It’s important for B2B SaaS to run experiments to grow. However, you may get easily confused, and it may not turn out to be effective. Therefore, here are several points to keep you on track and not to distort your results.
Research the Available Data
Even though you are experimenting, it doesn’t mean you should do anything ad hoc. It is necessary to study the available information in order to prepare well for experimentation if you want to achieve effectiveness. It’s useful to create charts, reports, review the experience of others, and conduct user interviews to learn more about your B2B SaaS target audience. From the research, you can identify the potential impact of improving a metric. You can also think about new experimental designs and understand how much effort the experiment requires.
In your research, you will also learn how many marketers the experiment would involve, how many B2B SaaS prospects it would affect as well as its technical limitations.
Implement All Your Experiments in the Marketing Mix Framework
Do not try to experiment with all channels and segments at once and don’t set unrealistic goals. Your goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-based. Start experimenting with something small, like blog posts. If you see that it works and your target audience engages well with them, you can add another channel, like videos. Companies often make such a mistake that they do too many things at once, but stop doing what was already working. Introduce one new idea, see how it works. If it works well, think about how you will introduce it to your B2B SaaS marketing mix.
It’s also a good idea to combine two B2B SaaS marketing activities. For example, you can have both a live online event about your product and then post this video on your social media channels. You may use different channels in B2B SaaS marketing, however, it’s important to tie them to the same outcomes.
Start from the Top of the Funnel
Start experimenting at the top of the funnel where the sample is ample enough. It can be with acquisition channels, or landing pages. Advertising is a great way to start, as you can see the result of the engagement rate quickly.
You can use different messages to find the ones that resonate the most with your B2B SaaS prospects. You can also test different content types, such as eBooks, videos, infographics, and identify what type of content your B2B SaaS target audience engages with the most. The data down the marketing funnel may not be enough. Also, with your B2B SaaS existing customers, you can rely more on analytical and qualitative data.
Choose Your Metric
You may choose different metrics of experiment estimation depending on your goal. Here are examples of the metrics you can choose.
Brand Awareness and Engagement
You can test various types of content in ads to see what resonates best with your B2B SaaS target audience. When people engage with your content on different platforms, they will be drawn to your website to convert. Many companies do it the opposite way. They create a lot of content on their website, although they do not find their B2B SaaS target audience where they already are, such as on LinkedIn, Youtube, uor Facebook. However, the conversion rate grows if your target audience is nurtured by your content and makes the decision to purchase your B2B SaaS before visiting your website.
Lead Acquisition
It’s important not only to increase the number of leads when running experiments but also to get more qualified leads. You can have thousands of contacts in your CRM. However, if you just approach them with cold calls or emailing, it will not be efficient in terms of effort. It’s much better to have fewer leads but the ones who are already interested in your B2B SaaS and continue nurturing them. It’s also useful to run experiments to lower your Customer Acquisition Cost and optimize your ROI.
Retention Increase
You also need to run experiments to make your B2B SaaS better for your customers. To do this you need to communicate with them and analyze their feedback. If you help your B2B SaaS customers get the most from your product, they will continue using it. You can experiment with informing the customers of personalized solutions your product can deliver or introducing the product’s new features. It’s important to use product analytics and communicate with your B2B SaaS customers to constantly improve your product.
Referral Frequency
Customer success stories inspire others to purchase your product to get the same solutions to their problems. Run experiments to encourage your users to share their success stories and develop a reward program for them. It’s important to analyze the number of referrals to find out how effective this marketing practice is for your B2B SaaS.
The Steps to Conduct Experiments
There are certain steps you need to follow to make your B2B SaaS experiments more organized.
- Analyze previous experience. If you don’t have a case study or a testimonial from a customer of this industry, then most likely you are not ready to run the experiment for your B2B SaaS yet. Study the results of other similar experiments and consider if it is worth trying.
- Choose your audience. You need to choose the audience you will run your B2B SaaS experiment on. It should be specific and laser-focused to understand the results clearly. It can be your TAM, SAM or SOM but you need to also decide if your marketing activities will resonate with them.
- Bring out your product’s value proposition. There may be different products with similar solutions on the market. However, you need to highlight your B2B SaaS unique value proposition. Think about what makes you stand out in the highly competitive market and bring it out in your experiments. Your SaaS target audience will notice and remember you.
- Choose your channel. Your experimentation needs to be laser-focused. Therefore, it is abundant to target all the channels at once. Choose a single channel where you want to experiment and try it out. If it works, you can go on with the other channels.
- Do the experiment. After all the previous points it’s important to finally run experiments you’ve been planning. Even if the result does not go as planned you can still try other channels or other audience segments.
Running experiments is inevitable in B2B SaaS growth. However, to be effective it’s important to address experimenting with a plan and implement it in your marketing mix. Your experiments should also be laser-focused, involving specific audience and metrics.
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