It is 2018 and the manner in which enterprise and technology companies market themselves is evolving at a considerable pace. In the face of the increased competition among organizations for attention on digital channels, the technology firms in the business to business B2B model can struggle on the right channel to reach the right decision makers and increase their sales funnel. Connecting with these decision makers about goals or important issues concerning business can be a great opportunity for success of almost any enterprise technology organization.
For technology-oriented companies to maximize their investment in the marketing facet, the company should look for a promising initiative as well as tools that have the most potential for engaging its decision makers by ensuring that they are cognizant of the challenges faced by their target industry and have a unique solution that can ensure the success of the organization. Towards that end, this thesis will explore a key marketing initiative that promises to deliver strategic advantage to organizations. The strategic initiative that has modified the way of thinking, collaborating and development in the companies as well as business domain, is the concept of Software as a Service SaaS.
Before it dives into this fundamental initiative in the business domain, this article will first define and explain what is actually meant by the term Software as a Service SaaS. Examination of literature suggests various definitions of Software as a service SaaS some of which are:
“Software as a Service SaaS is a software distribution model where applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over a network, typically the internet.” (Gibson, Rondeau, Eveleigh, and Tan, 2012, pp. 198-205).
“Software as a Service delivery model can be considered an extension or delivery of application service provisioning ASP which is a delivery model that contains hosting, maintenance and support of software.” (Mäkilä, Järvi, Rönkkö, and Nissilä, 2010, pp. 116-124).
Here above, are just a few definitions of SaaS retrieved from some of the top ranking sites in google search engine. Basing on the sources, a rough analysis of SaaS definition shows that all of the definitions stated above have the following aspects in common: a web-based service model, provided over a network.
For further understanding of the general concept of SaaS initiative in the business model, we will consider a pioneer in this domain called Waters, “Software as a Service is the leader in customer relationship management and cloud computing” (Waters, 2005, pp.32-39). The author further cites that SaaS is a method by which applications are delivered over the internet. Rather than installing and maintaining a software, a user just simply accesses it over the internet thus freeing them from the burden of software and hardware management (Waters, 2005, pp.32-39).
Evidently, analysis of literature suggests that SaaS is a critical aspect of multiple organization’s operations. As an example, Salesforce, one of the renowned customer relationship management platform that offers various cloud-based services including applications for sales, services, and marketing have enabled their clients to act very quickly through SaaS (Lomotey, and Deters, 2013, pp. 13-24). As on-site development projects can go up to several years, with SaaS as an initiative, the project can be completed within one week or even a day (Salesforce.com, 2018). Certainly, there is a growing sense that Software as a Service SaaS is a better initiative that promises to deliver a strategic advantage to various organizations. However, what is the strategies that render SaaS these advantages?
Before we discuss many strategies, it is imperative to define the term strategy. The strategy is construed as a long-term action plan for achieving a goal that is set in the context of the fast pacing technology (Golsorkhi, Rouleau, Seidl, and Vaara, 2010). It is a critical aspect that our organizations must consider if they are to succeed in the world of competition. Not only does well-planned strategies lead to valued services for organizations to keep up with the ever-increasing demand of business across the world, they also have potential to improve the marketing and ensure the success of business organizations. Various organizations can immensely benefit from SaaS-based strategies in different ways.
Firstly, SaaS can offer an immense advantage to various business organizations through content marketing strategies. Currently, business companies around the globe have implemented a content marketing strategy to build their brand, attract visitors to their websites and generate a considerable income. The good thing about content marketing is that it has compounding power of return and just like other smart investment, its value increase with time (Baltes, 2015, p.111; (Tyrväinen, and Selin, 2011, pp. 2-16). Most importantly, content marketing continues to drive leads, as other ways of marketing e.g. pay-per-click will only do so as long as the organization will continue to spend more money. It is for this reason that I suggest SaaS-based content marketing as a strategic advantage to companies.
Secondly, SaaS technology has precipitated the opportunity to use Dropbox on business platforms. This strategy has multiple types of potential customers and attracts them through the targeted contents at the Dropbox (Berman, 2016, pp.19-28). Various webinars are also hosted to enable the organizations to communicate their credentials to their prospective customers.
Most significantly, product trial is fast becoming the supreme source lead generation for the Software as a Service industry. Nothing outweighs “test driving” products, business companies should consider making trials available on their websites. They are a particularly effective lead generation for organizations selling to an audience that would like to experience the product instead of speaking with the sales representative. As product trials are always self-serve, more leads can be generated with the little ongoing marketing investments.
However, for this strategy to be successful, the company must ensure that its customers have a positive experience when trailing the product, as such, some onboard or support needs to be made available depending on the organization’s unit economics as well as the complexity of the product. This could be done either through group webinars, one-to-one calls, and automated emails or even a combination of the three. One supreme advantage of the product strategy is that they are strong indicators of a customer’s intent. A prospective client invests their time getting to know the particular product of a business organization. Typically, individuals running a trial have a higher propensity of buying the product.
Last but not least, referral marketing is another supreme SaaS strategy that is worth to be mentioned in this article. There is a growing number of empirical studies expounding that referrals are one of the most effective marketing strategies (Venkatachalam, Fielt, Rosemann, and Mathews, 2013, pp. 1-11). Despite the fact that referrals are always low cost and are relatively quick, there is a mismatch of referrals among sales and marketing (Burns, Bush, and Sinha, 2014). This has led to a lot of debates concerning whether organizations should incentive referrals or not. One school of thought, however, is that an organization cannot generate many referrals without using incentives. A contradicting view on the other hand push that if a business incentivizes heavily, a low-value quality referral may be found. Nevertheless, the best advice to avoid the low-value quality referrals is to test which referral works for the organization’s SaaS business and then optimize for it.
