Ask HN: Marketing for B2B SaaS product

[frobfoo]

The initial idea of https://zupp.ly was to get rid of all the Excel sheets that are being used to manage freelancer contacts and the annoying manual steps that are involved when staffing new projects with freelancers.

Currently, we are looking for ideas to market our product internationally, especially in the USA. We have had some success with cold mailing advertising and digital agencies, but we'd like to hear some of your experiences marketing SaaS products.

Ideas and any kind of feedback are highly appreciated!

[phantom_oracle]

What I'd be interested in knowing is if your entire product is basically just a "feature" from other SaaS products?

Eg. Does Freshbooks have the exact same feature running within it's accounting SaaS product?

Recommendations:

- Place a link on top that says "Demo" so that I can actually see a video/demo of the product

- Have some type of JS tool that converts prices from US to Euro (instead of saying "this applies to people outside the Eurozone")

________________________________________________

As far as marketing goes, you should try researching some organic techniques. No amount of advice given here will prove successful for your marketing, but if you setup a multi-channel strategy of:

- Social media engagement

- Blogging about insights of freelance market/SaaS market

- Growth through referrals (either having such an awesome product that your current customers become your marketers or giving incentive to people through referral links)

- [Insert offline marketing strategy/ies here]

Researching and focusing on 2-3 channels should give you a rough idea of how to approach your marketing.

Good luck.

[frobfoo]

Thanks for the feedback!

> Eg. Does Freshbooks have the exact same feature running within it's accounting SaaS product?

Our product does not really fit into the accounting area. If you like, it is more of a CRM-type product. The closest competitors would be specialized agency tools like Revolver or HR tools. And to some degree it is also possible to keep track of your freelancer relationships via oDesk/elance.

So, no, I don't really think our product is just a feature. Although I have to admit that the feature set is not really that large at the moment, basically because we wanted to keep it deliberately simple and not stuffing in tons of functions.

> Place a link on top that says "Demo" so that I can actually see a video/demo of the product

Good idea! We are working on some kind of explainer video.

> Have some type of JS tool that converts prices from US to Euro (instead of saying "this applies to people outside the Eurozone")

Did not think about that, thanks for the tip (-;

> Researching and focusing on 2-3 channels should give you a rough idea of how to approach your marketing.

Thanks for your tips regarding marketing strategies. I guess we'll look a bit further into content marketing/blogging.

[jsfour]

Cold emails is #1 best way to market a new SaaS product because its free and you get to hear feedback from customers. Aside from that "marketing" is really just building a list of a bunch of different tactics and trying each of them until you find something that works.

I once wrote on how a team I was on drove a bundle of users to a new app. It may give you some inspiration: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/237922

I happy to brainstorm ideas with you if you ping me on twitter @jsfour

[frobfoo]

Thanks for the feedback and the link, will definitely have a look at it!

[wannabestartup]

unless someone has been in the same space as you they won't have a clue how to market your product as we can only speculate as to whether a market fit exists or not.

lets say this is a great market fit, then you can try content marketing and blogging.

[frobfoo]

I guess you are right on that one ... any specific experiences with content marketing and how long this really takes to show some impact?