Why Drive-by Marketing Doesn’t Work

So you’ve just shipped your new software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, and for sure you’re eager to tell the world:  get out a press announcement, roll-out a search engine marketing campaign, sign-up for industry events, and whatever else you can think of.

Here’s some advice:  Slow down.

As tough as it is to resist the urge to do something, hold off a bit before going full blast with all this marketing activity.

And if you’ve already started, hang on and take a deep breath.  You may have already found that all this activity isn’t delivering the results you were expecting.  The hodgepodge of tactics and the drive-by approach is taking up lots of time and costing money, but at the end it’s not generating much business.

When SaaS companies find themselves in this bad spot, there’s usually two culprits to blame:  

1. A poor message
2. No plan.

The prospect doesn’t really care how your solution works

I’m sure you can do a great job explaining how your solution works and what each of its functions do.

But the prospective customer has other issues on their mind, such as:

• Who is this for?
• What problem does it solve for me?
• Why is it better than alternatives?

It doesn’t really matter how well you execute on a search engine marketing plan, direct mail, or other tactics.  Without a well-thought-through value proposition and messages that answer these questions, the prospective customers won’t respond.  They really don’t care.

Activity without a plan doesn’t move you forward

Just because you’re scrambling to execute on all kinds of marketing activities doesn’t mean you’re making any meaningful progress in the right direction. 

Effective customer acquisition requires a well-structured plan.  It needs to walk through each step of the evaluation and purchase process:

• Build visibility and generate leads
• Convert leads into qualified prospects
• Close prospects into paying customers
• On-board customers
• Retain and upsell

Drive-by marketing is unlikely to get prospects through this entire process.  Instead you’re likely to be stymied by bottlenecks and gaps.  Perhaps you’ll generate a huge volume of leads, but find yourself with no mechanism to convert them to prospects, or you'll close a steady inflow of new customers, but have no way to make them successful and retain them.

You can experiment with a whole range of marketing tactics.  There are no hard and fast rules about what might work for your particular audience.  But without a compelling value proposition and a well-structured customer acquisition plan, you may be just wasting time and money.