9 Essential SaaS Marketing Tools For Your Business

Cloud-based services are more popular than ever. The SaaS market is expected to be worth $623 billion by 2023. The annual growth rate is a generous 18%. The figures are not at all surprising. According to Better Cloud, 73% of businesses plan to make all their systems SaaS by this year.

Source: Better Cloud

These figures speak to the benefits of SaaS tools. For one thing, they take the burden off a company’s IT department as they remove the need for maintaining local software hardware. For another, they allow instant updates to be very accessible. SaaS tools are also increasingly affordable.

In short, businesses are really better off with SaaS tools.

But because of the demand for them, the number of SaaS tools available out there has just skyrocketed. The question for businesses is no longer where to find the tools that will help them. Rather, they need to determine which tool or tools are the right ones for their business.

In this article, we’ll look at 12 essential SaaS marketing tools. But first, let’s get our terminology in order.

What are SaaS Marketing Tools?

Simply put, SaaS marketing tools are cloud-based services that you can use for marketing purposes. These are, therefore, tools that can help promote your products.

Any cloud-based app that helps a business draw in customers and maintains relationships with them is a SaaS marketing tool. Any tool of the sort that also helps a business network with potential or past clients, for example, by writing thank you emails, is also a SaaS marketing tool.

9 Essential SaaS Marketing Tools for Your Business

This list of essential SaaS marketing tools covers some of the key tools your team will need. It was drawn up based on my experience of countless years as a marketing consultant. I suggest trying out the free demos of each tool, so you can get a grasp of what each SaaS tool has to offer.

As they say, the experience is always the best teacher. Let’s begin.

1. Manage Leads With a CRM

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools help you manage and develop leads. There are various tools on the market. One of the most widely used, and quite frankly best in the market, is Hubspot.

For marketers, Hubspot helps nurture leads with its easy-to-create bulk emails that are also automatically optimized for different devices. Its built-in analytics can help you understand which emails and pages generate the most conversions.

Customer service teams can also manage customer communication from one universal inbox. Members of your team can view, assign, and reply to customer conversations from multiple channels.

If you want to look at a customer’s record to determine the kind of response you need to give, that’s accessible in the inbox too.

You can even organize customer issues in one dashboard using tickets. To save time, you can also create canned responses and templates for the same questions from your customers.

2. Find Prospects With an Email Finder

Email marketing is a vital part of prospecting. If you are a B2B SaaS company, you will probably use cold email outreach to generate leads. More generally, if you’re relying on SEO to generate leads, you’ll need to write a lot of guest posts. This again requires a lot of outreach.

If you want to contact people via email, you have to ensure deliverability by verifying the email address of people who you want to contact. You don’t want those emails bouncing because if they do, your domain may be penalized, and you’ll end up in spam folders.

Also, if you don’t have the right email address in the first place, you are missing out on an opportunity.

Email finders are also crucial for email outreach. Say you’re looking for guest post opportunities for link building. You can look for the email addresses of relevant people who can help you, including content managers and editors.

3. Use an Outreach Tool for Automation

Like email finders, outreach tools can help you reach those people you want to get in touch with to promote your business. The difference is, outreach tools are made specifically to reach key decision-makers en masse.

This means they have specific features that make them a godsend for you.

There are a lot of great blogger outreach tools on the market. For example, Dave was one of the founders of Ninja Outreach, a blogger outreach tool. Outreach tools help automate the process of outreach, regardless of your ultimate goal. The ability to identify prospects and send automated email sequences is a significant timesaver.

4. Attract More Customers with An Ideal Customer Profile Template

An ideal customer profile (ICP) is a description of a customer that would be interested in your product or service, i.e. the type of customer you’d want to acquire. For SaaS startups, an ideal customer persona is a hypothetical organization or business that would get the most out of their software.

Creating an ICP can benefit your business in a number of ways. Besides the most obvious one – customers paying you for your service, an ICP can also bring you valuable customer insights, referrals, constructive feedback, positive testimonials, and even advocates for your brand!

Using an ideal customer profile template can make things a lot easier. It can help your business make important decisions by keeping track of customer information, thus giving you a significant competitive advantage.

