What are the best 12 valuable marketing tools for SaaS?

Published in

DatasheetEST by TDSmaker

9 min readNov 7, 2018

A successful SaaS startup consists of three essential components: a killer idea, a desire to get things done and the right tools. Unfortunately, we cannot help you with the first two, but we can recommend valuable marketing tools for SaaS companies.

SaaS marketing is by far the most challenging one. Your customers are located across the world and your product itself is continually changing, adding new features or taking totally different marketing direction. So you can not use traditional marketing channels to attract prospects. Although the task is hard, luckily there is a marketing softwares that can make your desired goal possible. Here is a list of all marketing tools we use at TDSmaker, cloud-based software that simplifies technical data sheets creating process.

We’ve categorized all marketing tools into 6 groups: management tools, email marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, customer support, and analytics tools.

Management tools

Management softwares aren’t technically marketing tools, but without appropriate planning and communication within your team any marketing strategy will fail.

TDSmaker uses two main tools to manage our work flow:

Asana

Asana is a project management tool that keeps everybody synchronized and hit deadlines. It was developed by Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook, who was also responsible for productivity improvements at the company. Asana was designed for small or midsize organizations that want to visualize their work and monitor what team members are doing. It is easy to learn the system. Basically, you move your tasks through multiple stages quickly, efficiently, and beautifully.

What you can do on Asana?

And lastly, you can make every project a success!

Slack

Communication is the key to a productive and successful SaaS workflow. If your team is using emails, Whatsapp or Facebook.. maybe you should consider other options. Although many existing messengers work just great, the main problem with them is that you have your parents, classmates and everybody you have ever met at an event or party there.

Let’s put it this way: communicating with your team members on Facebook/ WhatsApp/ Telegram is wrong!

Slack is a messenger.

What makes it perfect for work is that:

Email marketing

Despite the fact that now “work” communication happens in new applications like Slack, email marketing is still a valuable marketing channel.

MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the fastest growing SaaS company, making into Forbes Cloud 100 list. No surprise we have included this email marketing software to our 12 valuable marketing tools list.

Millions of customers use it. Luckily they have a freemium plan!

Why MailChimp is great?

Content marketing tools

Obviously buying behavior for a software product is drastically different from traditional buying behaviors. So, content marketing became popular specifically to match the changes.

The more information about the functionality of your software you provide, the higher the likelihood that a buyer will purchase/subscribe to your product. The idea is to provide educational and beneficial content that prove your expertise in the related field.

First, you need a software to plan your content marketing strategy.

Content Management Software (CMS) — Hubspot

Hubspot has a lot of tool and plans, that cover most of the marketing processes. But we want to focus on CMS.

HubSpot CMS takes care of technical optimization of content, optimizing it for every device: desktop, mobile, tablets.

Hubspot CMS features:

1) Manage all your content in one place

2) Create, edit blogs, landing pages, site pages and emails

3) Pre-designed templates or option to start from scratch

4) You can personalize your content which can lead to better conversion rates (CMS customizes the content based on a user’s location, device, language, demographics)

5) Track performance of your contentThe second step is to brainstorming content ideas.

Usually, the writing part is not the actual challenge. All the other related tasks such as brainstorming topics, targeting the right reader and SEO optimization with keywords are hard. Don’t panic! We have the right tools for you!

✍️Recommended article: 4 Steps to create a professional data sheet for Hubspot

Answer the public

“We’re all searching for something.”

Answer the public solves the brainstorming problem. When you run out of ideas, go to answer the public and get inspired.

Google or any other search engines auto-suggest results, which serves as a goldmine of insights for marketers. Google knows what people are interested in, their emotions towards something and their motivation to purchase a product, and you can know it too!

The process is simple:

That’s it!

Thirdly, check the headline on CoSchedule Headline Analyzer.

It is by far the best and fastest tool available on the internet, that checks your content headline. By improving your headline, you also improve the click-through rate. By doing a straightforward action, your blog can be tremendously more successful.

How it works?

The next step is to publish your content!

Ghost

John O’Nolan, a founder of Ghost, was a deputy lead for the WordPress User Interface team. TDSmaker team are working on a project for moving website ot Wordpress. But nevertheless, we agree with John O’Nolan on the difficulty of using WordPress.

