small-business-marketing

We all know that software-as-a-service (SaaS) has changed the way small businesses think about B2B marketing. But what's the real advantage driving these businesses to adopt SaaS?

Price is part of the answer. Pay-as-you-go pricing is a huge draw for small businesses that no longer have to worry about hardware costs, software licensing, support and maintenance, or any of the other financial baggage that comes along with on-premises software.

B2B Marketing SaaS: The Real Secret to Its Success

But price isn't the whole answer. In fact, there's an even bigger benefit to using SaaS for digital marketing: It allows small businesses to use applications that only very large enterprises could have used in the past.

SaaS-based demand generation tools are actually a perfect example of this evolutionary process. These online applications include an immense array of B2B marketing-related tools and services. A top-tier vendor in this space, such as Eloqua, Marketo, or Market2Lead, will offer a package that might include:

• Email marketing management;
• Multi-channel integration of Web, email, and live-event marketing;
• The ability to create custom landing pages, website forms, and microsites;
• Tools for creating personalized marketing campaigns;
• Event marketing capabilities;
• Contact database management tools;
• Lead scoring, nurturing, and reporting;
• Social media marketing and tracking capabilities.

I'm just scratching the surface here, and I could name a dozen other companies that offer similar SaaS-based online demand generation products. Some are less expensive than others, and some are more suitable than others for very small businesses versus midsized firms. All of them, however, deliver a package of services that typically cost between a few hundred dollars and a few thousand dollars a month.

A B2B marketing organization might find the same features in on-premises software, but they'll have to add a few zeroes to the cost to get it - and they'll have to pay a good chunk of that right up front.

Picking a SaaS Marketing Solution: 3 Things to Consider

So far, so good. You're sold on the concept of SaaS, and you'd love to adopt a digital marketing solution that gives your room to grow at a fair price. If you're ready to take the plunge, here are three tips for evaluating a solution beyond the obvious stuff, like pricing and support options:

Scope. Just about everybody in this market can support Web and email marketing tasks, and most also play well with third-party CRM and SFA solutions. But what if you want to use the same software to manage an integrated direct mail marketing campaign? How about integrating data from conferences and live events?

There are demand-generation tools that can manage multi-channel B2B marketing campaigns, and some of them do it quite well. Just remember that you'll pay more - perhaps a lot more - to get all of this in a single tidy package.

Scale. Small and midsized businesses don't worry much about how these SaaS-based digital marketing solutions will scale. That's only a problem for the big guys, right?

Actually, you might be surprised how quickly scalability becomes an issue even for smaller companies. That's because smaller companies have smaller marketing teams, and those teams often manage multiple campaigns with lots of moving parts. Select a demand-generation solution that can support Web templates, for example, and it'll be much easier to make changes while protecting your brand with a clean, consistent set of shared assets.

Feedback. Metrics are the modern marketer's secret weapon: They allow you to quantify results and demonstrate ROI in a way that you could never do in the past. That's why it's especially important to look at a vendor's analytics tools. Ask how they track things like website activity, campaign response rates, and cost-based marketing metrics.