What the next decade will look like for SaaS marketing
5 insights from marketing teams at India’s top SaaS companies
For the last few years, Dave Gerhardt of Drift has been saying something over and over again.
I’m paraphrasing here.
With CACs rising, and so many software products coming to market every month, there is only one way to be remarkable to your audience: Be authentic, and build a brand that is memorable, aspirational, and is clear about what it stands for.
He’s right.
At this point of time, everything else in the playbook of traditional SaaS marketing is table stakes. The blog, the white papers, PR, SEO, influencers, and so on. You have to do them, of course, but that won’t give you an advantage. Advantages have to be wrested now from product, branding, and wherever else you can get an advantage from. It’s going to be a challenge, one not many companies are prepared for.
But as with all challenges there’s opportunity.
Building a SaaS brand in the post-product decade is going to be difficult to do, which means that organisations ambiguous or half-hearted will not be able to plan and execute at the level that is now required. And the organisation that is actually ready to put in the time, effort, and changes necessary to achieve this, will go places.
With this as a starting point, I have tried to distill what marketing for Indian SaaS companies will look like in the 2020s, where the best teams are going to invest, what they are going to be working on, and what they will consider important.
I spoke to marketers from India’s top SaaS companies for the insights and ideas in this essay, and to executives in other roles.
Here goes.
1. Branding and storytelling are back
I’ve already written an essay about this. But let me illustrate with an example.
Basecamp hired a head of marketing for the first time last year. On their podcast, they laid out the way they had thought through the whole process. And in one episode, Jason Fried casually talked about how the new marketing hire understood that Basecamp was not just a product, but an elevated way to work.
You might not immediately realise it, but he’s making a pitch. And it’s brilliantly done. In saying something completely different, he’s making a point about what he thinks Basecamp is: an elevated way to work.
This is how brands get built. Repeat this often enough, and everyone believes it.
This kind of myth-making is not easy to do, but as is evident here, this has to start from the C-suite and taken to execution by the marketing and GTM teams.
Andy Didorosi, the new head of marketing at Basecamp, was hired not because he had the marketing pedigree that you expect someone who applies to Basecamp should have. In fact, he does not. He was hired because he is an amazing storyteller. He worked hard to make his earlier social enterprise a success, as he talks about in the podcast, and he knew how to communicate what they did with the world.
This is why he was hired, and though we perhaps won’t define it in quite this way, storytelling is going to be the marketer’s defining skill in this coming decade.
2. The funnel is out, the flywheel is in
Brian Balfour’s incredibly influential essay first introduced this idea in 2018, and I’ve honestly been surprised more marketers haven’t understood and applied its import. I’ve certainly tried to do this at imocha, and at the product I was working on before this: Freshmarketer.
But let’s get back to what the flywheel actually means.
In Balfour’s words:
The fastest growing products are better represented as a system of loops, not funnels. Loops are closed systems where the inputs through some process generates more of an output that can be reinvested in the input. There are growth loops that serve different value creation including new users, returning users, defensibility, or efficiency.
Let me try to phrase this in simpler, tactical terms — A wheel of great content, efficient mark-ops, well-executed sales collateral, topical outbound mails, and so on put together will create a compounding loop of growth that will build a sustainable marketing engine for you. Bear in mind that doing just two of these, three of these, won’t work — not in the way you want it to. But get them all working together, you may have in your hands, literally, a growth engine.
This is one of those ideas that is difficult to stop thinking about once you’ve come across it.
3. Content is still king, but the bar is way, way higher
Consider case studies.
In Freshworks’ early days, I was told by Girish (my CEO) at least twice or thrice to have a look at how VWO (Wingify’s flagship product) had organised its case studies.
The current design is good, but at that time it was probably best-in-class. That a prospect could look through the success stories herself for examples that pertain to her and then make a decision, probably drove more conversions than numbers showed.
This was not just great content, it was great content delivered at the right time and in the precise format that would have an impact.
Today, the bar is even higher.
Consider two case studies, one TOFU, one BOFU. The TOFU one will be story-driven, easier to access and read. The BOFU one will delve into detail, go into numbers, explain deployment specifics, spell out advantages for the people who work on this project, and so on. The first case study is for the marketing team, and the second case study is for the sales team, to help them close.
This is just one content type as an example. And case studies are easily the most straightforward of the lot. This approach/model will be applied to more and more content going forward.
Which means content marketers will need to up their game. Like really, really up their game.
4. The rise of the central marketing team
As SaaS companies, we are competing against the world now, which means that at times we’ll have to fight them on their own turf. This means global PR, planning and executing events (online summits for now), presenting and speaking at conventions with worldwide reach (webinars for now), raising a community for your product(s), and so on.
All of this is exactly as tough as it sounds, and traditional product marketing teams are ill-equipped for this kind of effort at scale. Even relatively large Indian SaaS companies have struggled with this and end up doing this ad-hoc, resulting in a shoddy brand experience (any founder/top executive who’s reading this knows what I mean).
But this just isn’t viable anymore. Your American/British/Israeli competitor is going to do these things as well, and if you do a half-baked job, he’s going to walk happily away with deals which could have been yours.
Which is why we will see more and more central marketing teams being raised in India. If you are thinking about marketing in this decade and not paying some sort of attention to this, well, that’s going to be on you.
5. Speed as a competitive advantage
Paras Chopra, my CEO at Wingify, used to say something quite often: That everything there is to learn about SaaS marketing or marketing software in general, is out there on the internet, and someone willing to learn needed only motivation. Everything else, including the opportunity to apply it, was open and available to the marketer.
I agreed with him then, and I agree with him now.
The competitive advantage the modern marketing team has isn’t information or technology or superior marketing operations. These can be caught up on. It’s speed.
Speed is going to be your competitive advantage.
Which is the thought I’m leaving you with.
Every SaaS company in the country has at one time or another strategised about everything I’ve talked about above. Even three or four years ago, an approach way less sophisticated than this would have been enough for growth of some sort. Not today, though, and certainly not in the next decade.
Whoever understands these insights and their implications, tailors them into a tactical and strategic vision for their organisations, and executes ruthlessly and fast, is going to win.