Practical workshops, highly relevant speakers and meaningful connections make SaaStock an absolute must for a SaaS founder, executive or investor. Last month, I had the privilege of attending SaaStock, a global SaaS event that takes place in Dublin and connects founders, executives and investors to build and scale B2B SaaS companies. After reflecting on this rewarding experience sponsored by Bounsel, I would like to share my insights as an Italian digital marketer.

These are my top takeaways from SaaStock 2019:

  1. Stop Measuring Vanity Metrics

Vanity metrics are metrics that make you look good but don’t help you understand your own performance. They aren’t actionable and useful to improve your results.

It’s important to look beyond this data and understand your business, or you’ll end up with teams creating vanity metrics and competing against the heads of other departments. If you mis-incentivize your marketing team, they will simply load up whatever sort of leads they find, rather than finding qualified leads. It passes the buck to other divisions who will then have a harder time converting and retaining those customers.

The CTO is usually forced to create vanity metrics for the division in order to measure and control costs per output. Its main focus becomes developing as many features as possible, but this doesn’t really help improve the product. This way of working leaves no room for discovery and experimentation and results in high costs and no real value for the customers.

When we are talking about stats and metrics remember that less is more and you should focus only on the most important ones. You have to find a North Star metric: a guiding goal for your company.

At Bounsel we have a clear goal, having our MVP ready in 2020. To do so, we are strictly focused on building the most important features for our customers and don’t lose time adding features that make us look good but are not really useful to the final users. This is our biggest secret behind our speed and efficiency in product development!

  • Create Content Your Audience Wants to Read

Most SaaS companies know that content marketing is one of the best ways to earn new users and optimize their blog posts to convert readers into leads. A successful approach is offering more valuable content for free to the reader. You can give away a pdf guide or a free course in exchange for the reader’s email.

But most of SaaS businesses are strongly investing in content and finding new ways to attract potential customers’ attention. So, if you want this strategy to work for your company, it will take more than publishing a blog post every few weeks.

One content format that’s proven to be effective is the case study. People are much more likely to be willing to pay for a product after reading a case study than a testimonial. Content can also be used to boost results in the retention stage. Tutorials that helps users to learn the software makes difficult for them to leave your company.

So, if you’re struggling to get results with content, consider which stage in your marketing strategy needs the most work. Determine what needs your target audience has in that stage and focus your content efforts on addressing them.

At Bounsel, even if we have limited resources as a startup, we are already planning our blog strategy. We want to help our target audience with insightful articles on contract management tips, legal tech news and much more!

  • Make Users Trust You

Your main competitors have the same target audience, a product as good as yours and equally awesome customer service.

How users decide whom to buy from? You could think that they will buy from the cheapest company, the one that’s been on the market longer or choose depending on individual preferences. Most of the times, the brand the client will choose is the one he trusts more. Building trust isn’t easy, but it is one of the most powerful things you can focus on.

These are some methods to make users trust you:

  1. Product description: Think about your target audience while writing your product description and give them all the information they need.
  2. Social media: Try to use your social media as a way to connect, create a community and build trust and loyalty.
  3. Product reviews: If clients have a good experience with your product, ask them to write a review with the benefits of using your software.
  4. Content marketing: The biggest purpose of blog posts is earning trust, a little at a time, with each piece of content a prospect finds valuable, until they decide to buy your product.

If your potential clients don’t trust you, they won’t turn into clients. Focus on building trust and understanding your users’ needs. Your sales will magically increase!

  • Get Your SaaS To Sell Itself

SaaS marketing isn’t that complicated.

Customer acquisition, conversions, churn and all these metrics actually take care of themselves once you’re able to settle on the most important things of all. Yes, you should keep them in mind, but they are not the focus of SaaS marketing.

The most important things are product and support. Once you have an awesome software and deliver a good customer service, your product will sell itself and you’ll focus on your marketing to further improve your results. But until that moment comes, the best you can do is to work on these two factors.

Great products and a great service are at the core of a SaaS marketing strategy.

At Bounsel, our main focus is building an awesome platform that significantly improves teams’ way of managing contracts.