12 common SaaS product promotion and customer acquisition models

Based on my own experience and some insights into the industry, I have summarized 12 common customer acquisition models here.

01. SEM placement

SEM delivery is one of the most effective ways to acquire users. As long as the company has capital, this delivery method will be effective. During the advertising process, you don’t have to choose Baidu as the channel. 360 and Sogou are also the necessary channels.

However, the current customer acquisition cost is very high, with the cost of acquiring most products ranging from 150 to 300 yuan. If the subsequent conversion capability is not good, the advertising channel will easily lose money. If the LTV is calculated, the users placed by the channel can still cover the CAC.

The four elements of advertising include: keywords, price, region, and landing page.

The keywords used generally include product words, industry words, solutions and competitor words. If you are a CRM customer, the product words include: CRM, CRM manufacturer, CRM price, etc. The industry words are: CRM for the education industry, CRM for the project industry, and the solutions include: customer management solution for the education industry, customer management solution for the retail industry. Competitive keywords mainly refer to friendly competitors in this industry, such as SalesEasy, FunShare, Salesforce, etc.

The longer the keywords you place, the more accurate the customers you will acquire. For example, the CRM in the education industry acquires more accurate users than CRM vendors. However, the traffic of long-tail words is much smaller than that of broad words.

General SaaS products have no geographical restrictions, but each city needs to be tested to see which city can attract more users. Cities that cannot attract users for a long time can be selectively abandoned.

There is also a tendency on the SaaS side. The competition in first-tier cities is fierce and the customer acquisition cost is high. After the regionalization is liberalized, the customer acquisition cost decreases, but the unit price in the sinking market is lower.

The landing pages of each company are not much different. If you are interested, you can pay more attention to the landing pages of competitors. Each company has its own characteristics. As long as the conversion rate can be kept on par with that in the industry, it will be fine.

02. Information flow

As the new rising star of traffic, more and more people are starting to place advertisements in information flow. Whether it is a C-end product or a B-end product, information flow has become the main direction.

There are two main camps of information flow platforms in the country: Tencent Advertising and Tik Tok. Everyone has started to attract users through content. More and more B-side companies are placing advertisements in information flows, and everyone can try to obtain them.

Since there are more short videos on information flow platforms, they have a stronger impact on users. In fact, the customer acquisition cost is not much different from SEM. However, SEM users are more accurate than information flow users and have better conversion rates.

Why do people still place ads in information flow? Part of the reason is brand. Users have seen advertisements in their information flow and this can leave some impressions on them, which will lead them to have a certain degree of preference when choosing products in the future.

The three elements of information flow include: audience package, display advertising, and landing page.

The information flow needs to target the right group of people. If the right group of people is targeted, the accuracy and quality of user acquisition will be much better. Display advertising is mainly about the impact of the video, including the scenes, the words, and the appeal of the actors. Pure and straightforward content is becoming increasingly difficult to be accepted. The cost of shooting a good advertisement is still very high, much higher than making a banner image.

The landing page usually has three or four screens, which can summarize all the content the user wants to see, and must make it easy for users to leave contact information.

Today’s information flow platforms have begun to adopt OCPC delivery methods, and settlement methods are becoming increasingly intelligent, so bidding is not that important.

03. SEO

SEO still occupies an essential and important position in B-side customer acquisition, but there are certain trade-offs in product selection. in the country, the manufacturers that are more keen on SEO are still the traditional wholesale manufacturers.

As some people have begun to criticize SEO, there are fewer and fewer high-tech products for SEO in China. On the contrary, I believe that the importance of SEO should be more important than other channels.

In fact, SEO companies don’t pay much attention to the design of the website, that is, the website experience is not very good, and everything revolves around keyword rankings. If you are making regional products, you can get good traffic by making SEO the first in the search engine.

If a company does both SEO and SEM, it is better to separate the SEO and SEM websites within the current rules. This will be beneficial to both parties without any impact.

In foreign countries, people like to blog and acquire users through the content of the blogs, but this is not the discussion at all in China. Under the impact of private domain traffic, various platforms have begun to promote their own self-media and their own mini-programs, and they all want to complete the closed loop within their own platforms.

The giants have all started to implement closed rules, which actually has a huge impact on the development of the Internet, causing the domestic Internet environment to become increasingly closed.

The four elements of SEO: keywords, content, website structure, and external links.

