In the fast-evolving software industry, marketers need to stay on their toes. A SaaS marketing strategy crafted a year ago may no longer drive high-quality traffic, nurture relationships, or increase conversions.
Strategy audits help you adapt to shifting customer demand and focus resources on tactics that yield the best outcomes. At Spot On, we evaluate our clients' strategies regularly to maximize their ROI. Here’s a look at the components we examine — and the steps you can take to continuously refine your approach to improve results.
Evaluate Your Buyer Personas and ICPs
Buyer personas and ideal customer profiles (ICPs) are the foundations of a successful SaaS marketing strategy. They inform everything from your content marketing strategy to your online ad tactics, so you must ensure they reflect your target audience’s challenges and goals.
Use customer data to verify that your buyer personas reflect prospects’ pain points and desired outcomes. Consider talking to customer-facing team members or interviewing your best customers to validate these profiles.
“Revisit your ICPs regularly to see if they help you connect the dots and demonstrate how your solution helps customers solve their challenges. They should help you align your messaging and marketing tactics to reach the right people with the right message.” — Rebecca Graves, co-founder at Spot On
Assess Your Messaging
After validating your ICPs, see if the messaging on your website, ads, and social media profiles addresses your customers’ concerns and pain points. All of your messaging should reflect your core value proposition and resonate with your target customers.
Assess the tone, voice, and consistency of the messaging in all customer touchpoints. Evaluate whether the messaging aligns with your brand identity and effectively guides prospects down your marketing funnel.
Additionally, perform competitor benchmarking to see how your messaging stacks up against competitors. Are you highlighting your differentiators and building brand affinity by sharing a unique perspective that resonates with customers?
Audit Your Content Strategy
Is your content helping you connect with your audience and demonstrate your relevance? Follow these three steps to answer that question:
- Categorize your content by type and purpose.
- Pinpoint which pieces drive traffic, conversions, and engagement.
- Analyze why they’re successful.
Identify underperforming and outdated pieces and determine if you should update or retire them. Also, evaluate whether or not your content strategy is helping you build credibility and authority. Is your content offering unique insights? Are you showcasing your expertise with meaningful thought leadership pieces?
“We evaluate if a client’s content addresses all stages of the buyer journey — many companies fail to create content for the middle of the funnel. Also, are you using topic clusters to drive traffic and engagement? Is your content creating opportunities for lead generation?” — Rebecca Graves, co-founder at Spot On
Perform a Website UX Audit
Your website is the home base for your SaaS marketing strategy. A website user experience (UX) audit will help you determine if it delivers meaningful and relevant experiences to visitors through effective branding, design, usability, and function.
When performing a UX audit, consider whether the header and footer navigations are easy to use and highlight the right content. Watch out for big blocks of text that may impede readability, make sure your calls-to-action (CTAs) stand out, and ensure the site is mobile-responsive and accessible to visitors with vision or hearing impairments.
“Our team reviews every page type and provides suggestions at a granular level. We also rank recommendations to help our clients prioritize their efforts and achieve quick wins.” — Erica Pierce, creative director at Spot On
Conduct a Technical SEO Audit
Technical SEO optimizes your website for search engines by incorporating information they need to crawl your site and understand the content. SEO includes many different website elements, including sitemaps, indexing, tagging, page speed, security, structured data, mobile optimization, and more.
You should eliminate duplicate content and fix broken links, images, and redirect loops. Optimize page titles and meta descriptions with the appropriate keywords. Move videos to the top of the page to help Google recognize them, and ensure the text size and the placement of clickable elements accommodate the mobile user experience.
"We use various tools, such as Semrush, Google Search Console, and Google Page Speed Insights, to perform monthly site health checks for our clients to maintain and improve their rankings." — Erica Pierce, creative director at Spot On
Evaluate Your Social Media Presence
Your SaaS marketing strategy should include a social media component to reach high-intent prospects. To set the stage for success, delete duplicate or inactive profiles, and ensure active ones are complete and follow your brand guidelines.
Analyze audience data to see which platforms drive the most high-quality traffic and if audience insights align with your buyer personas. Identify customer engagement patterns, such as peak engagement times and days, to inform your tactics.
Additionally, evaluate community management and customer interactions to determine if your team responds promptly to comments, messages, and reviews. You may also consider performing sentiment analysis, tracking feedback patterns, and addressing recurring issues.
Assess Online Ad Performance
Your pay-per-click (PCC) performance can substantially impact your marketing ROI. Evaluate your account hierarchy and organize campaigns, ad groups, and ads logically. Also, ensure you’re distributing your ad spend across high-intent keywords and audiences.
Assess keyword relevance and intent and gauge how well you’re using negative keywords to block irrelevant traffic. Verify that your segmentation strategy reflects your buyer personas and that your remarketing lists are effectively capturing past visitors.
“We check if each ad has a dedicated landing page to capture traffic. If you send visitors to your home page and hope they’ll find the offer you’re advertising, you risk losing the traffic.” — Rebecca Graves, co-founder at Spot On
Review Your Email Marketing Strategy
A recent study found that 83% of B2B marketers consider email one of their most effective channels. But is your SaaS marketing strategy effectively accelerating the B2B buyer journey with this customer touchpoint?
Consider your email subscriber list: Are high-quality subscribers consistently opting in? Is your list segmented by relevant criteria (e.g., behavior and customer lifecycle stages)? With this information, you can identify opportunities to use dynamic segmentation for marketing personalization.
Evaluate email deliverability and your sender reputation to ensure that recipients receive your communications. Review your campaign performance and KPIs, such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and more, to support continuous improvement.
Audit Your Martech Stack
Do you have the right tools to achieve your marketing goals without paying for functionalities you don’t need? Create an inventory of your martech stack, review the cost and contracts, and identify overlapping subscriptions.
Evaluate each tool’s utilization rate and check for redundant functions. Also, assess integration efficiency, address data silos, and review data quality to ensure you have accurate insights to make data-driven decisions.
Finally, build a tool stack with AI technologies and predictive analytics that can support effective automation and personalization. Evaluate the vendors’ product roadmaps to see if future features align with your business objectives.
Dial in Your SaaS Marketing Strategy
As the B2B SaaS landscape evolves, so should your strategy. Regular strategy audits give you insights into your audience, customers, and competitors, enabling you to adjust your tactics and make targeted improvements.
At Spot On, we take a holistic approach to help our clients evaluate their strategies and make data-driven improvements. We examine every aspect of digital marketing to ensure they work synergistically to maximize outcomes. Book a meeting to see how we can help you boost your ROI.