The most significant part, however, before focusing on the optimization is launching a referral program. There are numerous software available out there that can facilitate this process, but at the minimum, it is imperative that a landing page is made on the company’s website where customers can make referrals. For an organization to get quality referrals, it must understand what makes good referrals. This could be a person’s job title, industry, or the size of the organization the person would work for. Through the SaaS-based referrals, an organization’s marketing team can make it easy to access customers, sell products, and make referrals. The most important part, however, is making it easy for the marketing team to gain more customers which is the main goal of business companies.
In the preceding sections, we described and define the ICT initiative, we further defined and illustrated what strategy is alongside various types of SaaS-based strategies that are recommended for organizations. Now that we have this in mind, the question is, how does a successful strategy look like? As reflected in the previous definition of a strategy, the strategy is specific than an action plan which tells: who, what, and how. To make it short, a strategy seems to answer the question, how do we get there from here?
Along the lines, it can be deduced that a successful strategy will take into account the existing barriers as well as resources including people, money materials to mention a few. The SaaS initiative is a good player in all of the aforementioned fields. SaaS is favorable to various types of users, whether the user is an IT expert or not (Wu, 2011, pp.15057-15064). The software in SaaS is already installed and configured for its users, as such, the clients have the advantage of provisioning the server in a couple of hours and they can have their applications ready. As far as money is concerned with a successful strategy, successful should be cost-effective. SaaS has deferential regarding costs as the platform relies on a shared environment where the cost of hardware, as well as software license, is low compared to traditional initiatives.
SaaS has various features that are consistent with its strategic success. One important feature of SaaS is its time-saving subscription model. Instead of buying a software and installing, SaaS offers its users a platform to subscribe to a given software on a monthly or on a yearly basis. Its applications are used online through files that are saved in the cloud (Kundu, Banerjee, and Saha, 2010). As applications provided through SaaS are already configured, its users have a great advantage since they have a ready-to-use application. This does not only save the time for installation or configuration but also reduce the time wasted on potential glitches that are associated with the deployment of software.
Typically, the much traditional software comes with time-sucking and cumbersome installation that can take several weeks for a user to implement. Software as a Service, however, reduce the time for its users (Ergu, and Peng, 2014, pp.219-238). All that SaaS need is an internet connection and a log information to access the new software. Provided there is an internet connection, a user can access the application from any location.
Another significant feature of SaaS is its enhanced security. Every business organization has sensitive information that needs maximum protection. SaaS is here to ensure privacy for every user. SaaS-based data are hosted in the cloud and backed up by the service provider, this is more secure than other platforms and traditional methods (Jing, and Jian-Jun, 2010, pp. 475-478). On the off chance that a security emergency hit the organization’s server or an employee’s computer, most information will remain safe both on servers as well as the SaaS provider’s database. Security is also essential since employees always use their personal devices for office work, and the devices are susceptible to data loss or break down. If that occurs, the organization’s data will be safe as they are secured in the cloud.
As the primary goal in all business organizations is to get as maximum profit as possible, a cost-effective initiative strategy must, therefore, be a primary consideration if that is to happen. As such, the SaaS-based strategy is considered the most favorable root of execution for such organizations as the initiative offers its users with a shared platform at a lower cost (Huang et al., pp.4-1). The monthly or annual subscription for SaaS-based applications is much easier to budget for compared to the traditional strategies. Moreover, SaaS system normally comes with the flexibility to change or cancel the subscription if the user is not interested.
At a glance, this article has explored Software as a Service SaaS as the ICT initiative that promises to deliver a strategic advantage to organizations. In doing so, the study defined and described the initiative alongside its strategies together with its features that are consistent with the strategic initiative success of business organizations. A conclusion can be deduced based from this analysis that SaaS is a strategic initiative that should be implemented by every technology-oriented organization. There are a lot more in SaaS that is not covered in this thesis that can ensure success in business organizations; SaaS applications for important business technologies like email, billing, and human resource management to mention a few. All these SaaS-enabled services are fundamental and should not be neglected if a company is to achieve its goals.
Reference list
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Burns, A.C., Bush, R.F. and Sinha, N., 2014. Marketing research (Vol. 7). Harlow: Pearson.
Ergu, D. and Peng, Y., 2014. A framework for SaaS software packages evaluation and selection with virtual team and BOCR of analytic network process. The Journal of Supercomputing, 67(1), pp.219-238.
Gibson, J., Rondeau, R., Eveleigh, D. and Tan, Q., 2012, November. Benefits and challenges of three cloud computing service models. In Computational Aspects of Social Networks (CASoN), 2012 Fourth International Conference on (pp. 198-205). IEEE.
Golsorkhi, D., Rouleau, L., Seidl, D. and Vaara, E., 2010, Introduction: What is strategy as practice? Cambridge handbook of strategy as practice, 2.
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Kundu, A., Banerjee, A. and Saha, P., 2010. Introducing new services in cloud computing environment. In International Journal of Digital Content Technology and its Applications, AICIT.
Lomotey, R.K. and Deters, R., 2013, March. Reliable consumption of web services in a mobile-cloud ecosystem using REST. In Service Oriented System Engineering (SOSE), 2013 IEEE 7th International Symposium on (pp. 13-24). IEEE.
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