This morning I was a panelist in a conversation hosted by Mike Dunham from Scio Consulting where we discussed Agile Marketing in SaaS. The other panelists were Peter Cohen and Justin Pirie, both who have a lot of experience in SaaS marketing. It was a great conversation where we discussed how marketing in a SaaS world needs to be as agile as software development. You need to think differently about your products and customers. Today everyone wants an application to be easy to use with little to no training. If a customer can’t get value out of a SaaS application quickly, you as a provider have failed.
There was a great discussion about SaaS driving communities of users to help each other. If you can build social tools into your product to help customers engage with each other and with the provider, you hit a home run. If the users and other companies create an ecosystem around your product, that drives your cost of customer acquisition down. Customers will sell your products for you by word of mouth. Think about iTunes, Salesforce.com or FreshBooks. Passionate users are your best sales people.
Check out the show on BlogTalkRadio or iTunes. Also check out Mike Dunham’s show writeup.
