Now that you’ve launched your websites as a service (WaaS) solution, and you’re excited to market it to your target market: you’re ready to roll out a press release, implement an SEO campaign, frequent industry events and everything else you can come up with.

Here’s my suggestion: Slow down.

I know, coming from me that might sound a bit hypocritical. I’m the first to advocate blitzing your market, but when you first launch your WaaS, it’s important that you take a moment to reflect and strategize.

Don’t worry, if you’ve already started, just push the pause button and take a deep breath. It’s possible that you’ve already experienced that shot-gunning a bunch of random activity isn’t delivering your expected results. Let’s face it, the hodgepodge of tactics and drive-by method is just wasting time and money, and not delivering paying customers.

If you find yourself in this position, you can typically blame it on 2 culprits:

1. No plan
2. Poor messaging

The prospect doesn’t really care how your WaaS solution works

I don’t doubt for a minute that you’re able to explain how your WaaS features work.

But let’s be honest, your prospective customers have different concerns on their mind, like:

• Is this for me?
• Does it solve my needs?
• What makes it better than alternative solutions?

If your messaging doesn’t answer these three questions and concerns, I don’t care how well executed your marketing tactics are, your prospective customers don’t care and won’t respond.

Activity without a plan doesn’t move you forward

You won’t make any meaningful progress if all you’re doing is scrambling to shotgun your marketing activities.

To generate a consistent and predictable flow of customer acquisitions, you’ll need a well-structured marketing plan. It needs to address every step of your prospective customer’s buying cycle. It should: 

• Increase visibility and generate leads
• Convert leads into qualified prospects
• Close prospects into paying customers
• On-board customers
• Retain and upsell

Don’t plan on getting prospects through this process with drive-by marketing. If that’s your plan, expect to experience bottlenecks and gaps. You might get lucky and experience a large volume of new leads, but you’re likely to find yourself without the ability to convert your new prospects into paying customers, or you’ll get paying customers but fail to retain and upsell them on other products or services.

Feel free to experiment with various marketing tactics, you might get lucky and stumble on something that works for you (momentarily). But if you want to generate a consistent, predictable flow of new customers to your WaaS, you need to develop a well thought out marketing plan.