Product marketing has already consolidated its position among SaaS and continues gaining more and more relevance. Even startups or smaller SaaS businesses, who don’t have a dedicated employee for the role, are implementing their best practices.
After 2 years of a pandemic and a massive shift towards remote work and digitalization, most processes are being handled online and SaaS tools emerged as an efficient and cost-effective alternative to improve existing operations.
Product marketers now have the challenging and fascinating task of making their products stand out! By targeting the right buyer, having the accurate product messaging and positioning their digital tool as the perfect solution for each pain point.
As product marketing strengthens its importance, we’ll see more and new strategies to increase product awareness, user engagement and growth.
Here are the top 10 SaaS Product Marketing trends to watch out for in 2022:
1. Product-led strategy
SaaS companies no longer need a huge Sales team to manage as many leads as possible. A product-led strategy, places the product as the core and value adding asset to solve your users problems and needs. The new approach is just to target the right prospects, and show the product value to attract, convert and upsell.
Product-led strategy will continue to be a preferred approach, not only for startups or bootstrapped businesses, but also for publicly-traded companies. According to a recent report by Openview Partners, almost all companies going public in 2021 mentioned product-led growth in their filings. That’s being welcomed by investors for being a cost-efficient approach.
Product Marketing plays a key role here: understanding the product-qualified lead profile, crafting the right messaging and positioning, while gathering feedback to determine the upcoming new features and updates needed to support the changing demand and environment.
2. Communities
Product Marketers need to engage with their target users and share a common space with them to understand their pain points, analyze first-hand data and know what the new needs or trends are.
There are many products that have already created public or private spaces, where users can look for best-practices, share their questions and seek advice. They are another layer of customer support, and at the same time a great source of insights of the trends among existing customers.
In addition, professional communities are growing as well! Social media groups (mainly Facebook and Linked-in for B2B) and niche communities like Reddit or Hacker News are being complemented by Slack groups and private communities where product marketers can ask for and share recommendations. Not only are they great ways to learn and share knowledge, but they also give marketers the chance to interact with tough leaders and be updated on the latest trends, tools and industry news. We strongly recommend the Product Marketing Alliance Slack community!
3. Niche SaaS
As all businesses start taking their processes online, available tools might not be enough for newcomers, with specific needs and particular requirements.
Something we already saw in 2021 and is expanding in 2022 are niche SaaS, which will be created to attend special demands that other general SaaS products cannot fulfill.
This will create huge opportunities in markets that might have been ignored or generalized in a broader category. The result will be a huge value creation for end-users, improved customer experience and business opportunities for new SaaS or existing SaaS companies launching new niche products.
4. Educational Resources
Content marketing is still a crucial way for product marketing teams to generate demand, attract product-qualified leads and become a trusted authority on their own niche.
Product Marketing should create content not only aimed to improve the search engine rankings, but also specifically designed to educate prospects, users and customers.
Webinars are a must-have for SaaS products nowadays, to reach many potential leads and prospects and show the value of your product at once. Some clients will prefer to jump on a more personalized call, but a webinar gives you broader access and less dependency on the sales team.
Product marketers will also need to ensure they educate their users on the best practices and existing features of their product. Many companies, especially those offering several complementary or more complex products, have already implemented a “University” or digital courses to educate their users.
In addition, product marketing needs to properly announce latest product updates and new features to keep users engaged. One of the trends that will continue growing in 2022 is the implementation of in-app changelogs and segmented notifications. In-app, in context announcements have a significant better performance and open rate and ensure a faster new feature adoption.
5. Monitoring the whole feedback loop
The role of Product Marketing has gained scope, becoming key to understanding the users’ feedback and closing the loop.
Closing the feedback loop implies having the right processes in place to gather and analyze feedback to improve your product based on the market needs. Certainly, this is a joint endeavor, where different teams apart from product marketing must be involved: from the Sales teams and Customer Success, to Product and Development.
The information silos and buried feedback in multiple platforms are no longer acceptable. Product Marketing must ensure feedback is gathered and centralized to understand patterns, prioritize new feature implementation, define where the product is heading to and ensure customer success.
Beamer is a complete platform to cover all feedback loop stages. You can collect in-app feedback, measure NPS and gather new features requests, while presenting a product roadmap with the upcoming improvements to your product.
To complete the loop and improve customer retention, you can announce the latest product changes through a changelog and keep receiving comments on the implemented updates. In addition, all the data is centralized in a unique platform, easy to access, manage and analyze.
6. Data enrichment
Data is a very valuable asset for SaaS and, as users collaborate and move their processes online, they also leave traces of their behavior and preferences. That’s where data enrichment can be a great resource to acquire new leads, personalize SaaS messaging and engage users.
With data enrichment, Product Marketing can get additional information from your website visitors, to have a deeper knowledge of your audience, send targeted messages and automate SaaS marketing campaigns more efficiently.
This trend of additional information available, will lead to even more personalization, which will lead to better performing product marketing strategies and improved results.
7. Mutual Partnerships
Many companies are joining forces to offer their target customers a blend of two of their favorite experiences. As naturally more products and services are connected and used in tandem online, companies are seeing opportunity for collaboration.
Most examples of this are is software and apps, but there are eCommerce products as well. Not only does the natural use help marketing the products but often the co-branding combines the strength and audience of two closely linked brands. Some examples include Uber and Spotify (music on your ride) and Bumble + Instagram + Spotify (create a complete dating profile).
Many of these brands cross over in target audience and a partnership can really help boost sales for both. You can also partner with your customers. Affiliate programs can be very helpful in drawing new leads and customers just like your current base by using their influence and reach to the mutual benefit of you both.
8. No- code tools
SaaS is about constant improvements and rapid changes. And usually development teams are too busy to work on urgent stuff. That’s why no-code tools are the perfect solution to implement updates or have new data resources without coding skills.
The number of this type of tools is increasing (luckily) and they can be applied to the most common digital marketing needs, such as landing pages or email automations to more complex processes such as heatmaps, or Artificial Intelligence driven chatbots.
Thanks to no-code tools you can focus on your core business and manage anything else with specific tools or platforms. Usually a few initial settings are required, to have access to a complete dashboard the information you need.
Beamer is another example of a no-code tool. You can install it in your website or app in a few minutes to have your own product’s changelog, NPS and roadmap.
9. Video marketing
Video has been outperforming other mediums heavily exponentially over the last few years. Thanks to YouTube, it’s exploding on social as the preferred medium of social media users.
Marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users. Promotional videos and video content outperform simple branded posts and are a great way to improve audience engagement.
Video production can be expensive, especially for professionally shot videos but there are also free video maker tools that marketing teams can use to produce effective videos quickly. Wave Animatron has a ton of stock video and photo and a drag and drop editor that helps you make quick branded content. Shakr is also amazing for making super graphic brand videos to announce sales, new products, etc.
10. Multi-channel marketing and selling
The average customer of yours spends a long time of their day checking multiple social media channels. They all make up their collective profile and personality online.
Many companies are taking advantage to get to know and engage their target customer across multiple channels. It’s imperative your brand has multiple active profiles and you interact with your customers across them. Many brands are taking advantage of using social media profiles to present different offers and sell directly from the platforms, which customers are moving towards. This is one of the multiple touch points in your SaaS customer journey: so, be ready to make the most of it as well!
As a product marketer, you need to ensure your customers get the right understanding and value of your product, easy and quickly. Jumping on board and understanding these trends well are imperative to staying relevant and moving at the right velocity with your target audience and competitors.
