5 Real-World Examples of Excellent SaaS Marketing Efforts
Software as a Service (SaaS) has exploded in popularity over the last decade, and it is likely to continue to grow well into the future. Due to its popularity, it’s a very crowded industry, which means your company may struggle to gain traction without some experience and knowledge on your side. Below are five awesome examples of successful SaaS digital marketing efforts that you can use for inspiration.
#1 – GitHub
Almost every SaaS company in existence utilizes all the most popular social media platforms to build their names, but GitHub did something entirely different. It built its own social media platform. If you look up GitHub on LinkedIn and Facebook, you’ll find that those pages aren’t all that popular, but their own niche platform certainly is. By understanding its audience, GitHub built the perfect platform to share content. It is now 22 million members strong and still growing.
#2 – INVision
There are photo editors all over the web, whether you’re editing professionally, or you’re just interested in fixing up a selfie. When INVision made its debut, it had a lot of competition. It was originally designed to provide professional photo editing options like animations and transitions. Its huge social following and penchant for helpful infographics has helped it grow from these simple offerings into a tool that can stand up right alongside Photoshop.
#3 – Trello
Trello is a collaboration tool that displays projects like boards – almost like Pinterest – to make them easier to follow in seconds. Believe it or not, Trello used its meager startup budget to build a product people and companies really needed rather than advertising. Because the product was so good, people raved about it all over social media. Later, the company gave its followers rewards for interacting on social media, and they offered referral bonuses, too.
#4 – HootSuite
HootSuite is one of the world’s most well-known social media management systems. Its approach to marketing is simple – appeal to the masses with entertainment and unforgettable videos. They made a video campaign that focused on the hit TV series “Game of Thrones,” and this catapulted them into the limelight. People loved the video so very much that they shared it far and wide, and it has well over a million views.
#5 – Zendesk
Zendesk was designed to make customer service simple and effective with ticketing self-service options and other tools. Back in 2013, the team found that people were searching for “Zendesk Alternatives” rather than actually turning to their product, so the marketing team embraced it in a rather odd way. They created a fake music group named Zendesk Alternative, bought the domain name, created social media pages, and utilized SEO to essentially “own” the term that people kept searching for. The result? Zendesk surpassed its biggest competitor, Helpscout, in a matter of days after launching their fake band.
The SaaS industry is incredibly saturated, which means it can be difficult for new companies to survive. These five companies used innovation, creativity, and outright brilliance to grow their brands. As a result, they are some of the most well-known SaaS brands of all time.