The demand for optimizing productivity and streamlining business processes only increases yearly. Cloud computing and other integrated technologies make today’s SaaS industry exciting.
However, the SaaS market is projected to grow to USD 908.21 billion by 2030, making the competition fierce and relentless. So, standing out in this environment and retaining customers are top priorities for businesses.
This is where a carefully planned and well-executed product lifecycle marketing strategy can help businesses achieve sustained growth, customer retention, and profitability.
What is product lifecycle marketing?
PLM framework aligns your marketing strategy and campaigns with the different phases or stages in a product’s lifecycle, from beginning to end. You can customize your marketing efforts with trend analysis, user data, and lead scoring.
So, you address each specific stage-wise interaction or encounter your audience has with your product. Such strategies can drastically reduce your SLA.
Let’s look at three key statistics to understand the need for targeted SaaS marketing:
- The global SaaS market is valued at USD 273.55 billion and is growing at 18.4%.
- Marketing and sales are among the biggest expenses for SaaS businesses, some touching even 50% or more of revenue.
- 59% of companies cite visibility as a pain point in managing SaaS.
So, employing product lifecycle marketing is important for SaaS products to gain better visibility and reach the right audience at the relevant points in the product lifecycle.
Understanding product lifecycle marketing
Just like your products undergo a lifecycle journey, so do your customers. The marketing funnel describes their journey from initial knowledge of your business to when they finally make purchases.
Apart from investing in lifecycle marketing, the success of SaaS products also relies on how well you optimize the marketing funnel, ensuring your potential customers have the best experience from start to end.
To do this, get ICP and data collection insights. Then, you can tailor a marketing campaign to reach them at the right point in their interaction with your brand or product.
The stages of the product lifecycle
To understand how product lifecycle marketing can be implemented, you need to know the various stages of the product’s lifecycle in public view, i.e., research and development are not included here.
The four stages are:
- Introduction phase
- Growth phase
- Maturity phase
- Decline phase
Each phase is characterized by a specific market condition surrounding your product and a corresponding audience state. So, your marketing strategy has to take into account both these factors.
- Introduction phase. This is the product’s first entry into the market. Your efforts here involve raising awareness and generating product interest. Marketing strategies aim to create a buzz and spread the word about the product’s USP. The goal is to secure early adopters who then advocate for the brand.
- Growth phase. Once the product reaches enough people through the right channels, there will be an onslaught of new customers and proponents. You will gain traction and seek to expand and scale customer acquisition efforts. Here, the marketing strategy revolves around targeted ad campaigns to reach specific audience groups and critical partnerships to expand the reach.
- Maturity phase. After a juncture, your product will hit a horizontal growth point. The market gets saturated, you stop seeing a jump in sales or drastic upticks in new adopters. This phase is crucial for customer retention so your marketing needs to focus on building loyalty among existing customers.
- Decline phase. As technology and product offerings evolve, your product sales could start declining. At this natural end of the product lifecycle, you need to focus on gaining as much remaining value as possible from the product. This phase is also an opportunity to move your customers to newer, better offerings.
The benefits of product lifecycle marketing for SaaS
The growth rate of the SaaS industry necessitates an active and dynamic marketing strategy. This is true for giving new products the best chance at success and rejuvenating existing offerings.
The most crucial benefits of product lifecycle marketing are:
Enhanced customer retention
Product lifecycle marketing recognizes and addresses core customer needs at each point in the product’s lifecycle. This means creating and capturing more value for SaaS customers, leading to fostering loyalty and identity with the brand. Since repeat revenues are at the heart of SaaS businesses, maximizing customer loyalty and reducing churn rates are crucial success factors.
Maximized customer lifetime value
Each customer individually and the audience segment bring unique value points back to the business. SaaS lifecycle marketing maximizes the value of each customer with targeted and controlled upselling and cross-selling drives. Thus, it can open new revenue streams and lengthen the customer’s lifetime value.
For example, by noting customer dissatisfaction with a near-legacy feature at the Maturity stage, businesses can market parallel products or add-on services to help address the issue and gain more business from the customer.
Optimized resource allocation
Marketing efforts can account for so much of a company’s total revenue. Broad, generalized marketing strategies tend to waste efforts and resources by not being tailored to the right audience at the right time.
Product lifecycle marketing helps you deploy the right resources strategically. So, you can gain maximum impact while cutting down on wasteful spending. You can use online ROI calculators to see how this can give higher returns for your marketing undertakings.
Implementing product lifecycle strategies
This involves correctly recognizing the product’s stage and customizing your marketing strategy accordingly. These aspects are fueled by data-driven decisions.
Identify lifecycle stages accurately
In PLM, products have a beginning of life (BOL), middle of life (MOL), and an end of life (EOL) stage. Compare this with lifecycle marketing, where products go through introduction, growth, maturity, and decline.
