SaaS marketing is no simple task. It’s vastly more difficult than marketing a pair of shoes or a laptop, where what the buyer receives is obvious. There is more nuance to a SaaS solution, and that can cause some marketing challenges.
First, you are selling something nonphysical. Your buyers can’t just scroll through five different-angled pictures and fully grasp the use of the product. Second, software is complex for the average buyer — especially for those who lack any technical experience. Third, your SaaS product is constantly evolving. Your product team is always developing new features.
Intangibility and constant change can make it difficult to present a unified message about your product. Luckily, affiliate marketing for SaaS can help you overcome many of these challenges.
With affiliate marketing, you’re able to reach a larger and more sales-ready audience. For instance, they might read a blog post about a problem they are having and come across your solution in the article. That way, they will see your product in a contextualized environment and will therefore more easily grasp how it helps them.
The goal is for your solution to find them when they need it most. That’s much more effective than running a Google ad.
How to Improve Affiliate Marketing for a SaaS Company
Let’s go over some tips so that you can master affiliate marketing for SaaS.
Search for Your Brand Mentions
There might be some brands in your industry who are already writing about your solution. Track them down and ask them to be your affiliates. Why would they say no to monetizing their work? Find these people by using a tool like Google Alerts or Awario.
Check their websites and see if each one could be a good fit to market for your company. If there is a risk that they might hurt your brand reputation or send you lousy leads that end up wasting your time, move on to the next prospect.
If you like what you see, reach out to them through email. You want to convince them to join your affiliate program, so it’s best to include the following in your outreach:
- An offer to demo your product for them
- The benefits of marketing for you as an affiliate
- Your affiliate commission rates for leads, customers, and more
Make it easy for them to sign up for your program, too.
Partner With SaaS Niche Affiliates
In affiliate marketing for SaaS, it’s critical to find the right partners — affiliates who can easily explain your offering’s benefits and how it functions.
You’ll have more luck if you stick to influencers, bloggers, vloggers, and thought leaders in the SaaS niche, as they have experience explaining complex SaaS tools. Plus, they will already have an audience of tech-hungry buyers, some of whom might suffer the exact problem that your solution solves. Finding affiliates in the SaaS niche means getting highly-qualified leads for you.
When your affiliate marketers are established in the tech world, their readers will be more trusting of their recommendations, too. An audience like this is more likely to click that link leading to your website.
Work With Other SaaS Brands
Are there some popular non-competitive SaaS tools with which your solution integrates? If so, strike up a conversation with someone from that business and figure out a way to promote each other’s products.
Let’s say a company sells a mobile app that helps property managers do inspections. Perhaps there is a larger property management software that its customers often use in tandem with its app. The app company might reach out to that big brand and see if they can collaborate to provide each other with more leads.
They could do this for each other in a variety of ways, such as:
- Write blog posts reviewing each other’s products, using affiliate links
- Come out with a collaborative article about the power of using the two tools together
- Use promo codes and coupons for each other’s customers
- Create a recommendations page on their websites, each including the other’s solution and affiliate link
Working together can be a great way to increase lead acquisition.
Make Selling Easy for Your Affiliates
You want to make selling your solution as easy as possible for your affiliates. To do so, take these steps:
- Share branding guidelines. Send your affiliates a document that outlines how you want them to discuss your solution and company. Is there a certain mission statement or software feature you want them to bring up? Let them know. Send them your logo and common marketing slogans or anecdotes, too.
- Provide them with images. Pictures will help readers understand your product. Equip your affiliates with informative pictures that they can place next to their copy.
- Give them videos. Your affiliates can include videos in their reviews or mentions of your solution. Video often sells more easily than any writing on the page. Send them your demo recordings, case studies, explainer videos, or anything else that you think might help a buyer learn about your solution.
It’s critical to help these marketers help you.
Track Referrals and Analyze the Results
Tracking your referrals gives you valuable insights into which of your marketing techniques are working and which aren’t. Through referral tracking, you can figure out what type of copywriting is most successful, which websites are generating you the most sales leads, and whether or not certain videos are helping your affiliates sell your solution.
But how will you get access to these details without the slow labor of checking affiliate details manually? It pays to invest in an easy-to-setup SaaS affiliate software like LeadDyno.
Referral software for SaaS will help you figure out what’s working so that you can step on the gas.
What the Right Software Can Do for Affiliate Marketing
As you enact your affiliate marketing strategy for SaaS, be sure to use the best affiliate marketing software available to help you scale your efforts.
With blogs and social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube continuing to increase their hold on our attention, affiliate marketing will become more and more important to any SaaS marketer’s strategy. It allows you to place your product in front of your ideal customers at exactly the right moment. Why wouldn’t you use the best tools available to help you do this?
Check out how LeadDyno, an affiliate software for Saas companies, can assist you in launching your affiliate program today and see more sales next month — and beyond.
