A story of a newbie who has been a marketer for only two months and is now in charge of marketing for a SaaS service

Thank you for visiting the Beyond blog.
at Beyond Co., Ltd.from the Marketing Department of the Technical Sales DivisionNaritaThis is

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

・People who aspire to a marketing career
・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

As a complete beginner, I've been put in charge of marketing for our company's services, and I'm learning from my superiors while grappling with challenges every day.
(I can hear voices in my head asking, "Is it really okay for a beginner like you to be in charge?", but don't worry, I'm receiving plenty of 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, you can't recommend a service to others unless you understand its features. I actually tried out all the features of the service.
(I learned about various services, but in this article, I'll pick just one to introduce in an easy-to-understand way.)

The SaaS service targeted in this case is "Appmill," an automated website monitoring tool.

To put it simply,100monitor up tofreeyou can
I actually created an account and registered some random website URLs.

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 Your home suddenly disappears one day (domain expires)
② A burglary occurs and personal information is stolen (information leakage or data tampering due to unauthorized access)
③ Who you are in contact with is revealed (forgetting 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's also a video that explains everything in just 2 minutes, so please check it out! ↓
Apumil Explained 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]
Health monitoring, scenario monitoring, SSL certificate and domain expiration, response speed and status code checks
[Billing functions]
Broken link check, HTML difference comparison, snapshot comparison, malware protection, social engineering protection

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 terms:
"SSL certificate expiration notification," "domain monitoring," "site URL check," "○○ monitoring method" (where ○ is a word like "health status" 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

- We want immediate notification if any problems occur with the site, such as an expired SSL certificate or inability to access the website.
→ This is a common way to use monitoring tools.

- We need someone to monitor a large number of websites all at once.
→ This could be someone from a large corporation.

- A site check is necessary, but since I'm not an expert, I don't know how important it is, so I'd like to do it as cheaply as possible.
→ This could be someone who has been entrusted with the task by their boss and is desperately searching for a service that seems to have good conditions, even though it's 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] (Reiterated)
Non-engineers who operate their own company or personal business website and have not yet implemented monitoring tools, etc.

- They don't understand the importance of site monitoring in the first place.
→ Very few people truly understand the importance of monitoring.
→→ They don't even bother searching for monitoring tools, or they just ignore them
. →→→ Isn't there a way to advertise that makes them aware of its importance?
→→→→ Stir it up.

[How to appeal]
- Use the survey results that "people won't use the service if the site isn't well-maintained" and spread it on social media and blogs
(imagine something like the ads on YouTube that used to provoke men who hadn't had hair removal)
→ Introduce security cases such as "the consequences of a website being compromised"
→ Make the content understandable to the general public out of morbid curiosity.

*Reference:
This site compiles past security-related 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

[Proposal 1]an influencer to post a project
on Twitter. Ask an account that regularly posts information to tweet about security case studies. Then, ask them to include an Appmill link in the replies to that tweet.
→ If it aligns with the activities of the requested account, it will get a lot of impressions and you can expect a big effect. (It is more efficient to ride on the fame of others)
→→ Points to note are that you need to be careful in choosing the account to request and prepare attractive tweet content or materials.

[Option 2]Running YouTube ads
. The reason for choosing YouTube advertising is:

→If the content you want to spread through advertising is sensationalist, you don't want to show it to people who are searching for it, but rather to increase exposure to people who might become users in the future.
→→Therefore, I felt that YouTube ads, which are shown to a large, unspecified audience, are more suitable.

-What can I do about options 1 and 2?

① Security case studies are gathered by searching the internet for past incidents and articles.
...It would be good to have examples involving celebrities, such as "The story of how so-and-so's PC was infiltrated by hundreds of thousands of viruses."

② Gathering data that can be used for promotion
... Finding good reference materials such as survey results and research reports 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!