HR 101 SaaS Insights

Solving Top SaaS Marketing Challenges

Joanna Campa

A marketer helps other markters solve top saas marketing challenges.

The SaaS Market is Crowded

The SaaS market is saturated. Globally, there are approximately 30,000 SaaS companies with 14 billion customers. Small and medium-sized businesses use an average of 16 SaaS applications, while companies with over 1000 employees employ an average of 177.

As Marketing Director for HiringThing—the premier private label applicant tracking system (ATS) on the market—my job is even a little trickier 🙂. Not only do I oversee marketing for our own product, my team and I help our partners’ position our ATS as their own.

Private labeling is a form of white labeling. We sell our ATS to partners who customize it, brand it, and often resell it as their own proprietary solution (marketing staples like case studies, testimonials, and customer reviews often can’t be used for the HiringThing brand). I like to think this makes us something of marketing experts here in the HiringThing marketing department since we’ve still managed to create a strong brand that attracts the type of customers that helps us grow our business.

In this post, I’ll share the HiringThing marketing department tips we’ve learned firsthand when it comes to solving top SaaS marketing challenges, highlighting actual examples of what’s worked and positively impacted HiringThing.

Increased Competition

Due to low barriers to entry and the ease with which new software solutions can be developed and launched, the SaaS industry is highly competitive right now. This has led to a proliferation of companies offering similar products and services, all vying for the attention and loyalty of potential customers. It could be difficult for even the most well-crafted, professionally executed marketing strategies to stand out.

Affirm Your Value Add

Several years ago, we identified a gap in the market when a key partner made a simple request-to partner with us as the power behind their new ATS solution. We made the strategic shift to white labeling our software right then and there. Now in 2023, it’s a key differentiator and the driving force behind our business model.

During our market research, we discovered that other white label applicant tracking systems offered limited functionalities. They could brand an ATS with buyers' logos and brand colors but did not offer customized workflows, or the open API buyers could utilize to build onto a platform and make it their own. Our team jumped on that and further differentiated our new differentiation by branding ourselves a Private Label Applicant Tracking System, which we could accurately say is the premier Private Label ATS on the market.

What can you say about your brand that others can't? We made a big pivot from direct user ATS to partner distribution, but yours doesn't necessarily have to be. Our private from white label to private label didn't require any business changes. We simply changed how we marketed our product to reflect what it actually does. How can you reposition your value add in a way your competitors can't?

Customer Acquisition

With so much competition in the SaaS market, getting noticed and acquiring new customers can take time and effort. Companies must differentiate themselves from competitors and create a strong marketing strategy that reaches their target audience.

Add (and Tout) New Products or Functionalities

Gartner reports that 80% of tech organizations are developing new initiatives designed to make them more innovative, resilient, and competitive. That’s your key to developing a new product, service, or functionality your marketing team could tout as a new innovation and service. This helps you stand out to new customers.

Now, I know that “adding a new function or service” isn’t a suggestion to be thrown around lightly. Adding an entire new feature to a SaaS platform takes time and money if you’re developing it from scratch. However, white or private labeling, which I’ve touched on earlier (and what our business model is largely based around), is a cost-effective, efficient way for SaaS products to add new features without starting from scratch. Our partners use our private label ATS to add hiring capabilities to their tech stacks so they can begin marketing and selling almost immediately. Think about what kind of feature would give you a marketing edge and see if there’s s white label solution that will propel you forward.

Want to know more about creating your own white or private label partnership and expanding your business (and marketing opportunities)? Check out our guide to establishing private label partnerships for everything you need to know

Customer Retention

In our field—HR SaaS (though it behooves me to say you don’t have to be in the field of HR to offer hiring software…)—82% of users struggle with adoption of their new platforms. When users struggle with adoption, they often churn, which renders all your fantastic marketing efforts moot.

It’s not just about acquiring customers but also retaining them. Many SaaS companies struggle to retain customers over the long term, impacting revenue and growth.

Market to Your Customers

It’s not enough to market to prospective customers in the SaaS world. You must be marketing to your customers at every stage of the life cycle, reminding them of your solution's power. While much of the work here is done in tandem with your product, customer success, and development teams, the marketing department plays a crucial role.

We market to our HiringThing customers in these ways and more:

Creating customer-centric educational content that helps them not only with mastering our ATS, but solving bigger-picture hiring challenges. The HiringThing Guide to Increasing Your Applicant Traffic and HiringThing Guide to DEI Recruiting, for example, provide value by helping our customers use our SaaS in tandem with best practices.

Sending out a monthly newsletter sharing both the aforementioned valuable content and platform updates. This keeps our users engaged and shows them how to get the most out of the platform.
Email nurture campaigns—if customers haven’t been using the product, we reach out via email nurture campaigns that remind them of the product's benefits.

There are numerous other ways to market to current customers. Ensure you’re thinking about and then enacting the best ones for your business model or industry.

Brand Awareness

Building brand awareness is critical for SaaS companies. Companies must invest in branding efforts that differentiate them from competitors and resonate with their target audience.

Demonstrate Value

My number one tip here is to provide value to your target audience. Now, we’re marketing. Obviously, we want to sell, but you can’t always lead with that, especially when creating top-of-the-funnel content meant to capture potential customers searching your top keywords. I know this is basic marketing 101, but many marketing departments, professionals, and initiatives sometimes lose sight of the buyer journey and go with “selling” first and “providing value” second. It’s still a helpful reminder to create content that helps consumers solve problems and isn’t just interested in selling them products. If you’re valuable, consumers return, and that’s when they become customers.

Scaling Marketing Efforts

As SaaS companies grow, it can be challenging to scale marketing efforts to meet the demands of a larger customer base. Companies need to develop processes and strategies that can scale with the business while maintaining high quality and effectiveness.

Create Content That Can Be Repurposed

We have a small (but mighty!) marketing department here at HiringThing that has exponentially grown the scale of what we do over the past year without exponentially growing the department (a very common SaaS marketing challenge). To ensure we’re getting everything we need done while also prioritizing new initiatives, the bulk of the marketing content we create can be repurposed. We create blogs that can then become newsletters or YouTube scripts. New guides become templates for newer guides down the road. Internal marketing content is repurposed externally—you get the point!

Generative AI Content

AI can make a marketer’s job difficult by creating a more competitive marketing environment. As AI tools, like Chat GPT, become more advanced, they can be used by more and more companies to improve their marketing efforts, leading to a crowded and fiercely competitive environment where it’s not just the companies with the most talented teams creating top marketing content. This means that marketers need to be even more strategic and creative in their approach to stand out.

Embrace Thought Leadership

We were brainstorming about what kind of content AI isn’t capable of making yet, and that’s individual thought leadership content where members of our team (like me!) give you their thoughts and expertise about a topic. We’re leaning into this in 2023, especially in the video-production realm.

Need a Hand With Marketing Your New Hiring Solution?

When you enter into a private label partnership with HiringThing, you acquire a new, proprietary hiring solution for your organization and get the backing of the entire hiring team, including us here at the marketing department. We work with you to help market your ATS to prospective customers, build hiring thought-leadership credibility, and keep your users engaged, so your new hiring solution keeps you successful. Check out one of our private label demos to learn more.

About HiringThing

HiringThing is a modern recruiting and employee onboarding platform as a service that creates seamless talent experiences. Our white label solutions and open API enable technology and service providers to offer hiring and onboarding to their clients. Approachable and adaptable, the platform empowers anyone, anywhere to build their dream team.