Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing

3 Top Tips to Optimizing PPC for SaaS

JannelleChemko
ByJannelleChemko

Building a digital marketing strategy for a SaaS company is much different than building one for, say, a retail store. For SaaS, you’re trying to market to people who can convert into long-term subscribers of your product, vs. single, one-time purchasers of one of your products.

But although your strategy between SaaS and other business models may differ, the platforms on which you market are the same. Pay per click (PPC) advertising on search engines and social media can help you to grow your SaaS subscriber base; especially if you keep these 3 tips in mind.

3 Top Tips to Optimizing PPC for SaaS | Umami Marketing

1. Focus on Problem & Solution Keywords

Your SaaS software provides a solution to a problem that your prospective buyers are experiencing. So plan your keyword bids around these instead of much more competitive terms, such as “purchase” or “free trial”.

Sit down with your sales team and find out what common questions or phrases customers repeat when discussing your product. Do they regularly discuss a particular problem they are experiencing, or ask how your software can help them resolve an issue? Fleshing out your buyer personas will really help you out with this process, so that you can target your PPC keywords the most effectively.

2. Drive Lead Gen with Remarketing

Closing a SaaS deal typically takes longer than the average sales cycle. Because SaaS requires an ongoing commitment, buyers will spend more time researching and comparing options, budgets and ROI before picking “the one”.

Remarketing is a great way to stay front of mind (and browsers) while your prospective subscribers are doing their research and due diligence. Highly effective, easy to implement and affordable to maintain, remarketing gives you the ability to essentially “follow” your website’s visitors around the internet with a simple line of code on your website, and it will show them your ads wherever they go. This is an incredibly powerful way to stay engaged with your target audience with well-placed, relevant ads or offers that speak directly to them (while encouraging them to always keep your SaaS solution top of mind!)

There are a few ways to set up a remarketing campaign:

1. Site Remarketing – as mentioned above, this will display your targeted banner ads after a visitor leaves your site, when set up via Google AdWords campaigns, for example.

2. Social Media Remarketing – similar to what happened to our newly engaged friend, social media remarketing places ads on social networks, like Facebook. If your visitors are on your bridal website and then log into Facebook, they will soon see placed ads for wedding-related goods and services.

3. Search Remarketing – this method targets users based on a specific keyword or phrase inquiry. For example, if you search Google for record players, you will next see a whole list of record players for sale under Amazon.com’s “Recommended for You” section.

The web offers a lot of distractions; remarketing is a valuable way to pull your target audience’s attention back to your brand and your Saas solution.

3. Play Around with Multiple Ad Platforms

PPC is not just limited to AdWords; experimenting on multiple ad platforms may bring you even more leads and a greater ROI than the traditional placements on Google’s search engines. Here are some other platforms and channels you may want to tap into:

  • Search engine advertising through Bing
  • Facebook Advertising
  • Instagram’s “Shop Now” Featured Ads
  • Paid Pins on Pinterest
  • YouTube Advertising (via banner placements, sidebar placements or video display ads, skippable ads, overlay ads, and non-skippable ads)
  • Sponsored Tweets on Twitter

The only way to find out which platform works best for your business and your SaaS solution is to experiment. Your goal is to find out where your target buyers are and which platform they are using, and then which keywords you can pick to garner the highest engagement with your audience.

PPC advertising can offer a wide net in which to bring in new leads and business. And because you don’t pay unless your ads are clicked on by your target audience, it leaves you room to test the waters with new keywords, new landing pages, and new platforms until you find the most effective mix.

Of course, the above tips will only help you if you have a solid understanding of the biggest PPC platform: Google AdWords. Download a copy of our free guide, which will give you all the basic steps to get started.  

About the Author

JannelleChemko

JannelleChemko

Numbers Ninja & Digital Dynamo
Jannelle Chemko has been working in Operations and Accounting since 2007. After earning a Bachelor’s Degree in English, she is now in the midst of her CGA designation.

As strange as it sounds, Jannelle is a numbers and a letters guru: in addition to extensive full-cycle accounting experience in the technology and retail industries, Jannelle is also passionate about writing. In between crunching numbers and building excel reports, she researches, creates content, and keeps up to date with digital trends.

When she’s not working to meet school and month-end deadlines, you can find Jannelle outside walking her dog, and enjoying the beautiful Vancouver air.
Follow Me On: Facebook

You may also like...

By continuing to browse or by clicking “Accept” you agree to the storing of first- and third-party cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts.
Cookie policy | Privacy Policy

Privacy Preference Center

Close

Your Privacy

Umami Marketing Inc. appreciates your interest in its products and your visit to this website and respects the privacy and the integrity of any information that you provide us as a user of this Site. The protection of your privacy in the processing of your personal data is an important concern to which we pay special attention during our business processes.

Privacy Policy

Required
Personal data collected during visits to our websites are processed by us according to the legal provisions valid for the countries in which the websites are maintained. Our data protection policy is also based on the data protection policy applicable to Umami Marketing Inc. Read more

Cookie Policy

Required
Umami Marketing uses cookies and similar technologies, such as HTML5 web storage and local shared objects (all referred to as ‘cookies’ below), to record the preferences of users and optimize the design of its websites. They make navigation easier and increase the user-friendliness of a website. Read more

Essential cookies

These cookies are essential for websites and their features to work properly. Without these cookies, services such as the vehicle configurator may be disabled.

Cookies used

  • WordPress Required

Performance Cookies

These cookies collect information about how you use websites. Performance cookies help us, for example, to identify especially popular areas of our website. In this way, we can adapt the content of our websites more specifically to your needs and thereby improve what we offer you. These cookies do not collect personal data. Further details on how the information is collected and analyzed can be found in the section ‘Analysis of usage data’.

Cookies used

Third-party cookies

These cookies are installed by third parties, e.g. social networks. Their main purpose is to integrate social media content on our site, such as social plugins.

Third-party cookies