Executive Summary

• There is little written on software marketing.
• This article covers this specialized type of marketing.

Introduction

The reasons we wrote this article are as follows.

Reason #1: Seeing Successful and Unsuccessful Vendors

I have seen many vendors successfully follow what I will call a SaaS or inbound based strategy, although it could be used by a vendor that only had an on-premises offering.

Reason #2: The Waste in Software Marketing (and sales)

There is a large amount of waste in both the marketing and sales processes of software vendors. A major reason for this is that vendors have to keep re-learning the same trial and error steps. And this relates to the next point.

Reason #3: A Lack of Books on Software Marketing

There are few materials on the marketing of software. In fact, if you type in “software marketing” into various search engines, you are more likely to receive results for “marketing software,” which is for software that assists in marketing.

I found this search result odd because reading a generic book on marketing does not have much to do with how to market software. I was further surprised when I typed in “SaaS marketing” and again could not find books on this topic. However, I did find many articles (and you can find them in the references section). I also found the articles not to be around what I intended to cover, as they tended to be mostly about keyword optimization or email marketing. They were just generic digital marketing topics that have been repurposed to cover the area of SaaS. The articles had some relevant topics, but the coverage of the various topics was generally short and high level. For example, several articles on the topic of SaaS marketing have around 8 to 10 items where the coverage of each item is less than 300 words.

When Did SaaS Become AaaS?

This gets into an interesting topic: SaaS has now come to represent both software and non-software categories, at least in terms of marketing. This means that some of the SaaS marketing and SaaS marketing agencies focus on promoting anything online. That is, the term has metastasized to cover online endeavors and not just software. Of course, the term SaaS stands for “software as a service,” so how it morphed into “anything as a service” (AaaS) is a mystery. What is non-service marketing now, AaaM or AaaD (anything as manufacturing and anything as distribution)? How can SaaS now cover legal services? This is something I never expected to find.

Furthermore, if you read the websites of many SaaS marketing agencies, you will find that many discuss the online model but don’t say much of anything software. For example, one agency I found catered to the insurance industry, another to the hospitality industry. Well, marketing insurance is not the same and requires different expertise than marketing software.

Reading the Articles on SaaS Marketing

This was the part of researching this article that I did not enjoy because I had to read many websites on SaaS marketing, and I wouldn’t say I liked most of the articles that I found. I often felt as if I was reading derivations of the same article. These articles also seemed to be miscategorized as I read material generally to all marketing, not just services marketing. Some of these articles were written by SaaS marketing companies, which could not write compelling articles on the topic. They would then say something like the following.

“We provide content for your website.”

Ah…no, thank you. This was their opportunity to write an article that pulled the reader in on the importance of using them for SaaS marketing, and they could not do it. However, tedious, I felt I had to read them to completion to accurately present a comprehensive view of the material in this area. Or put another way..

“I read a number of articles on SaaS marketing….so you don’t have to.”

Normally when I do research, I end up with many interesting sources, which I quote in the book or article. But that was not the case this time around. And this is a good time to address what this article will not cover.

What This Article Does Not Cover

This includes.

1. Pricing
2. Operational SaaS topics
3. The freemium model (see pricing)
4. Churn rates

I could go on, but I wanted to mention this point because many of the articles I read seemed to branch into topics unrelated to marketing and the overall SaaS business model. Again, I view this as sloppiness on the part of the article authors who frequently lost their way and started discussing other topics within software marketing. And again, this article is not specifically aimed at SaaS (or AaaS for that matter) but is instead squarely on software marketing.

And as a side note, one should ask why nearly all of the content covering software marketing is now under SaaS. SaaS allows one to access a demo environment immediately, but how many vendors offer this? Not that many. Amazon and Google Cloud are very well known for their ability to bring up environments. Still, these are companies that offer their services online available to spin up at any time. The primary market of Amazon and Google Cloud are those looking for infrastructure services. That has does not translate to most vendors. Therefore, why is SaaS marketing any different from good old software marketing if the vast majority of vendors do not offer an online demo or the immediate ability to spin up the application for a charge per hour or minute?

This is a question I only began asking as I was writing this article and noticing the one-sidedness of the availability of content in SaaS marketing.

Curiously, I never saw this question addressed one time in any of the articles I read on SaaS marketing. So if you are not trying to market software specifically, this is not the article for you.

Conclusion

For most of the existence of Brightwork Research & Analysis, the company’s focus has been researching. However, many of the requests that would start off from vendors related to some research that we had performed would eventually move over to tow that vendor could better market. So why not add software marketing to the repertoire? This does not change the research side of Brightwork Research & Analysis. Unlike a Gartner, we don’t sell space or ratings to software vendors. This software marketing service is entirely unrelated to the research at Brightwork. That is, we don’t produce vendor-paid for articles or anything like that. I am a stickler to the research method of never having commercial interests bleed into the research.

References for this article can be viewed here.