Ghost is a free platform designed to simplify the publishing blogs for independent bloggers as well as companies. 1) You can schedule your posts

2) Add tags, meta descriptions, optimize meta descriptions to different social media: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.

3) Collaborate with team members. Each will have a different access level: administrator, editor, owner, or author.

4) Mobile, desktop versions

5) JSON API allows you to have full control over what data to get, set and display. You can build entire publishing apps on top of it and completely customize the reader experience.

Distribution and promoting you content across internet, specifically social media can boost your traffic and bring more prospects to your website.

Our Story: TDSmaker moved from Hubspot marketing tool to Ghost and many other cheaper alternatives. Moving our blog was a hard and long transition. It took time to transfer all texts, CTAs, pictures, meta-descriptions, and all links. But it was the right decision.

Social Media Marketing

Crowdfire

It revolutionized the way companies use Twitter. It was developed to give users a more efficient way of managing their accounts.

1) Track unfollowers

2) Find inactive users on social media profiles. You can unfollow a user, who didn’t use the media for 3, 6 and 12 months.

3) Schedule posts to receive more impressions

4) Track performance of your accounts: number of followers, opinions, direct messages and replies.

5) Crowdfire is available on Android and IOS, the web.

You can connect with TDSmaker on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn.

Canva

It is a drag and drop tool that transforms your ideas into visual content. It only takes 23 seconds to learn.

No design expertise is needed, anybody can create an impressive design with pre-designed templates.

1) It has everything you need for fantastic design: photo filters, hundreds of fonts perfect for any plan

2) Templates for presentations, social media posts, and more than a thousand awesome layouts

3) A drag-and-drop interface allows you to easily add photos, video clips, icons, and your own voice.

4) Export files in different formats: png, jpeg, pdf

5) Free and paid templates

6) You can add objects, shapes and frames to your design

Related article: Canva Vs TDSmaker

Lincoln Murphy: “When creating your SaaS marketing plan, you must understand that your business model of choice is a fully-integrated architecture where all aspects of the business — product, support, revenue model, and marketing — are tightly-coupled.”

Intercom

Intercom is a customer messaging platform. If you are a software company, you can chat with prospects, existing customer by using their app, website, social media or email.

1) Track and filter customer data ( conversations history, product usage behavior, past purchases, payment details, etc.)

2) Personalized messages

3) Automate marketing emails and messages

4) Target your audience

Analytics tools

To grow your business, you need to analyze and optimize your marketing efforts. First, you need to know your customers, then you need to analyze how your content is performing in across all social media, and understand which content your public likes the most.

What seems like a hard task, can actually be quickly done using the following tools:

Google Analytics

Google Analytics brings you to your target audience. It shows you information about your customers: who they are, and how they are engaging with your content. So, you have to know which content has a higher probability of bringing your customer down in the sales funnel.

1) Machine learning discovers new insights from your data — such as which users are which users are likely to convert or which customers have high revenue potential.

2) Analyze data quickly

3) Easy to use interface and available online free courses at Google Academy

4) Built-in technical support and global infrastructure. Your data is secured and under your control

5) Download and create a report to share within your organization

Google offers many marketing free tools, that can highly benefit your marketing strategies.

For example:To create advertising on Google: AdWords, Adwords key planner, Google trends, DoubleClick Search, Google Alerts, Google Feedburner, Google Adsense…To find out more about these tools — Google them! )

Bitly

Bitly is one of the most popular link shortening and link management software. The company shortens 600 Million links per month!

Why do you need it?

From a long link: https://privateapi.tdsmaker.com/UserFolders/59bf938b4617df1695b8b2a8/libraryTemplates/pdfs/5952392b264fe3773d9e3f83.pdf

You can get a short one: http://bit.ly/2pyM830 (This one is a lot nicer, isn’t it?)

By shortening your links, you not only can insert them into tweets, Blogs, and other social media accounts but also manage each link. Bitly shows time when a user clicked on the link, references (Email, SMS, direct, Facebook), location.

In conclusion,

Every challenge has its own solution. Successful SaaS marketing is not an impossible goal! We have listed 12 valuable marketing tools for you to be successful in creating content, managing your projects, monitoring your performance, creating excellent social media post, scheduling them to hit higher impressions rates, sending emails and many more tools that were not covered in this blog. Google can help you find them all.

And you can check out TDSmaker.com! We love helping people creating technical data sheets.