With product-led growth gaining more popularity, product marketing is also rising. But what exactly is the role of product marketing in SaaS? 

Product marketing aims to promote the right features of a product to the right audience at the right time, showcasing the product's value to both potential and existing users. Product marketing focuses on user conversion and retention more than creating initial interest. 

While the role of a product marketer varies between companies, each product marketing team is tasked with implementing the three pillars of product marketing:

  • Bringing a product to market

  • Promoting the product

  • Selling the product to customers 

Let's take a look at the key elements of product marketing and how to measure its impact: 

What is SaaS product marketing? 

SaaS product marketing is the tactics and strategies applied to software products to generate demand and drive end-user adoption and retention of the product. It focuses on consistently delivering value to users while taking steps to reduce churn and increase customer retention and account expansion (like upgraded subscriptions.) 

Best practices for SaaS product marketing strategies include:

  • User-centered mindset

  • Continuous feedback loops

  • Personalized messaging

  • Data-informed decisions 

What is the role of SaaS product marketing?

Product marketing helps with product messaging, positioning, and lower funnel marketing campaigns. Product marketers are usually responsible for in-app messaging, upselling, cross-selling, and communicating new updates and features. 

Since SaaS products often change with new UI updates, bug fixes, and feature implementations, it is the role of product marketers to: 

  • Drive user adoption across stages of the customer funnel (activation, adoption, retention, referral)

  • Reduce churn 

  • Seek out opportunities for user account expansion

The main difference between product marketing and traditional marketing

What makes product marketing in SaaS different from traditional marketing? Traditional marketing centers around acquiring leads for the sales team. SaaS product marketing uses the product as the primary driver of customer acquisition through freemium models and free trials.

Traditional marketing concentrates on acquiring leads for the sales team, who try to convert them into paying customers. 

SaaS product marketing, in contrast, concentrates on using the product as the main driver to encourage free trial and freemium model signups. 

On the other hand, product marketing uses your product as the main driver of acquisition. This is achieved by getting potential customers to test out the product through trials and freemium models.

Why product marketing automation strategies are essential for SaaS

First off, what exactly is marketing automation? 

Marketing automation uses technologies and tools to automate repetitive tasks efficiently that would otherwise require resources. These tools help perform tasks (like in-app support, user onboarding, lead generation, analytics, and more). 

Marketing automation strategies encompass all facets of your marketing (and often sales), including:

  • Communication channels like social media, email, and text

  • The customer journey, from a first-time visit to repeat visits from an engaged user

  • All marketing tools and tech stacks 

Product marketing automation tools can help SaaS teams with:

  • Staying in touch with users, leads, and customers to create long-term engagement 

  • Giving leads and prospects important pre-sign up information

  • Sharing relevant content with users to help them understand the product (like tooltips or onboarding tours) 

  • Assisting potential customers as they move through the buyer’s journey 

  • Creating cross-channel synergy between different marketing strategies or web apps 

How to measure the success of SaaS product marketing 

To see the success of SaaS product marketing, you'll want to measure each KPI: key performance indicator. KPI describes a metric that tracks performance, and a product marketing KPI is a metric implemented to measure the impact and implementation of product marketing efforts and strategies. 

KPIs help teams understand if they're meeting their business goals or how close or far off they are to achieving them. 

Some examples of product marketing KPIs include: 

  • Revenue KPIs: Net revenue, gross revenue 

  • Product marketing KPIs: Number of signups, customer lifetime value, product usage

  • Product management KPIs: Customer acquisition cost, activation rate, retention rate

Great product marketing focuses on the user, nails brand messaging, is timed for the market, and offers creative and out-of-the-box solutions. Now that you have a solid understanding of all SaaS product marketing encompasses, it's time to set goals and implement post-launch product marketing strategies to drive product adoption. Give Lou a try if you're looking for helpful automation like user onboarding, feature announcements, and out-of-the-box analytics to measure and iterate.

Published on April 8th, 2022