain high-quality, high-ranking backlinks to your home or service page. A blog post and some PR outreach efforts will get your message out there. Even so, you need to use your owned media to make sure this content gets magnified even more. After all, your owned channels are under your control, so they’re much easier to use. Let us look at how to do this:
- Social media: The initial step is to make sure you reach out to your ‘direct’ audience via social media. Owned social media networks are the best way to show off your personality and tone of voice. Social media platforms are also a valuable resource for expanding your industry knowledge.
- Employee advocacy: It’s important to invest in the people who help you run your brand, regardless of whether you’re a SaaS company, a clothes store, or a meal delivery service. Thanks to your employees, your audience has a connection to the brand. By adopting an employee advocacy strategy, you can ensure that your content is shared beyond the company.
- Email Marketing: When used properly, an email marketing strategy can be a powerful weapon for building relationships, increasing ROI, and increasing engagement. Email is your most effective tool for personalizing your content and reaching out to your customers directly.
Conclusion:
SaaS is a fast-growing and competitive sector. In order to stand out, your SaaS firm should be producing content that is influenced by thorough keyword research and with the primary goal of guiding people through your sales funnel. It’s also important not to focus solely on generating earned media for your brand. While it’s always nice to have thought leaders and journalists in your industry saying nice things about you, it’s also important to use your owned media to connect with your target audience in an authentic way. Creating valuable content that other people want to quote will also help with increasing website and brand authority and attracting high-quality, relevant links. By combining all these tactics into a fluid approach, you’ll give your SaaS company the best chance of shining.