Expert Product Marketing Examples and Case Studies for SaaS
In the hyper-competitive SaaS landscape, product marketing is a must-have.
Clearly differentiating your product from the competition and describing it in a way that drives conversion is vital to your success.
But finding new, compelling ways to position your product, tweak your messaging, and engage with existing customers and prospects is tough.
It takes technical knowledge to deeply understand the product, but it also takes high EQ to communicate effectively with every customer persona. On top of that, product marketers need creative energy to brainstorm fresh product marketing strategies.
So we at Navattic, along with Product Marketing Examples have compiled a list of seven innovative product marketing examples. Keep reading to gain inspiration from companies like Alyce, Algolia, Calendly, and more.
7 examples of product marketing for SaaS companies
Below, we explore how modern SaaS companies leverage product marketing campaigns in a variety of different channels.
Klue: New feature announcement campaign
Company: Klue, a competitive intelligence platform
Channels used:
Sales lifecycle: Prospecting, Upsell
Campaign: Showing off a new release on social media is an excellent way to generate buzz among prospects, customers, and partners.
But your messaging will fall flat if readers don’t understand the new feature and the value it will bring.
Klue made it simple for their audience to understand their new product by expertly weaving gifs and product tours into their announcement of “Triage Mode” for competitive insights.
Just below the fold, readers are exposed to a gif showing how easy it is to review and prioritize competitive intel.
This is followed by social proof 一 a quote from a happy customer. Then readers are invited to take a quick tour of Triage Mode to solidify their understanding and look at the feature in greater depth.
The Klue team also leveraged product-led content in LinkedIn posts associated with the feature launch.
Jason Oakley, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Klue, explains why Triage Mode was created, what it does, and what customers think about it in this LinkedIn post.
But the best part of the post is his candid video. In it, he speaks directly to the camera and highlights the most powerful aspects of the feature during a screen share.
The video is only about two minutes long, but it’s enough to spotlight the best parts of Triage Mode in a memorable way.
BetterCloud: Positioning services and customer success
Company: BetterCloud, a platform that helps IT professionals manage and secure SaaS apps in the digital workplace.
Channels used:
Sales lifecycle: Upsell
Campaign:
Professional services are often a neglected product marketing area.
But nothing improves product retention and customer satisfaction more than partnering with customers and solving their use cases with professional services.
BetterCloud does a fantastic job of explaining how their professional services team drives positive outcomes for their customers.
They start with punchy text, emphasizing reduced time, customized offerings, and expert guidance. Then they move into the hard numbers.
Exceptional satisfaction and adoption scores establish BetterCloud’s professional services team as a competitive differentiator.
Product marketing teams should remember to lean on professional services to upsell to existing customers and increase new deal sizes.
Alyce: Integration launch campaign
Company: Alyce, a corporate gifting platform for B2B marketing and sales
Channels used:
Sales lifecycle: Qualification and discovery
Campaign:
These days, many SaaS companies have integrations with other, complementary tools that enable them to get more work done in less time. But configuring and setting up integrations to see how the two systems work together can be challenging, often overshadowing the integration’s value.
That’s why Alyce takes an offensive approach to their integration launches, ensuring customers understood why their product team chose to build certain integrations and how easy they were to set up.
Before publishing their campaign, they created interactive product tours for the new integrations.
As shown in the screenshot above, the integration tours take users through the setup process step by step and explain how each integration adds value to the platform – in this case, “automating 1:Many gifting.”
The Alyce team then publicized these product tours on LinkedIn, taking the time to first thank customers for bringing integration partners to their attention, which builds their credibility and trustworthiness.
Members of the Alyce marketing team also plugged the launch announcement.
Nick Bennett, Director of Evangelism & Customer Marketing at Alyce shouts out each platform Alyce has integrated with recently on LinkedIn, giving partner pages a boost while also promoting the interactive integration tours that Alyce created.
Nick says that they use this joint website, LinkedIn, blog post, and interactive product tour strategy “between a qualification call and a discovery call, and prospects have LOVED it.”
