A story about how a newcomer with 2 months of experience as a marketer became responsible for marketing SaaS services.

Thank you for visiting the Beyond Blog.
is Narita work in the Marketing Department of the Technical Sales Division at Beyond Co., Ltd.

I hope this article will be widely read by a wide range of people, especially

・People who are aiming to work in marketing
・People who are interested in marketing
・People who have just started working in marketing

I think this content will resonate with people like you

We have tried to avoid using technical terms as much as possible so that anyone can read it easily

Please read to the end

History

I only started working as a marketing manager last June, so I'm still a beginner and don't even understand the first thing about marketing

Now, as a beginner, I'm in charge of marketing for our company's services, and I'm struggling with my head every day while learning from my superiors.
(I can hear a voice in my mind asking, "Is it okay for a beginner like me to be in charge?" but it's okay. I'm receiving generous support.)

Below is a summary of what I have been working on

Let's try it out

Let's try out the service first

First of all, you can't recommend a service to others unless you understand its features. I actually tried out all of the service's functions.
(I learned about various services, but in this article I will introduce just one for easy understanding.)

The SaaS service in question is " Appmill ," an automatic website monitoring tool.

To put it simply, you can
100 URLs free I actually created an account and registered the URLs of some random sites.

Since it is a monitoring tool, you are not notified unless something happens, so I just kept opening various pages, reading, opening, and reading

[Additional Information] Why do we need to monitor websites?

Let's explain the website by comparing it to a house

If you leave your house unattended for too long,

1. Suddenly, your home disappears one day (your domain expires).
2. Your home is burgled and your personal information is stolen (information leaks and data tampering due to unauthorized access).
3. Your contact details are revealed (you forget to renew your SSL server certificate).

Various problems will occur

To prevent this from happening, updates are necessary, but those of you who are careless may not realize that it's time to update unless you are not notified

This is why you need to use a monitoring tool to be notified of upcoming deadlines

*There is also a video that will help you understand everything in just 2 minutes, so please take a look ↓
Understand Apmil in 2 minutes!

Understand the features and pricing structure of the service

Below is a list of the costs and procedures involved in using the service

Items that Appmill can monitor
[Basic functions]
Alive monitoring, scenario monitoring, SSL certificate and domain expiration, response speed and status code check
[Paid functions]
Link broken check, HTML difference comparison, snapshot comparison, malware countermeasures, social engineering countermeasures

Research and predict search terms used by potential users (competitive awareness)

It is necessary to consider how people who are actually considering using a monitoring service will search

This time, we assumed that the target user would be a non-engineer who runs a website for their own company or personal business and has not yet implemented monitoring tools, and wrote the article from their perspective

・Predicted search words:
"SSL certificate expiration notification," "Domain monitoring," "Site URL check," "○○ monitoring method" (○ can be replaced with a word such as "life or death" or "scenario"),
"Site response speed check," "Response speed threshold setting," "Free website monitoring"

Anticipate the thoughts (problems) of potential users

I tried to imagine what kind of worries and problems the users I predicted earlier might have

・I want to be notified immediately if an abnormality occurs on the website, such as the expiration of the SSL certificate or the inability to access the website.
→This is considered a common use of monitoring tools.

・I want to monitor a large number of websites at once.
→This is likely to be used by people in charge at large companies.

・Site checks are necessary, but as they are not experts they do not know how important they are, so they would like to do it as cheaply as possible.
→ For example, a person in charge who has been entrusted by their superiors with the task and is desperately searching for a service with good conditions, even though it is outside their area of ​​expertise.

Create marketing strategies based on the above user group hypotheses

Now, we have listed some marketing strategies that can be used to deliver services to a specific user group

[Target] (Reposted)
Non-engineers who run their own company or personal business websites and have not yet implemented monitoring tools

・They don't understand the importance of site monitoring in the first place.
→ There are very few people who truly understand the importance of monitoring.
→ → They don't even bother to search for monitoring tools in the first place, or they just leave it alone
→ → → Isn't there a need for a way to promote it to make people aware of its importance?
→ → → → They incite people.

[How to promote]
- Use the information from the survey results that "people won't use the service unless the website is reliable" and spread it on social media and blogs
(think of it like the ads that were on YouTube for a while that encouraged men who hadn't had hair removal)
→ Introduce security examples such as "The aftermath of a compromised website"
→ → Make the content easy to understand even for the average person, who will be curious to see what happens.

* Reference:
This is a website that compiles past security news. https://cybersecurity-jp.com/news/84544

Reflect on your own capabilities and break down the scope of your planned measures into smaller steps

We proposed specific methods for implementing the measures mentioned above and what can be done under the current circumstances

[Option 1] Submit a project to an influencer.
Ask a Twitter account that regularly posts information to tweet a security case study. Then, ask them to include a link to Appmill in the replies to that tweet.
→ If the project is in line with the activities of the requested account, you can expect a large impact as impressions will increase. (It is more efficient to ride on the popularity of others.)
→→ Please note that you need to be careful when choosing the account to request the project, and that you should prepare attractive tweet content or materials.

[Option 2] Run YouTube ads.
The reasons for choosing to advertise on YouTube are:

→If the content you want to spread through your ads is provocative, you don't want to show it to people who search, but rather you want to increase exposure to potential users.
→→So you feel that YouTube ads, which are displayed to an unspecified number of people, are more suitable.

-What can I do about options 1 and 2?

① Search the internet for past incidents and articles to gather security case studies.
...It would be good to have examples of famous people, such as "Mr./Ms. XX's PC was invaded by XX million viruses."

② Collect data that can be used for advertising
...Finding references such as survey results and research reports that seem promising will increase credibility.

These were the first things I worked on after taking over as service manager

summary

This time, I introduced what I actually did when I became the marketing manager for a SaaS service

Although I am still inexperienced, I will continue to work hard to contribute!

Thank you for reading to the end!