5. Get More Search Traffic with SEO Tools

Traffic generated through SEO is one of the principal marketing channels of most SaaS platforms. This is where SEO tools come in. SEO tools basically allow you to determine relevant keywords so you can build your content marketing strategy around it.

Ahrefs is one of the most widely used tools. It helps analyze the ranking difficulty of keywords and calculates their traffic potential.

In addition to identifying suitable keywords for your campaigns, SEO tools will help you undertake the following:

Analyze competitor marketing strategies
Review backlink quality, so you know what links to acquire
Benchmark your progress against competitors

There are numerous SEO tools on the market. Tools like Ahrefs are at the premium end of the market, while things like Longtail Pro are more suited to people on smaller budgets.

6. Grammar Checker

Whether you’re writing content or outreach emails, you need to make sure your sentences are structured properly, and that you use correct spelling and grammar.

This is crucial because people are easily turned off by poor grammar and other mistakes. If you write “your “roducts is,” for “xample, you’ll give yourself away as an amateur, and your content may just end up in the bin.

It provides a bad first impression. This is something you want to avoid rather obviously. To check these mistakes, you can use a tool like Grammarly.

Grammar checkers will help you detect mistakes not only in spelling but also in tone. Most modern tools provide you with suggested replacements when there is a better alternative, or you made a simple spelling mistake.

7. Content Optimization Tools for Improved SEO Rankings

We’ve now covered five different tools that can, in one way or another, be used for your content marketing efforts. The final type of SaaS marketing tool I recommend you add to your collection is for onsite content optimization.

The new generation of content optimization tools seeks to fill the gap that is emerging as Google’s algorithm goes from focusing on keyword density to natural language processing. In layman’s terms, this means the emphasis is less on how many times you repeat the same word, but how many times you include a range of words.

One of the best tools to fill this gap is Surfer. This tool provides you with clear feedback regarding the ideal length of a piece of keyword-focused content, the range of keywords to include, and even the headings that you should use.

8. Onsite Technical Optimization Tools

Sometimes, the problem is not the content you put out but the website itself. For example, if your website takes too long to load, visitors will obviously leave, and the site bounce rate increases.

The result? No conversions, no money, and then you go out of business.

This is why it’s so important for you to determine your page loading speed. If it loads slowly, you need to see what the cause is so you can immediately address it.

You can use tools like GTmetrix or Google PageSpeed tester to check your site load speed. The good thing is, with this tool, you can test your site’s speed in different countries and browsers. It also gives you recommendations on how to fix the problems.

9. Affiliate Management Platform

If you tap marketing affiliates to promote your goods and services, you need to use a platform that will allow you to manage and monitor their performance.

It’s a chunk of your revenues you’re going to share with them, which means non-performing affiliates aren’t worth your time.

This is where affiliate management platforms come in handy.

FirstPromoter is one such example. It’s an all-in-one platform that allows companies to run their affiliate and even influencer and referral programs. The tool will enable you to automate refunds and set different rewards for each pricing plan.

The Paypal Mass Payments feature also allows you to pay hundreds of affiliates in just two minutes.

10. Email Management Software

If you’re sending out emails in bulk as a marketing strategy, managing the responses can be overwhelming. This is why email management platforms are essential to businesses. These tools allow companies to easily manage large volumes of inbound emails so they can properly respond to them.

You want to respond to incoming mail because they can be crucial to your business, whether they are leads or someone who can help you promote your business.

There are a lot of great email management platforms on the market. The most widely used is undoubtedly Mailchimp, which is easy to use and has a fun interface. Personally, I use Moosend. Most of these platforms do much the same thing; help you grow and manage your email list.

How to Choose the right SaaS Tools

In this article, we saw how SaaS tools are taking businesses by storm. This is not surprising since the benefits businesses can reap from them far outweigh the costs.

Because of the demand for SaaS, there are now too many of them to mention. The challenge is, therefore, to look for SaaS marketing tools that are the right fit for your business. To make this easier, I’ve provided the nine essential ones based on my own experience.

My suggestion? Experiment with these tools on your own. You’ll see what all the fuss is about, I’m sure.

Author’s Bio

Owen Baker is a content marketer for Right Inbox, an email scheduling tool, and Voila Norbert. He has spent most of the last decade working online for a range of marketing companies. When he’s not busy writing, you can find him in the kitchen mastering new dishes.