The Ultimate Media Strategy Guide For SaaS Startups

The Indian SaaS market attracted investments worth $4.5 Bn in 2021 alone—a whopping 170% increase from the previous year. The reason? SaaS brands in India bagged more than $50 Mn in subscriptions and deals. This is just one indication of the aggressive competition in the SaaS sector today. 

While there’s no secret sauce to sweep past this competition, building relationships and winning customer loyalty come close. To do this well, you need a PR strategy that attracts new customers while engaging the existing ones. This strategy can build credibility, generate awareness organically, and build social proof. 

The only catch: doing PR is no cakewalk. 

PR for SaaS brands requires a thorough understanding of the target audience and creating unique content that evokes a positive emotion. Half-baked PR tactics can do more harm than good for your company. 

So, read this blog to learn more about the difference a solid PR strategy can make and six strategies to do it right. 

Why SaaS Startups Need Effective PR Marketing

As a SaaS startup, your priorities lie in building the perfect product. But what good is an excellent, feature-packed product if it fails to get people’s attention and drive conversions?

Sure, virality through ads and social media can generate amazing buzz for you. But it won’t happen frequently, nor will it be cost-effective. This is why you need a laser-targeted PR strategy that breaks down your marketing goals into actionable steps that yield results. 

Let’s look at what a solid PR strategy can do for your brand:

• Brand Awareness: When you’re starting, your biggest challenge is to get in front of the right audience. A well-designed media strategy can connect the dots and help you do just that to build brand awareness and push users further down the funnel. 
• Positive Publicity: With the right PR tactics, you can drive positive conversations around your brand on social media and events. It allows you to raise the brand reputation bar and attract users. As you share your customer stories and innovative media campaigns, your brand will garner more attention—for all the right reasons.
• Lead Generation: The most direct benefit of a solid PR strategy is the leads it can secure for you. Beyond reputation management and publicity, PR can improve SEO rankings and expand reach to bring new users into the marketing funnel. 
• Social Proof: Testimonials can boost conversions by 34%. That’s the power of social proof for SaaS brands. It helps accelerate the buyer’s journey when they see enough proof of how you can take them from where they are to where they want to be. Your PR strategy can win positive customer reviews and user-generated content to achieve this.
• Quality Traffic: Understanding your target audience and addressing their concerns takes a step closer to your potential customers. When you do this organically, with the right PR strategy, it’ll attract people who are genuinely interested in your product. 

So, if you’re convinced that a PR strategy is more than just a nice-to-have for your success in the competitive SaaS market, let’s look at how you can actually begin creating it.

6 Strategies To Create And Implement A Killer Media Strategy

Today, we have more options than ever to engage in public relations—like events, communities, collaborations, influencer partnerships, and so on. But if you don’t design the right strategy to leverage these options, you’re leaving money at the table. 

Here’s a six-step roadmap to create a fail-proof PR strategy for your SaaS brand:

Collect And Share Data-Packed Insights

SaaS companies deal with endless streams of data—from customers and product usage to industry trends. You can leverage these insights to create high-impact reports that position your brand as an industry leader. 

Even if you don’t have access to first-hand data, use external research to produce data-rich reports the right way. Here’s how:

• Collect and analyse the data to derive quality insights
• Identify key statistics as your main hook to attract sign-ups 
• Present easily digestible facts in a report with enough context and plenty of infographics and examples 
• Create a landing page or gate the content on your own website to gather their contact information in exchange for this report  

HackerEarth presents a perfect case in point with its State of Development Recruitment Report 2021. The report offered information about the development in the recruitment world following the advent of COVID-19 and helps readers understand today’s hiring landscape. It contains data from several different industries to cover a larger target audience.  

Unsurprisingly, the report has since gained a lot of backlinks—300 to be precise. This makes HackerEarth’s data valuable and increases its brand credibility. 

Share Knowledge Through Media Queries

Media queries are a CSS3 (Cascading Style Sheets 3) feature. It allows content rendering by ensuring screen resolution as a factor. Essentially, it helps you experience HTML emails and websites in the right way irrespective of the device. This is an essential part of PR marketing as you can reach your target audience across devices and deliver a consistent user experience.

Zoho shows how it’s done with its newsletters covering the brand, product updates, and business insights. This is a brilliant way to stay in touch with customers and attract new ones with constant engagement. 