The keywords you want to use are some industry words. This word is not necessarily the biggest product word. Instead, regional words are better. The content is not of particularly high quality. Instead, some spliced ​​content is more popular with search engines. The website structure is not a good customer experience. After the product introduction, it must be the entrance to the content, which increases the probability of the content being crawled. External links are mainly friendly links, which increase some of the website's weight.

Due to the domestic Internet environment, it is more effective to build a large number of sites and use homepage keywords to grab traffic than to use blog content to obtain traffic. There are also some domestic platforms that use blogs for ranking that are doing well. Most of them are data analysis platforms, such as: Umeng+, Sensors, and Growing IO. They mainly write about this direction, and other platforms may not be able to write as much content.

04. We-media

It seems like you’re out of date if you don’t engage in self-media now. All major platforms have launched their own self-media accounts, and there is also some bias in traffic. In contrast, among the current self-media platforms, there are very few corporate accounts that can perform relatively well.

Because everyone is not good at SEO and cannot write their own content, it is difficult to cultivate a big self-media account. On some self-media platforms, most companies are still stuck in the Internet 2.0 era, always focusing on their own products and company dynamics. Such self-media accounts have no likes from anyone other than their own employees.

There are also some main reasons. The self-media platform cannot make direct conversions, which leads to many companies not recognizing this method. Other companies have done it, so their own company also wants to do it, so they let an employee do it part-time.

If you still think that you can get it done by just giving it a try, I advise you not to waste your employees' energy.

The core elements of self-media channels are: content, content, and valuable content.

Valuable content is what you provide, which happens to be what users like, not what your boss likes. Content that is aimed at your boss will not do a good job.

It doesn’t matter where the content comes from, but rather some of your experiences in work, solutions packaged into user cases, and the proposed methodology. It is undeniable that methodology is still a very effective point in attracting user attention. The larger and more comprehensive it is, and the more difficult it is to understand the methodology, the higher the probability that users will like, share, and collect it.

You can think about why my articles are generally very long and cover a lot of content.

05. High-quality content

Today's platforms are able to produce more and more high-quality content, especially white papers. Those who create high-quality content are generally those who have done well in blog SEO. On the contrary, businesses that specialize in SEO rarely produce good high-quality content.

It is not easy to produce high-quality content, and it is even more difficult to produce high-quality content continuously, especially for Sensors and Growing IO. These platforms generally like to produce white papers to the outside world.

The contents of these white papers are generally enough to be printed into books, with an average of about 50 pages. Both in theory and in terms of industry interpretation, they can surpass many manufacturers of the same period.

The cost of producing high-quality content is not low, and ordinary teams are unable to produce it. Most of them need to rely on external experts or senior editors within the company. People like me who often write self-media content cannot produce high-quality content.

In order to produce high-quality content, the company must have the awareness and the team configuration should include at least one senior editor from traditional media and experts from inside and outside the company, who should work together to write this part of the content over a period of three to two months.

05. Cross-industry cooperation

Cross-industry cooperation is still relatively rarely used on the B-side. This method can bring small companies together to form a larger alliance, and their user resources and products can be complementary.

If merchants can form a good alliance, they can also work together to win some larger customers and provide customers with more complete solutions.

Sometimes cross-industry cooperation may also involve cooperation with competitors. In the B-side business, there are no completely opposing business models. Only by working together can we serve customers well.

If your product is at a disadvantage in the industry, you can also appropriately subsidize some partners so that both parties can cooperate smoothly.

07. Agent

The agency system is common in traditional SaaS products. For example, UFIDA and Kingdee have many agents across the country. The agents are responsible for serving customers and real-time services, while the product side is only responsible for providing products with better user experience.

It is difficult to recruit agents in the early stages, but once the agency system is built, SaaS vendors can just sit back and wait for profits.

The core of recruiting agents is the support given by the company and the superiority of the agency system. Many local small companies have local resources but do not have strong R&D capabilities. They all improve their ability to serve users through the agency product model.

In addition to recruiting agents from the public, a better way is to recruit from your own users. They have already used your products and have a high level of understanding of them, making it much easier for them to be recognized as agents and to receive subsequent training.

Agents should focus more on quality rather than quantity. If a company recruits a lot of agents without control, it may be a loss for the company, damaging its reputation and failing to develop its business quickly.

