The SaaS industry is growing. And it’s probably no surprise considering the current economic climate.
Businesses desperately want to streamline processes and cut back on unnecessary costs, however they can.
And while increased demand is great for SaaS companies, there are also more products popping up in the market as more founders put their hats in the ring.
So, how do you ensure your SaaS company continues to grow and doesn’t get knocked over by the competition?
It may sound like an overly simplistic answer – but you need to set smart, strategic SaaS marketing goals. And master them.
Keep reading to access our 5-step framework to setting realistic yet ambitious goals and hitting them.
What is a SaaS marketing goal?
A SaaS marketing goal – like any marketing goal – is essentially a written target you set for your business’s marketing function. The intention being to help you achieve results.
Ideally, this goal will align with the overall business strategy and be clear, relevant and measurable.
The only way to have a successful long-term SaaS marketing strategy is to have a series of clearly defined marketing goals that your entire team is working towards.
These can and will, naturally evolve over time. However, your day-to-day tasks and operations should aways be guided by them.
What are common marketing goals for SaaS?
Every SaaS business operates differently and has different targets, but most have quite similar core goals they want to achieve.
For SaaS startups, everything comes back to Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR). As Hubspot writes, “MRR stands for monthly recurring revenue. It’s a normalized measure of a business’ predictable revenue that it expects to earn each month.”
And every SaaS business, no matter where they are on their growth journey, ultimately wants to achieve and sustain MRR.
From here, there is definitely an increased level of nuance when it comes to the goals each SaaS company creates to get there. At a high level, though, there are 5 main SaaS goals:
- Build brand awareness
- Lead generation
- Customer acquisition
- Customer retention
- Customer engagement
While the language, framing and metrics organisation’s use will vary, you’ll probably find that their goals can more or less be boiled down to one of the above. And yours will most likely follow suit.
5 Steps to setting & smashing your SaaS marketing goals
So now you know what most SaaS companies are looking to when setting their goals, how do you go about setting your own SaaS goals?
Below, we share 5 basic, easy-to-follow steps we take every time our marketing team sets a goal to help you craft your own. Let’s get into it.
1. Tie every goal back to your overarching objective
While we have many tips for creating SaaS marketing goals, perhaps the most important one is making sure every one of your goals links back to your overarching company objective.
For example, if your overarching objective is to secure and sustain Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), every smaller goal you set out to achieve should contribute to this broader, long-term goal.
This more holistic outlook is a great way to ensure you’re utilising your time and resources effectively, and keeping your marketing team on track.
2. Get smart with SMART goals
SMART goals is a framework used by many successful marketers to focus their marketing efforts. What does SMART stand for? Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-based. See the visual below for a full explanation of each aspect.
The whole philosophy behind this mnemonic is that creating your goals within specific parameters helps make them achievable. The trick is, when setting a goal, to go through each of the letters and ensure all of the criteria are ticked off. This will indicate to you that you’ve set a “good” goal to anchor your SaaS marketing strategy.
There’s no point in setting marketing goals for your SaaS business, if they aren’t following these principles. Start SMART.
3. Align your goals to marketing metrics & industry benchmarks
Another top tip to achieving your SaaS marketing goals is to associate them with solid metrics. While this point does tie into the “M” of the SMART acronym (measurable), it’s so important it needs it’s own section to elaborate on.
Whenever your marketing team sets a goal, you need to attach it to at least one specific metric (2-3 one in most cases) that you can use to measure success. This is the only way you can know whether you’ve succeeded at your goal or not.
Once you’ve done this, set a target for this metric that’s informed by industry benchmarks and your own historical performance. It needs to be challenging, but also realistic.
For example, if you’re launching a brand awareness campaign, you could choose to focus on “reach” as the primary metric to measure performance, and then look to “impressions” and “engagement rate” as secondary metrics.
Then you could do some research into what the industry benchmark for these metrics are, what it seems possible to achieve based on historical data and then set your targets accordingly.
If you set up your goals this way, using a methodical, data-driven framework, you’re giving your business the best chance of attaining goals. Without hard metrics to ground your goals, they can suffer from being soft and flimsy.
4. Check in with the competition
If you want to make your organisation’s goals as impactful as possible, you should have a decent level of context about your competition to draw from. We’d suggest conducting some in-depth competitor research to see what’s going on in the market.
How should you go about this? Luckily there’s a whole bunch of tools that can help you do the majority of the legwork, but there are some things you should pay particular attention to –
- What are they doing and what aren’t they doing?
- Are there gaps in their current strategy? Is there an opportunity here?
- What do their existing customers say about them (good and bad)?
- Is there something you should avoid?
You want to get a sense of what their SaaS marketing strategies are, and how they’re achieving their marketing objectives. As well as where they may be falling down. Then, you want to use this helpful intel to inform your own goals.
For example, did you observe that there’s a lack of paid social media marketing out there amongst your competitors? Is there a good reason for this or could this be a good opportunity for your business to surpass theirs? Could creating a social media presence using paid tactics be a goal of yours for 2023?
These kind of insights can be the propeller you need to set great goals for your SaaS product (and hit them).
5. Regularly monitor and review your goals
Checking in regularly with your goals and reviewing your progress, is exactly what you need to do to ensure your marketing goals retain relevance. You also want to make sure that they are still challenging.
So, how should you go about this? We’d suggest deciding on a regular interval (be it weekly, fortnightly or monthly), and then set yourself up a reminder to monitor your goals at this interval, into your calendar or a project management tool if you have one (hello Asana!).
When you check in, see how you are tracking against the goals you set. From both a metrics and benchmarks perspective. If everything looks good, that’s great, reflect on what you’ve been doing, and continue to do that.
On the other hand, if you aren’t seeing signs of progress, you need to dig into the data and find out why. Deep, thorough and data-driven analysis is the only way you can find out what’s going on and set yourself back on track.
By isolating the cause of the problem before it spirals, you can make some optimisations early and set yourself on the right path for hitting your goals.
Alternatively, you might realise that the targets you originally set are too high or unrealistic or circumstances may have changed and they need to be tweaked. Regardless of what you monitoring sessions uncover, being across what’s going on is always far wiser than turning a blind eye. Put yourself in the driver’s seat.
Start achieving your SaaS marketing goals today
Now that you’ve got our miracle 5 step formula to setting and achieving realistic SaaS goals for your organisation, it’s time to get out there and start using them to guide your team’s efforts and anchor your successful marketing strategy.
Feel like you need a little extra help on this front? At Digital Rhinos we have a whole team of SaaS marketing experts who can help you create and achieve your marketing objectives. We can also help you build and execute an effective SaaS marketing strategy.
Get in touch today by clicking the button below to learn more about what we do.