Determine the portrait of the target audience and segment
To build a client profile, you need to get much more information than “Sergey, the founder of a startup with a target audience of developers.” At the same time, try to avoid quantitatively insignificant segments.
Patrick Campbell suggests using such a table template that will help you find a “quantitatively significant” target audience.
In the columns, you specify the customer profiles you want to target. It is important to describe them as specifically as possible in order to understand not only who you are targeting, but also how to monetize and retain them. You need to separate these profiles by size and role (or both). For example, a marketing automation product can be targeted to:
- Marketing leaders (Director and above) in companies from $1M to $10M
- Marketing leaders (Director and above) in companies from $10.01M to $50M
- Marketing leaders (Director and above) in companies from $50.01M to $100M
In the lines indicate the distinctive characteristics of each profile, for example:
The most important features
Least important features
Willingness to pay
LTV
Acquisition Cost (CAC)
If you are just starting segmentation and you do not have data, fill in the table with hypotheses. Then confirm or refute the most relevant of them based on the results of the decisions made.
Don’t underestimate the importance of target audience analytics. You should never clumsily do what the client wants. You need to be an anthropologist who knows the audience better than the audience itself.
User research and pricing experiments
You can never put an end to pricing, as the factors affecting the price are always changing. Experiment with the price every quarter.
Once you have identified the key target audience segments and value metrics, start optimizing your monetization.
Patrick Campbell recommends prioritizing the stages of experimentation in this order:
1. Basic. Identification of key segments of the target audience and value metrics.
2. Key. Determination of your price category, positioning and value for each segment, product packaging.
3. Optimization:
Specific price ($10 product or $11 product)
Prices for domestic / foreign market
Discount Policy
Optimization of the terms of the user agreement
Growth Accelerators:
- Shareware – freemium model
- Market expansion
- Vertical extension
- Multiproduct
Your actual monetization workflow will be different, but every company should work through the basic and key sections before moving on to optimizations and growth accelerators.
Bonus Tips for Accelerated Growth
1. Localize prices in accordance with the currency and solvency of the region and potential customers. You can earn up to 30% more revenue per customer by simply using the local currency symbol. Different price categories for different regions also further increase revenue.
2. Think of a freemium product not as a price cap, but as a customer acquisition model. Don’t use the shareware strategy if you don’t yet fully understand how to convert leads into users.
3. The value of the offer is the main thing that influences the purchase decision.
4. Don’t discount more than 20%. The amount of discounts directly affects the churn rate. Big discounts attract users who then fall off.
5. When giving a discount on annual service, indicate the benefit in numbers, not in percentages. One month free will work better than discount **%.
6. Set price ending with “9” or round up? According to research, prices like “99” work better in the lower price segment, but worse customer retention.
7. Experiment with the price every quarter. This does not mean changing the price cap every three months, but regular small experiments have a positive effect on customer retention.
8. Demonstration of product use cases increases willingness to pay by 10-15% in both B2B and B2C.
9. Attractive design increases willingness to pay by 20%.
10. The more opportunities for integration, the higher the willingness to pay and retention.
Results
Build your pricing strategy now – start simple and optimize monetization every quarter.
The most important thing is to correctly determine the value metric and quantitatively important segments of the target audience.
Optimize monetization in order of priority.
Consider bonus tips when experimenting with the price.
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Marketing strategy for b2b SaaS
review of internal documents with a marketing strategy for product development. I will be glad to talk and get your opinion.
Product description
Task prioritization service Ducalis.io helps companies around the world to prioritize tasks. Make decisions about what to do next.
Changes the approach to project management, product development, when team prioritization is at the forefront, collecting different points of view from the team and customers.
The product integrates with task trackers (Jira, Asana, Trello, etc.) and helps the team understand what is important, what to do next from the backlog.
Purpose of marketing
The main difficulty and interest in marketing a product like Ducalis.io is that we are in a relatively new growing category of software. 90% of our new users didn’t even know such solutions existed. So we need to literally create demand and educate the audience by raising awareness.
While our category is at the level of “most prioritize with their hands in Google plates and do not know that there are convenient tools”, and the current task tracker tools do not solve the problem.
We want not just any increase in registrations in the service, but targeted ones. The task is to find users who are interested in the problems solved by our product.
It is important that supply and demand meet each other correctly.
Formation of a product message
In the current boom of B2B SAAS products, no one has time to figure out what exactly the next service does. Ducalis.io operates in the Productivity Tools industry for tech-savvy users. And this means that they do not really want to immediately call up the sales department. First of all, it is important to understand the product message, then poke the product yourself, start using it, and only then communicate with the sales department. A typical example of the Product Led Growth approach.
You need to present the message in two planes: vertical (for which industries, directions, company departments our product is suitable) and horizontal (what specific features does the product have). It’s like GoPro video clips, where two minutes of product usage examples from surfers to food bloggers (vertical) mixed with stories about megapixels and vibration smoothing (horizontal) are shown.