08. Exhibition

Exhibitions have developed from some traditional industries. It would be a big mistake to question the ability of exhibitions to attract customers. Each exhibition has tens of thousands of participants at least, and hundreds of thousands of participants at most, and it can also bring a lot of media exposure.

In the Internet industry, the most famous conference should be the Wuzhen Conference. Every year, many companies launch their own products at the conference, and many companies can attract some media attention.

Nowadays, more and more companies are holding exhibitions. Whether the companies make money or not is another matter, but those who hold exhibitions must make money. However, judging from the attitude of various companies in actively participating in exhibitions, this should be one of the good channels to obtain traffic.

09. Industry Conference

It is more interesting to hold industry conferences, especially for some general products, such as fission products. The CXOs of these companies are actively participating in industry conferences.

Taking the operations industry where I work as an example, when I go out to share or sit in the audience to listen to lectures, I will definitely hear about companies that are doing fission and private domain traffic. A few years ago, company executives who were doing data analysis went out to share.

The more you share on the stage, the more popular your products will become. The company's products are a great way to promote them. However, when attending industry conferences, people who share with others still need to have a little bit of aura. But the more you share, the personal aura will come out. It is best to have a good PPT with a set of methodology, rather than a full page of product introductions. Adding soft advertising to the methodology is more likely to be accepted by everyone.

Especially in these small circle meetings, although the number of people is not large each time, probably only about 100 people, the users who listen to the sharing and the users who search for the product name on the Internet have completely different feelings.

If you combine your own operational actions, especially the high-quality content in the industry, then becoming the No. 1 in this industry will be just around the corner. When users think of related tools, they will definitely think of your products.

10. Sweeping the floor

The more you despise some behaviors, the stronger their ability to attract users. This method is used by the larger domestic outsourcing agencies. Basically, they divide the buildings into areas, and all the commercial buildings in a area are under the responsibility of one or two people. They really go around the buildings, knocking on doors and visiting offices one by one.

It is very accurate to obtain business opportunities through this form. Moreover, this kind of behavior is looked down upon by everyone, especially some technology companies.

This company hired recent graduates to gain users by going around the building, and had people help customize the system at the back end. A city can make a lot of revenue in a year.

11. Fission

Fission is very useful in SaaS systems. Maybe everyone's thinking is still on C-end users. Fission can only fission small C-end users, not millions or tens of millions of orders. If money is so easy to make, China's SaaS industry would have surpassed the United States long ago.

When doing fission, you must be clear about your users' demands and do fission while meeting their needs. The prerequisite for fission is to have your own user pool.

I have done fission of SaaS products before. I just gave users a VIP account, and I split more than 30,000 users in one month. During the event, we continuously place advertisements to maintain the acquisition of front-end traffic.

If all your products require payment, then fission is not suitable for you, unless you postpone the revenue, fission some VIP users this year, and charge these users next year.

This method is effective only if the user's data is stored in your system and exporting the data is troublesome. And you must ensure that your product experience is competitive enough in the industry, otherwise this activity will be in vain.

12. Renewal

Renewal is a point that every SaaS manufacturer pays attention to, but most SaaS manufacturers have a problem. When there is a problem with the product, there is no one to solve it. Your service staff only appears at the end of the year when it is time to charge. In this case, how can users feel at ease to hand over the money to you?

If there are any problems during use, users would have already switched to other companies and bought other companies' products.

When the product capabilities are similar, you rely on after-sales service and customer relationships, especially with some big customers. If you don’t build relationships, they may be poached by others next year.

The renewal rate also determines whether the SaaS product can be successful. If your team is small and you cannot provide one-on-one after-sales service, then prepare QA for common problems and provide customers with an entrance to an intelligent robot that can solve most problems encountered by users. Problems that cannot be solved can be transferred to manual resolution. This can reduce a lot of user costs, improve work efficiency within the company, and increase user satisfaction.

If you say winning by product strength, then forget it. Product homogeneity is very serious now, especially in China. As long as there is one person who makes money through SaaS, there will be companies doing SaaS everywhere.

Products must also keep up with the general capabilities of the industry, rather than leaving a framework for users to use. Product strength is the foundation for SaaS products, and promotional methods are the real way to attract customers. The more customers you acquire at low cost, the greater the chance of SaaS success.

Don't ever believe that good wine always finds its way to your doorstep. That will only lead to you getting screwed.

Author: Zhang Mu, Operations Officer

Source: Operations Officer Zhang Mu