Insider’s guide to SaaS marketing:

Generating demand for your product

Main illustration: Joshuah Miranda

 Insider’s guide to SaaS marketing: Generating demand for your product Brian Kotlyar, Director of Demand Generation | Intercom

Businesses fail for all kinds of reasons – their

technology just isn’t good enough or they’re
not filling a need – but marketing should never
be one of them. And yet in spite of this, a lot of
businesses fail because they’re just no good at
acquiring and retaining customers. That’s what
demand generation really comes down to.

However, the best marketing in the world is irrelevant if nobody sees it. There’s
only one way to make sure that your customers see your message and that is to
inherently understand their behaviors and mindset. From there, ask yourself
how you can build demand to continue to grow your customer base?

There’s no easy answer, unfortunately. The key to success lies in your ability to
create a repeatable process for generating demand.

What is demand generation?

Let’s be clear in our definition before we start. Demand generation is the
creation of systems that build awareness of, and a market for, your products
with target customers.

We can break this down into a few different elements to make it clearer:

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 Insider’s guide to SaaS marketing: Generating demand for your product

• Products: the actual things you sell.

• Customers: people who buy your products.
• Systems: a combination of people, processes and technology that can run
over and over again.
• Awareness: knowledge of your existence and what you do.
• Demand: interest in what you do and the value it creates.

The specific demand generation system you build varies based on what type
of product you sell and the customers you hope to attract. However, there are
common themes to keep in mind as you sketch these out for yourself.

1. Start with a point of view

“Why does your company exist other than to make money?”

Your business exists to solve a problem. It might have begun as a problem

statement like “Email is too expensive” or “Catching a cab is too hard.” It might
also have started with loudly chanting words like “AI” or “blockchain” while
dancing around a fire. Regardless, you need a reason that your company exists
besides a desire to make a lot of money.

2. Determine your positioning

Ask yourself who your product is for, which is another way of asking who your
customer actually is. When you know this, you should then clearly define what
your business actually does for the customer, what value is generated for them
and how your way is better than the old way they might have done it.

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 Insider’s guide to SaaS marketing: Generating demand for your product

Here’s an example for a fictional company:

“The new Artificial Intelligence shovel, by Shovl.io, helps onion farmers dig
holes faster, so they can plant more and sell more with less back pain than
traditional shovels.”

Breaking this down using our questions, we get:

• What is the product? An artificially intelligent shovel.

• Who is the customer? Onion farmers.
• What value is generated for them? Time saved through faster planting.
• How is it better than the old way? Less back pain than traditional shovels.

3. Understand your customer

As we said above, the best marketing in the world is irrelevant if nobody sees it.
The only way to make sure your customers see your message is to understand
their behaviors and mindset. Research can be fast and almost free, so doing
your homework up front can save a lot of extra work later.

The more specific you are about your target customer, the easier it is to
understand how to reach them and what message should be used to do so. For
our shovel company, for example, onion farmers are a smaller audience with
different behaviors than do-it-yourself homeowners.

That means their needs and habits are more specific, which gives you a huge
advantage by narrowing the range of answers for the next questions you need to ask:

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 Insider’s guide to SaaS marketing: Generating demand for your product

• How do my target customers buy products like this today?

• Where do my target customers congregate to be with people like them?
• Where do my target customers get their information personally?
• Where do my target customers get their information professionally?
• Who do my target customers look up to?
• Who do my target customers trust?
• What time of year is most important and relevant to my target customers?

The more specific you can be, the better. If every onion farmer in the world visits
the annual OnionCon, then you should note that down along with who spoke
there over the past few years. If they’re all listening to OnionPod, you need to
note that and listen through the archives to discover what topics they discuss.

4. Generate ways to reach your audience

This one is simple: Dream up all the ways you could reach your audience and
write each idea on a giant list. There’s no harm in dreaming up ideas, big or
small, at this stage, because we’ll assess them for feasibility later.

Here are a few ways we could reach our onion farmers:

• Buying OnionCon or OnionPod sponsor slots.

• Facebook advertising based on interest in onions.
• Google ad targeting for the word “shovel”.
• Sending sample shovels to all the speakers at OnionCon.

Once you’ve got those, the cold hard reality is next: numbers.

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 Insider’s guide to SaaS marketing: Generating demand for your product

5. Win on paper
As cheap, fast and easy as it is to dream up ideas, it’s the same for making
simple models to help prioritize and determine if they’re worth pursuing.
Doing so involves some thinking about the different paths and steps people
might take to buy your product, followed by basic math.

These are our “funnels” and they are informed by every aspect of how the customer
might convert, from where they’ll find you to the scale of the channel you’re using.

Here’s an example for our idea to sponsor an episode of OnionPod, which

charges $1,000 to place an advertisement:

• 25,000 listeners of OnionPod.

• 2% of listeners (500 people) visit your website because of the ad.
• 2% of those visitors (10 people) buy a shovel.
• $100 per shovel sold amounts to $1,000 in sales.

From here, subtract all the costs you might incur to create that shovel
(manufacturing, storage, etc.) and you’ve got a rough idea of whether the tactic
is a profitable idea worth pursuing. It also provides a great opportunity to think
about ways to optimize.

To do that, you should theorize the outcomes that could change if you improve a
specific component of your tactic. Maybe you can create a better advertisement
and get 5% of OnionPod’s listeners to your website, or maybe you should just
charge more for the shovel to make each sale more profitable. As you adjust these
factors in your model you’ll quickly learn if the math works (or not).

Remember to use conservative assumptions and apply them with rigor to every tactic
you’re considering. Don’t believe your own spin, either; this is a business, not a religion.
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 Insider’s guide to SaaS marketing: Generating demand for your product

When the funnel is in place you should rank each idea by two factors: difficulty
(cost, time to execute, feasibility) and impact (revenue, profit, customers acquired).
At different stages of your company’s growth you’ll optimize for different things:
maybe now it’s customer acquisition, but later it’s going to be profitability.

You only need one thing to work

Depending on the size of your company, you might be working to establish many
demand generation systems with various characteristics of profitability and acquisition
to work together for growth or you might still be working to find the one that works.

Either way, when you find something where the math adds up, you should run
that tactic as frequently as you can. Each time you execute on it, you’ll remove
waste and increase impact.

That way, your demand generation channel is providing you with the head space
you need to think about the next big idea. When that system is maximized, or you
need to grow even faster, you can refer back to your long list of ideas and add a
new test to the mix.

We are making internet business personal.

Intercom is a modern platform for sales, marketing and support teams to

connect with customers in a real way. Designed to feel like the messaging
apps you use every day, Intercom lets you talk to consumers almost anywhere
– inside your app, on your website, across social media and via email.

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