SaaS marketing is difficult at the best of times. Consider a global brand or even the smallest of online e-commerce stores. The customer base and the potential market is huge, and there are many different channels that these businesses can use to market their products or services.
However, as a SaaS business, your options are much more limited and need to be a lot more precise. Your industry’s marketplace is constantly changing. This is the foundation of why having a knowledge base is essential, so you can pinpoint these opportunities and take full advantage of them.
Let’s explore these concepts, teaching you everything you need to know to ensure you can market your Software as a Service business as effectively as possible.
Implement World-Class Customer Support
As a SaaS business, you’ll already be well aware of the fact that customer retention is far more important than securing new customers, especially if you’re running a monthly payment system. Your customer service department must be able to go above and beyond the call of duty, as should your knowledge base.
More and more, stellar customer service and the customer experience is becoming a key differentiator for companies and a strategic tool to open up new marketing opportunities for your business. After all, if a customer is interested in your product and you can show them that they will receive all the support they could ever want, why would they need to go anywhere else? Companies like Brocade and Adobe are providing outstanding levels of customer support and prove that the better the level of support you offer your customers, the more successful your business will be.
Most companies are well aware of how important comprehensive customer service solutions are for business, but providing effective customer support with efficient support agents has traditionally required a major investment in training them to understand customer problems and provide solutions. Factor in the high turnover of customer support agents and the complex systems to provide support and this has been very difficult to do at scale. This is where an effective and powerful knowledge base can cut down on training times and empower your agents with the knowledge they need. AI-powered search and machine learning embedded in your support console can anticipate their needs, and recommend content based on the behavior, context and history of the customer and agent.
Using Facts to Drive Sales
Traditionally, knowledge bases were used internally by businesses, and it’s only been recently that they have begun opening the doors to customers and ‘outsiders’. Since you can receive usage analytics from all of the interactions that happen within your knowledge base, you can actively transform, improve and market your product effectively.
“For example, if there’s a certain feature that keeps popping up in your knowledge base, it’s obviously one that people are interested in, allowing you to improve your product or create more SEO-friendly content for that particular feature, overall giving your customers a better experience,” explains Nancy Rhodes, a Marketing Strategist at Paper Fellows and Huffington Post writer.
On the flip side of the coin, you can use the gaps in your knowledge base to identify new content that you need to create. With powerful search usage analytics, you can look at the queries that return few or no results, as well as those with low clickthrough rates.
High-Quality Knowledge Base Articles Are Essential
Let’s imagine you’re running a sports equipment business. The knowledge base you have is relatively easy and will include articles such as reviews on equipment, workouts, industry news and events, nutrition plans and the sorts.
Your SaaS business has to be a lot more precise since not everybody will be interested in what you have to say. However, you still need to be providing your readers with valuable and relevant information, so where’s the balance?
Rather than just writing technical guides for your product, you need to focus on creating engaging blog posts and stellar customer support articles. Show your readers just how amazing your product is and how it will change their lives.
But it’s not always that easy. Valuable content starts with valuable knowledge, and that requires a robust knowledge base. With knowledge trapped in silos of different systems, and everyone dreading having to constantly ping the “experts” on the team for advice, creating valuable content becomes a challenging exercise.
If you simply don’t have the time to create valuable content yourself, don’t risk missing out on these opportunities. Instead, you can use article creation services, or tools to help, just like Easy Word Count or Essay Roo.
Becoming the Authoritative Figure in Your Industry
The more comprehensive and complete this information in your knowledge base is, the more customers will use you as their source of information since they won’t go anywhere else. Use this drive to put yourself as the authoritative company in your industry.
“This is a great way to boost sales, lead generation rates and overall revenue because you won’t need to be showing people how amazing and top-of-the-line your product is because you’ll already be renowned for being the best company in the industry” – says Raymond Mock, a Marketing Manager at Ukwritings.
Plus, if you aren’t able to provide your customers and prospects with the information they need, you can rest assured that they will find it elsewhere, costing you a potential conversion.
Valuable Content Boosts SEO Ranking
As you should know, Google ranks content that provides real value to their readers highly in the search engine results page so use this to your advantage since nearly every piece you write will be somewhat informative.
SEO is no easy game, and it shouldn’t be taken lightly. Don’t forget the guidelines set out by Google, for which you can brush up on your knowledge, or ask an expert using resources like Boom Essays and State of Writing.
Your knowledge base and knowledge management strategy are such important parts of your business because you can use the information you get back from it, back from your customers, to improve your overall experience and be used to open up more marketing opportunities that are targeted and pinpoint precise. If you’re looking to strengthen your KM efforts, consider implementing the Knowledge-Centered Service® (KCS) methodology.
Be smart, think outside the box and match these opportunities to your brand and you’ll see a dramatic increase in your findability, your website traffic, your engagement rates and your overall revenue.
To learn more about how to create a robust knowledge base and increase ROI from your customer communities, watch this video, “Intelligent Self-Service for Your Customer Community.”
Gloria Kopp is a digital marketing strategist at Australian Help. She is writing her Studydemic blog for marketing students and is a regular writer at Engadget and Bigassignments blogs.