24, Aug 2022
SaaS Promotion: BUILDING A PARTNERSHIP

affiliate marketing


It’s about building an affiliate program. Offer your users a reward in the form of a small fraction of what the people that this user will refer to your service will pay you. This mechanic is quite common and works best in the mass product segment.

In recent years, CPA platforms (from the English Cost Per Action – payment for action) have been developing more and more actively in Russia, aggregating offers from advertisers and transmitting them to an extensive database of webmasters who are ready to promote these offers. Payment in such systems occurs directly for the action (for registration, for ordering, and so on) performed on your site, this significantly reduces (but does not exclude) the risks of inefficient spending of the marketing budget. Examples of such networks in Russia are Mixmarket, Admitad, CPANetwork and others.

revenue share


If your product is intended for business, web studios, consulting and advertising agencies, system integrators, etc. can become an excellent distribution channel. It is quite common practice to provide such partners with white-label solutions so that they can sell the service to end customers under their own brand. The mechanics of work are almost the same: a partner introduces your product to his client and receives either a one-time fee or a small percentage of all client payments in the system.

co-marketing


You might not notice it, but in terms of the number of Internet users, Russia is the first market in Europe. Internet projects are growing like mushrooms after the rain. Look around: it’s almost certain that someone is trying to solve the same audience problem as you, but is not your direct competitor. I know dozens of services that in one way or another try to increase the income of an online store and are successfully used by many businesses at the same time. To get the opportunity to appeal to the audience of a related service is your task. Arrange for a joint mailing list, cross-posting on corporate blogs, a webinar, or providing exclusive terms for partner clients. The beauty of this approach is that the “active” customers of your partner’s service are already profitable, and if they are interested in your service, they will most likely be profitable for you.

Final Thoughts

Despite the fact that the promotion strategy of different services may be similar, the tactics will always be different. Carefully work out the values ​​that your product carries, audience segmentation, its tasks and ways to solve them. Don’t forget about your customer’s IT services. They worry about the security, reliability, performance, and integration capabilities of your product because they don’t have direct access to it. Take care of them at least at the documentation level.

Promote your entire service, not individual “chips” of the product. Remember that the process of using it includes registration with the setting, and the process of “learning” how to use it, and communicating with those. support, and even actions to pay or stop using the product. Each of these points can play a decisive role in deciding whether to use your product by one or another segment of your target audience.

We have considered the main mechanics of promoting SaaS services on the Internet, available to most startups, used with a limited budget. Much is left behind the scenes, much you will have to rework and supplement on your own. I can only wish you success in this.