The IDIOTS Guide To Running A Failed SaaS Marketing Campaign! 🤦🏻‍♀️

The title is a bit clickbait but this is another post I put up on LinkedIn a while back that some people found quite useful. Instead of highlighting what you should do, I wanted to reframe our findings as how to run the WORST marketing campaign possible.

Hopefully, this helps you apply our findings to your marketing. Please be aware some of these principles seem simple and you may claim you're not falling victim to them but we've found these faux pas to be very common, especially with people just starting out (although we do also see them with more established SaaS companies too).

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Step 1 - Immediately Sell. Shamelessly.
FIND AN AUDIENCE WHO HAS NEVER HEARD OF YOU

Give them the FANTASTIC opportunity to find out how much your services cost.

Or even better, give them the opportunity to speak directly to a salesman for a quote!

This is commonly seen in B2B SaaS companies as running a LinkedIn campaign to cold traffic pushing a free demo (which, let's all be honest, is a sales call covered in fairy lights and glitter, the prospect knows this as well).

We've found the' free demo' offer to a cold B2B audience just doesn't work at an efficient CPA. It can work to a remarketing audience a lot better.

For B2C the equivalent would be asking someone to pay upon signing up without offering a free trial.

Although in B2C there are some niches whereby this could work if you take into account the lifetime value of a single user.

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Step 2 - Only Write About Yourself!
"We're an award-winning, sustainable, woke, disrupting [blah blah blah]"

"Our platform allows you to [list features no one cares about or ever asked for]"

"We're a trusted partner of [probably Mircosoft or something. Everyone is. Get over it.] "

The above examples have their place, they are viable strategies. The issue comes when your whole website is only focused on how amazing you are rather than discussing how your solution resolves the problem of your target audience.

"OUR" is the key. If everything you write starts 'our', you're being narcissistic

Your customers care about themselves. They don't care about you.

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Step 3 - Make Signing Up As Confusing & Difficult As Possible
Make everything really vague on your website so even your ideal customer can't figure out what it is you actually do.

"Your data? Globalfied. Create new stories and solve dreams."

Or one bio I genuinely saw today on a company's LinkedIn page

"Performance delivered"

STOP TRYING TO SOUND SMART. You just end up sounding pretentious

Decision-makers won't go Sherlock Holmes for 5 minutes to try and figure out what problem it is you actually solve and how you solve it.

Keep It Simple Stupid

This one is fairly common for even larger more established SaaS companies.

Anyway, those are 3 steps you can take to ensure you're pissing money up against the wall. If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

Source: We run marketing campaigns for SaaS companies, primarily on LinkedIn