50 Creative Ideas Your Marketing Team Can Use to Improve SaaS Product Adoption & Awareness

To enhance the impact of your content, try showcasing it directly in your content. This won’t apply to every business, but if you offer any kind of website tech you can try it. If you do it right, you can create an experience that is better than the content alone.

For example click here to see a sticky bar appear at the top of the page.

I just demoed our sticky bar product by asking for your participation.

The on-click trigger is one of many options available in Unbounce, including scroll down, scroll up, entrance, exit, and timed delay.

Brainstorm ways that you might be able to show your product in the context of your content.

If your software involves building something, a great way to help with onboarding and adoption is to drive first-time evaluators into a self-guided experience within a template. That way you can show them exactly how to use the product, inside the product! #inception

Here’s the “Builder Basics” template we created for this purpose. You can use it to get the full builder experience in less than 10 minutes or less, which is perfect for showcasing initial value and improving your Time to Value (TTV) metric.

This concept allows people to try your tool without needing to already have an idea they want to build and launch. You can also use it to specifically guide people to using the features you’ve identified as having the ability to create those all-important ah ha moments.

With an interactive sandbox experience like this, the only barrier to entry is the complexity of the product or the clarity of how you communicate its use. And because we’ll be linking to ours from tens of different campaigns and contexts, we’re using entrance popups to speak directly to the message and source that led people to the demo, as well as introduce how the demo works.

You can check out the try-before-you-buy demo here.

Entry popups are a brilliant way of scaling this idea as we can use referrer or URL or cookie targeting to show the right message to the right people.

We gave some of the top brands that use Unbounce beta access to the popups release, which was a great way to source a high-profile testimonial, like this one from Campaign Monitor.

Not everyone likes to consume content the same way. To combat this, on our demo page we offer three lengths of video: 2 mins, 10 mins, 30 mins, and live 1-on-1 sessions.

As an example, for Unbounce popups and sticky bars, we identified that for evaluators to be successful in their trial using these, they must a) build b) publish c) add the line of javascript to their site d) collect 10+ conversions. (Ten or more helps us ensure they aren’t 1-2 from simply testing the product themselves).

It’s key once you outline your product’s ah ha moments that whatever they are, they’re trackable from inside your product. This ensures you can truly measure adoption and understand where people get stuck.

Taking Sam’s advice above, when we identified our ah-ha moments to product adoption, we started tracking them, made our dashboards, and then began creating educational content designed to help people over tricky steps. You can do the same for your products, too. Either via emails, or something like a skip ahead guide for product setup, similar to the one we made:

Here’s the product marketing kicker: don’t sell or mention the product in the letter – keep it personal and thankful – but follow your signature with a fun and made up job title that mentions the new product or feature.

For example: Oli Gardner, Chief Unbounce Sticky-Bar-with-Geo-Targeting Champion

I just mentioned the new product, and one of its features. In a delightful manner.

Bonus points if you create some content (like a custom landing page) that ranks for the keywords in that job title (and has your face on it).

Side benefit bonus: your coworkers get to rewrite their own job title every day for a month.

Ask your entire company to change their email signature to promote your new products. This can gain some exposure to different segments of potential customers. For example, your developers run in different circles than marketing, so their email conversations might connect with a different functional buyer persona. This also has the benefit of mobilizing the whole company with the same message, which is beneficial in its own right. Here’s an example email that our events manager sent to the company to help increase awareness for an event we were hosting at Hubspot’s INBOUND conference.

If you click here, you’ll see a sticky bar with the same content appear,

and because it was created in the Unbounce builder, a developer would never have been needed.

Note: I made it appear at the bottom because if it appeared at the top you wouldn’t really see it appear because it would be covering the header (and it looks the same).

Add a link to your Twitter bio that leads to a product landing page. Double down by asking your employees/coworkers to change their Twitter header image for a period of time. You can’t add links in the main body of the bio, but you can add one below.

Offer early access to your product (or a free account) to influencers in your industry. If they get value from using it, ask for some social sharing love, and ask them for a testimonial you can use as social proof on upcoming campaigns and your website. We recently released an amazing Landing Page Analyzer and asked Rand Fishkin if he’d try it out and provide a testimonial. Here’s what he sent back to me:

Brilliant.

