The biggest fear of many SaaS owners and marketers is that they will be found out and crushed by the big players in the market before they have a chance to build their own momentum. If you follow Aytekin Tank, the founder of Jot Forms, you will have heard about how JotForms grew when facing competition from Google and Adobe.
A key part of the success of any software company, either legacy or SaaS, is finding the right niche and communicating with them.
Understanding your target market defines your ability to succeed and truly defines your success as a software company.
Because, even if you are Amazon, your SaaS is not for everyone. Finding that niche and communicating with them is key to staying and growing in business.
Finding Your SaaS Niche
All software is designed to solve someone's problem. Understanding what problems you are solving them and who is the most likely to look for a solution to that problem is key to targeting your niche.
Whether you are giving someone a solution to boredom with a game app or providing a management service for businesses, your software solves a problem. And, in order to offer it as a service, the problem has to be reoccurring.
The first step to finding your SaaS niche is to identify the problem that you are solving for your market and the periodicity of the problem.
The Periodicity of the Problem
Periodicity is the regular intervals where something occurs. For a SaaS software to work, you ideally need a problem that has a periodicity of at least one interval per month.
For example, a SaaS selling an accounting program needs to provide an answer to the problem of monthly profit and loss reporting. If the software is focused on larger periods, like helping with annual ASIC filings but does not provide monthly reporting, it will be more difficult to target to your market as a SaaS product. But, a program that has some functionality as a monthly reporting tool but focuses on the core problem of providing better reporting tools for publically owned corporations will solve problems for a unique market with regular needs for the software as a service.
Eliminating Non-Ideal Customers
Besides finding something that answers a problem regularly, you need to identify who will not benefit from your SaaS solution. In the example above, an accounting program that targets public companies has already eliminated most small businesses as ideal clients. But, you will need to focus even more.
Finding a solution to a problem requires that you look at the major product offerings already on the market and define who is not being served by your competitors. In JotForms example, they had to do this while having large companies enter the market after them. For the accounting software company, it might be that their competitors don't have as accurate accounting methods, don't have automated, tracking, or several other issues.
The important thing is that you have software that provides solutions for your customers in a way that other software doesn't. Then, you need to focus your marketing on the ideal client that has those unique problems.
With the right solution for a regularly occurring problem, you can provide your SaaS solutions to the right customers. When you are connecting a unique solution with the right customer, you will be able to grow your SaaS product, no matter the size of your company, and create success. Whether you are an industry leader, a bootstrapping startup, or a Fortune company, targeted marketing will help you succeed as a SaaS provider.
To learn more about the ways our digital marketing services can help your SaaS business increase lead generation, boost conversions, polish your brand and increase sales, contact us today.
Not ready to talk? Then download our guide for greater insight into LeadGen for SaaS: "How SAAS Founders can Generate High Revenue from LinkedIn"
