Global Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies have experienced tremendous opportunities for growth in the past decade. As of 2021, this industry is worth $152.18 billion. Investors are particularly in favor of these companies as they generate consistent cash flows.
SaaS businesses end-user spending worldwide from 2015 to 2023
However, the Russia-Ukraine war and pandemic-induced economic crisis have signaled several possibilities of recession in the upcoming years. This has risked the growth possibilities of SaaS companies.
In fact, majorities of SaaS startups are struggling with two critical challenges - generating fresh leads and retaining existing clients. Most SaaS startups are plunging towards varied cost-cutting measures as a preventive measure.
Nevertheless, cost-cutting can chop down your revenue streams further! SaaS companies should shift toward a performance marketing mindset to stand out in this situation.
This blog will discuss how SaaS companies should prioritize outbound and demand generation and performance marketing activities to cope with the global recession.
Quick Fixes to Survive through the Global Recession
Ideally, outbound and demand generation strategies are key in SaaS lead generation and retention processes. However, the approaches followed by these two forms of marketing are completely different.
Outbound marketing is about reaching out to the prospect or customer directly. On the contrary, demand generation is another lead generation and retention approach where marketers follow a planned, step-by-step framework to grab prospects’ attention.
Unlike outbound marketing, where the sales team finds the prospects, in demand generation, the prospects develop an interest in your services and eventually find you.
Demand generation is essential for your business as it helps you achieve the following:
- Demand generation is all about enhancing brand awareness by creating solid content in the digital space.
- Demand generation techniques help businesses to generate high-intent leads effortlessly.
- Appropriate B2B demand generation strategies can create multiple growth opportunities for SaaS businesses, including high revenue earning potential and low acquisition cost.
The success of a demand generation campaign lies in building trust and nurturing a prospect over time to convert them into loyal customers.
Demand generation process
Outbound marketing activities also have their fair share of benefits. Here is how outbound marketing can help out businesses:
- Outbound marketing equals shorter sales cycles for SaaS companies. With appropriate outbound strategies, businesses can target valuable leads and convert them in the first attempt.
- Outbound marketing activities are your key to entering overseas markets. These strategies are perfect for SaaS businesses to conduct quick A/B tests and evaluate whether their product is in-demand in the international markets.
- Outbound marketing tactics can make your brand famous within a short span! Unlike demand generation strategies, where brand awareness happens slowly, outbound marketing can quickly create a buzz around your products and services to grab prospects’ attention.
While demand generation and outbound marketing strategies have some critical advantages, one question still pertains here.
Should a SaaS business rely solely on either strategy to fight the global recession? Let’s find out in the next section.
Should SaaS companies solely rely on any one of the demand generation or outbound activities?
Until now, we explained the advantages of demand generation and outbound marketing. However, there is more to it. Trust us when we say demand generation and outbound marketing come with a few challenges.
Let us explain those quickly.
Challenges of demand generation
- Demand generation is all about consistency. You need a well-planned content strategy that discusses your consumers' changing needs and consistent efforts to execute them.
- Demand generation is probably not for you if you are in a hurry to see results overnight. It needs a lot of time and patience. Inbound marketers go through several rounds of trial and error before identifying the appropriate SEO strategy for their companies.
- Demand generation involves a lot of activities like creating and optimizing the website, managing social media accounts, creating different forms of engaging content, and so on. It is a joint effort. It is not a single person’s task.
Challenges of outbound marketing
- Attracting quality leads is possibly the biggest challenge of outbound marketing. Marketers spend a lot on outbound lead generation, only to find leads that don’t qualify for the basic conversion criteria.
- What if the sales reps spend their valuable time to qualify a lead, and it doesn’t convert even after reaching the conversion stage? Such things are not rare in outbound marketing. It happens mostly because of a long and complex sales process.
- Sometimes marketers are so focused on outbound activities that they miss out on tracking prospect activities. As a result, they cannot distinguish between high-intent and low-intent prospects and lose opportunities.
As we told you at the beginning of this section, demand generation and outbound marketing are not easy!
A more effective approach is - performance marketing. More on this in the next section.
The solution for SaaS businesses is - Performance Marketing!
Performance marketing is a result-driven marketing approach. Instead of relying solely on demand generation or outbound marketing, performance marketing focuses on multiple channels like social media, videos, search engines, and more with a single goal - improving performance.
The performance marketing process
Performance marketers track the number of clicks, impressions, shares, and sales generated by an advertisement and plan their ad spending accordingly.
If SaaS businesses embrace performance marketing in its full functionality, the opportunities for scaling become huge! Here’s why:
Performance marketing is recession-proof
Performance marketing helps businesses to keep their ad campaigns up and running. This means that even though the recession hits an organization, it can expect some revenue streams through performance marketing campaigns. During the recession, such supplement income streams can make a lot of difference for small businesses.
Performance marketing also helps organizations with significant data points to fine-tune their ad campaigns. This means higher efficiency and visibility. During the recession, all businesses are a little tight on the budget. Performance marketing ensures that return is maximized and ineffective spending areas are removed from the marketing campaigns.
Performance marketing is trackable
Traditional marketing would demand spending money on ads without knowing whether they generated sales. Performance marketing is far more transparent and enables you to track every click. Hence the trackability of performance marketing is based on real results.
In performance marketing, SaaS companies can pay only for successful transactions. Here, each transaction defines buyers’ actions. Performance marketing provides complete visibility into the Click-to-consumer path for each prospect. Hence, deciding which path or channel you should spend more on is easier for better results.
Lower risk, higher ROI
In performance marketing, you only pay when the desired action takes place. Therefore, the customer acquisition cost is much lower, with high ROI earning potential. Hence, marketers are left with more budgets to explore various performance marketing initiatives and boost growth.
Performance marketing quickly diversifies your revenue stream
Performance marketers are a team of marketing sensations who can promote your brand across different channels. Some of them are experts in niche-specific markets and can help your SaaS brand reach its targeted audiences.
Therefore, with performance marketing by your side, you don’t need to focus on a single sales channel. Hence, even if a particular channel lags in generating sales, multiple other channels exist to explore.
Tripledart Digital is APAC’s #1 Performance Marketing Agency!
Are you looking for a result-driven SaaS performance marketing agency that relies on data to multiply your growth?
Well, you have reached the right destination - Tripledart Digital!
We are a team of performance marketers who know how to blend different marketing approaches to create the best lead generation formula for your brand. Our strategies are 100% compatible with the changing algorithms of social media and search engines.
Here’s why you should talk to us at the earliest:
- We have a dedicated team of SEO experts, PPC specialists, content marketers, and designers, with remarkable SaaS marketing experience.
- We execute campaigns based on your business objectives and priorities.
- We don’t stop after execution. We track each campaign thoroughly to know what’s working and not!
- We never leave you in darkness. We always connect with you over proactive Slack communication to check in on your requirements.
Book an intro call with us and discuss how we can help you!