Note that this was a fairly simple interface change, but there is still a massive amount of code that our engineering team had built based on the previous hierarchy. That will remain for now as we run these experiments, but it was a substantial barrier in getting buy-in to make these changes.

Overall, if you’re not being 100% clear about the context of use in the naming of your products, don’t stick with a name because you came up with it, be prepared to pivot for the sake of both awareness and adoption.

Here are a few to get you going:

1. Product Marketing 101 by Uberflip
2. The Product Marketing Podcast by Josh Duncan
3. Former Apple Sr. Director of Product Marketing Michael Gartenberg
4. How we do Product Marketing at Trello with Jessica Webb
5. Product Marketing is the New Content Marketing by Unbounce

You heard me. Get a plane flying over your city writing a romantic red script-style message in the sky. This tip comes courtesy of my wife Nicole, cos she’s hilarious.

Drag & Drop Match
For this challenge, we had two screens: one showing a completed landing page and the other where the Unbounce app was open and you had to replicate the completed page from jumbled components. You had to match the two pages by dragging elements, changing widths, colors and page sections.

Lock Box
There was a locked box with sweet sweet swag inside, and to get the combination, you had to trigger a popup or sticky bar using all of the available triggering settings: click, entrance, exit, scroll down, scroll up, and timed delay. Each one had a number on it that made up the combination for the lock.

So good.

Update your Twitter profile header image, and include a text bit.ly link (or similar). This will let you track its impact. You can see mine here.

Here’s how to do it. Choose (and protect) a cell somewhere in your sheet(s), and paste this code into it:

=image(googleanalytics(“UA-xxxxxxxx-1″,”Doc Name”,”Sheet Name”))

Obviously replace the xxxxxxxx with your GA account ID, and the doc and sheet names.

Here’s what mine looks like currently. It talks directly about Product Awareness Month, and this now appears at the end of the 300 blog posts I’ve written!

No harm in experimentation though, so throw in a single line of CSS to set the ID or class of the meta info (date etc.) to hidden. {.blogMetaEtc: display:none !important;} will most likely work.

Replace .blogMetaEtc with the actual class or ID. Then after a week/month (depending on traffic levels), look in GA to see if the bounce rate or time on page is different.

Note that both of those metrics can be a bit shady if it’s the only page they visit on your site, as GA can only produce a real number if you visit more than one page. But you might spot something. If you DO find that people spend more time on the “no date” version, you can focus on getting more product mentions on those posts.

Probably very rarely.

So just ask them! But don’t waste people’s time with a long-winded and generic, “Can you Tweet this?” email.

That shit drives me bonkers, it’s total amateur hour.

Send them a three-line email that says, “Hey team, it would really help if you could give our new product launch/feature some love on social.

Here’s a Click-to-Tweet ready to go, and here’s one for LinkedIn.” etc. etc. for the social channels that matter for you.

Include a p.s. “p.s. I would like to bug you to help like this once per month, so expect emails with that frequency. Thank you!” << letting them know it’s a regular thing will A) make you do it regularly, which you should be, and B) stop you from having to grovel every time you send an email like that.

You can even have a consistent “Product Marketing Tweet Request #23” in the subject line. Super clear, super simple, super respectful of people’s time.

This doesn’t have to be your core product. It can be anything that you’re releasing. We launched the Landing Page Analyzer there and managed to get to the #2 spot for the day, earning us a place in the PH newsletter.

In SaaS, for example, you can use a Hotjar poll to collect 2-month onboarding feedback, and then use sticky bars to funnel a the positive feedback onto your site using the on-scroll trigger. This can help address purchase anxiety by helping current prospects see who’s already starting trials and providing terrific feedback about their onboarding experience.

If you’ve got proper app security, it’s likely that your customers are automatically logged out after a given period, and will often see the login screen. This is a perfect opportunity to showcase your new products or even old ones that need a bit of love. This was a big learning for us, as we were only starting to use a portion of it (but look at all that space!!).

An interstitial is just a fancy way of saying a gateway experience that you pass through.

Something along the lines of “Did you know that you can also create website popups and sticky bars with Unbounce?” We haven’t done this yet, but the idea came from the product team during a brainstorm.

Personally, I think it’s genius.

Like the in-app “Create” button, this is a brilliant way to present an interstitial popup to tell returning customers about your latest and greatest, with a simple button to continue on their way.