Advertising for SaaS companies

Subscription software has an unforgiving arithmetic. If customers leave after eight months and cost nine months of revenue to acquire, no amount of campaign optimisation makes the business work.

The numbers that govern the marketing

Payback period is the operative constraint for most companies. At a twelve-month payback and 4 per cent monthly churn, the average customer barely repays their acquisition cost.

Onboarding is marketing

The largest single lever on churn is what happens in the first two weeks. Customers who reach the point of value stay; those who do not, cancel.

Practical measures: identify the specific action that correlates with retention, then design everything to get new users to it quickly. Guided setup, sample data, a check-in at day three, and removal of every step that is not required.

Trial or demo

Self-serve trials suit products under a certain price where the value is demonstrable without help. Above that, a demo converts better because the buyer needs a conversation about their specific case.

Requiring a demo for a low-priced product loses the majority of interest. Offering a trial for a complex enterprise product produces trials that fail without support.

The content that works

Software buyers search for the problem, for alternatives to a competitor, and for comparisons. Three content types map to those.

1. Problem content: how to solve the thing the software solves, including manually. It attracts people before they know software exists for it.
2. Alternative pages: honest comparisons with named competitors, including where the competitor is better. These rank and convert unusually well.
3. Integration and use-case pages: specific enough to match a specific search.

Pricing on the website

Hiding pricing behind a contact form is standard for enterprise software and costly for everything else. Buyers eliminate options they cannot price.

Where pricing genuinely varies, publish a starting figure and the factors that change it. Complete opacity loses more qualified buyers than a slightly wrong number.

Expansion is cheaper than acquisition

Revenue growth from existing accounts costs a fraction of new acquisition. Marketing to the installed base, so additional seats, additional modules, higher tiers, is usually underfunded relative to its return.