Here’s one of their newsletters that adapts based on the device when it arrives in customers’ inboxes.  

Follow Newsjacking To Garner Attention

Newsjacking is the technique for creating content around a recent event or trend that is relevant to your industry. This is a handy tool as it allows marketers to leverage a hashtag or event’s traffic to their advantage. 

But this can go wrong when marketers don’t have customer perspective and brand image at the core of their strategy. 

So, here are two things that you should avoid at all costs: 

• Don’t use an unfortunate or controversial trend to gain traction. You might receive backlash for such content. 
• Don’t produce content that doesn’t align or “feel right” for your brand. Just because everyone may be hopping on a trend, you shouldn’t. 

Now that you know what not to do, here are two examples of companies who did it right. 

Using A Social Media Trend 

Leadsquared, marketing automation and sales execution platform, leveraged a famous trend to drive attention toward their hiring requirements in this LinkedIn post. Recently, a social media trend of an Instagrammer saying “pawrii” went viral. 

A Leadesquared employee recreated a cheeky and fun version of the video that received a lot of social media love! 

Using The Latest Event

Chargebee, subscription management and recurring billing software, interestingly used an event for their PR strategy. 

Their LinkedIn pulse article addressed how the Yellowstone Stone National Park issued an inheritance pass for use after 150 years—essentially for a family’s future generations. This was to ensure active participation in its preservation and have customers several decades down the line. They linked this idea to customer churn and how to get it right.

Using this approach to newsjacking, they tied two unrelated concepts into one without hampering the brand image but instead received good traction!

Connect With Industry Experts And Influencers

Influencer marketing is essential to PR today—93% of PR experts agree! In this strategy, brands collaborate with social media influencers who have enough credibility with a large audience base to talk about their products or services. Considering how 90% of social media users engage with influencer content, it’s a tactic you can’t afford to ignore. 

SaaS brands can collaborate with industry experts as well for events, webinars, podcasts, and more such engaging initiatives. Your brand reliability increases when you present expert insights and opinions to your audience. 

WebEngage is a multi-channel automation platform with an array of solutions for B2C brands. Recently, they conducted EngageMint2022, their annual user retention conference. They leveraged industry experts and an influencer to market their conference. 

Using Industry Experts

They invited several industry leaders to speak at the event. Here’s one of their social media posts that talks about the experts from the industry speaking at the event. 

Using An Influencer

Rahul Subramanian, a comedian and influencer, was a part of their event as well! In a LinkedIn post, he addressed the audience about his performance for the event. 

Produce Link-Worthy Content 

As you create content for your PR strategy, stop to think about who it is for. Are you only talking about yourself and your products? Or are you creating content that helps people address their business problems? 

This is important for two reasons:

• Creating helpful content with resources like articles, research, and landing pages gets maximum backlinks 
• 68% of social users share content that addresses who they are and what they care about 

Therefore, if you want more backlinks to gain an SEO edge and make sure people love what you create, create link-worthy content. 

Chargebee created a blog post about selecting the right merchant service providers. This post received over 18,000 backlinks—which shows the immense value this article contained. 

Send Out Press Releases Consistently 

Regular press releases inform your audience about everything related to your brand—whether it’s a new feature launch or a product update. All these updates lead back to your customers and shape their perception of your brand.

A consistent flow of press releases also helps in reputation management to tackle bad publicity at any point. Establish a team to act immediately whenever unfortunate incidents happen because it might take only a couple of hours to confirm a rumour, but it takes 14 hours to debunk a false one. If your PR team is equipped to send regular press releases, you could clear the air in no time. 

Look at Whatfix’s recent press releases to see this tactic in action. The brand posts consistent updates from the newsroom to keep its readers and users informed. It’s a brilliant way to talk about your achievements, product releases, and news items all the while maintaining a connection with the customers. 

Stay On Top Of Your PR Game

PR is an invaluable part of the plan to build and boost your reputation as a SaaS startup. These six strategies will help you perfect your media strategy and maximise the ROI. 

No one can understand your audience better than you and likewise, create content that speaks volumes about your solutions. Find the balance and centre your strategies around customer empathy. Once you get this right, no viral content will win against your well-thought-out approach to a media strategy. 

With all these takeaways in mind, you can work on building your PR strategies. We hope you get links, shares, likes, and most importantly, a lot of customers!