He goes on to say how easy this multi-pronged approach makes it for prospects to “get the 30,000-foot view,” allowing reps to deep dive into an actual use case on a sales call and make sure leads are fully loving their experience with Alyce.
Algolia: Strengthen your value proposition
Company: Algolia, an eCommerce search and recommendation tool
Channels used:
Sales lifecycle: Proposal
Campaign:
Deals often get stuck in the sales cycle. Prospects are interested, but they aren’t 100% convinced that your product will make an impact.
One way to show that it will is by using an ROI calculator that quantifies what your product can deliver. Sharing concrete numbers helps your rep and your internal champion get your deal to the PO stage faster.
Algolia’s “Profit simulator” is an excellent example.
The Profit simulator directly addresses prospect skepticism by breaking down the sessions, AOV, search conversion rate, and monthly revenue growth they can expect based on their current KPIs.
To further substantiate this value, Algolia has embedded case studies that reflect similar results (in this example, they’ve used Lacoste). Algolia’s ROI calculator is a double whammy – showcasing potential and real results while providing social proof.
Dooly: Updated product pages
Company: Dooly, a tool used to streamline the revenue team’s workflow by improving CRM hygiene
Channels used:
Sales lifecycle: Prospecting
Campaign:
With the rise of PLG, showing – not just telling — is imperative during the sales process. And there’s no better way to do that than with interactive demos.
Dooly has fully embraced this concept, turning its product pages into a series of interactive demos, showing off everything its platform can do.
In this example, Dooly highlights their Pipeline product, taking you through a very realistic example of a prospect wanting to update their opportunity after a call with a prospect.
As you walk through the steps, you realize just how easy it is to update the close date, log next steps, visualize deal progress, and check against quarterly revenue goals.
According to Dooly, “Prospects have specifically complimented our reps on these interactive demos, and they allow us to tell our product story with ease.”
Adding interactive demos to product pages also makes sales calls more productive. Prospects who’ve gone through an interactive demo know exactly what they want and why they want it, making it easier to get sales over the finish line.
Calendly: Life before and after your product
Company: Calendly, a platform for scheduling, preparing, and following up on external meetings.
Channels used:
Sales lifecycle: Prospecting
Campaign:
A simple but incredibly powerful messaging tool is the before and after comparison.
You want to convince prospects that their life after using your tool will be drastically better than it is now.
Communicating how stark this difference is helps prospects better visualize the benefit of adding your product to their day-to-day workflow.
Calendly does a terrific job of this for their marketing use case. As we know, marketers are constantly trying to improve or even retire the age-old approach of generating leads through forms.
On this landing page, Calendly reinforces how much better meetings are than leads, sharing that 10% of leads go stale.
But with the “new way,” prospects can anticipate a 100% increase in meeting volume thanks to increased traffic and automated routing. Calendly even adds a testimonial to strengthen this message.
Front: Handling objections in messaging
Company: Front, a SaaS app for teams to manage customer relationships
Channels used:
Sales lifecycle: Prospecting
Campaign:
The way you position your product matters. Many companies are up against strong competition, and if they don’t make competitive advantages explicit, prospects will go with the vendor they recognize most.
Front does a wonderful job of differentiating their product from alternatives.
Customer relationship management – the space they’re in – isn’t new. But Front solves CRM issues in a way that existing products don’t.
So on their homepage, Front explicitly lists all the ways they are superior to email and ticket management solutions.
Underscoring how much more efficient, collaborative, and advanced Front is compared to other platforms functions almost as an FAQ page, making objection handling much easier.
All these examples demonstrate that product marketing is a key lever for SaaS companies 一 particularly when marketing budgets are tight.
Incorporating product marketing messaging in every stage of the sales lifecycle and getting creative about your channels can help you access and educate the most valuable prospects. For more product marketing ideas:
Next Post
2022 SE Trends: Listening + Discovery with John Care
We spoke with John Care, an author, speaker, and professional trainer at Mastering Technical Sales – a training and consulting company specializing in the skills improvement and development of presales engineers.