These stages mostly align with the MOL part of product lifecycle management. So, even before public distribution, you must deploy a marketing strategy to spread product awareness.
Once the product is introduced, analyze product performance data, market trends, and customer feedback to pinpoint the product lifecycle stage.
Tailor marketing efforts accordingly
After correctly identifying the stage, create and implement a marketing campaign that addresses its specific needs and trends.
Identify ad and marketing campaign channels based on where your target audience will be present. Then, customize your messaging and marketing approach to resonate with the audience and tackle their pain points.
For example, during the introduction phase, you can leverage educational content and demos as part of your marketing strategy.
Use data and analytics
Everything depends on relevant data. Identifying the product stage, understanding market trends, gathering customer feedback, and designing a marketing strategy all hinge on data-driven insights and decisions. Identifying the right consumer base depends on defining metrics, and collecting and analyzing data.
To succeed in the SaaS space, you need the right tools and platforms to access useful insights and analytics that will form the basis for your marketing campaigns.
Tools and platforms for lifecycle marketing
Streamlining research, business process automation (BPO), data gathering and analytics, and customer relationship management efforts are all crucial aspects of lifecycle marketing.
You need the right tools and platforms to maximize real-time data and AI-driven features and capabilities. For example, tools like Breadcrumbs offer lead scoring and valuable insights into leads most likely to engage with your product.
There are multiple tools and applications to choose from. So, narrow down what would work best for you by considering these key factors:
- Integration with existing systems: The new tool or software you implement should integrate seamlessly with your existing systems. This ensures your business processes remain uninterrupted and no time or energy is spent migrating from currently-used tools.
- Cost and scalability considerations: You could get state-of-the-art features and capabilities for a high enough price. However, the pricing should make sense to your business size and model. This also rings true for scalability—the tool you select needs to offer flexible, dynamic options.
Let’s look at 3 popular tools to see what they do and how they help with product lifecycle marketing:
Hubspot
Hubspot, a well-known player in the field, offers a comprehensive centralized CRM with many automated marketing tools and functionalities. To propel sales efforts, you have options like email marketing and lead nurturing, and the tool also facilitates social media management and analytics.
Intercom
Intercom is a useful customer communication platform that helps you send personalized and relevant messaging to customers throughout the product lifecycle.
Pendo
Pendo analytics platform gathers meaningful customer data and insights from within a SaaS product. This data is user-behavior-oriented and shows how customers interact with your product, letting you pinpoint areas of improvement and drive engagement.
Common pitfalls in lifecycle marketing and strategies to mitigate these challenges
Some of these issues stem from outmoded ways of business functioning and collaboration, while others stem from gaps in the marketing vision.
- Operating in silos: Data and insights are usually spread across different departments. Missing out on any one source can lead to missing out on key aspects of the customer journey and the product lifecycle. So, it’s important to move away from data silos and adopt an integrated approach to collate relevant data and work with a holistic approach.
- Delivering inconsistent messaging: Consistency is key to any good marketing initiative. However, there is a high risk of sending inconsistent messaging with so many different channels and platforms. Omnichannel marketing can help you maintain a uniform and recognizable brand voice throughout, even as you tailor messaging to various lifecycle stages and audience types.
- Failing to personalize: Generic marketing campaigns are easier and quicker to run but won’t yield the right outcomes. So, personalize your marketing by leveraging customer data and customizing content and offerings.
To mitigate these challenges, you can:
- Opt for a centralized CRM: A unified CRM is a valuable customer and product data repository.
- Implement a content map: A content map will align with each phase of the product lifecycle, so your marketing campaigns can broadcast the right message for each stage, at the right time.
- Leverage automation: Marketing automation will help you personalize and deliver messages in large quantities, eliminating a lot of unproductive manual efforts. You will be better equipped to nurture leads and customers throughout the cycle.
- Gather actionable insights: Product features and marketing strategies depend on customer needs and wants. So, gather customer feedback to gain actionable insights. You can use surveys, feedback forms, and interviews.
- Constantly monitor and tweak: The market and your audience are often growing and changing, so you must, too. Track key metrics in real time and address pain points on the go to boost the success of your SaaS product. Refine and adapt your approach as required.
The bottom line: Lifecycle marketing is essential for SaaS products
Product lifecycle marketing can differentiate between your SaaS product failing or thriving amidst tough competition. It’s a data-driven strategic process of running complementary marketing campaigns attuned to each stage.
With targeted marketing, you can achieve:
- Enhanced customer retention
- Higher customer lifetime value
- Better resource allocation
To run a successful product lifecycle marketing campaign, you need the right tools and platforms that integrate into your existing systems at the right cost and feature package for your business.
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