The SaaS market is estimated to reach over $700 billion by 2028. While it means more opportunities for SaaS companies – it also means fierce competition.
To keep up with the changing market trends and stay ahead of competitors, you must have a solid SaaS marketing strategy. While crafting this strategy will take time, the returns can be mind-blowing. Take Chanty, for example. They drew in 70% of their first 10,000 users with SaaS content marketing.
As a link-building and full-service SaaS SEO agency, we help SaaS businesses blast past their targets. So, we’d love to share some of the marketing strategies that work.
What We'll Cover:
What is a SaaS Marketing Strategy?
A SaaS (Software as a Service) marketing strategy focuses on building awareness of your SaaS product, generating leads, and acquiring and retaining customers.
Most SaaS businesses pick multiple strategies as their focus areas instead of sticking to just one. For example, Slack uses content marketing, social media, and email marketing. If you’re wondering how SaaS marketing differs from other kinds of marketing, here are the three core differences:
- SaaS products are generally complex: This means many B2B SaaS companies will have longer sales cycles, and you’ll need to keep nurturing your leads at every stage and pushing them down the sales funnel.
- There’s an equal focus on retention and acquisition: As opposed to the single-purchase nature of traditional products, SaaS products are subscription-based. That means you must keep proving your product’s value and retaining customers for a steady monthly or yearly revenue.
- SaaS generally requires more commitment: With numerous tools in every niche, you need to create comparison articles and educational content to attract more users. It requires your marketing team to be on their toes every day.
How Do I Create a SaaS Marketing Plan?
A SaaS marketing plan consists of multiple strategies and tactics to achieve a common purpose – increase revenue or gather more leads. The two most important steps are:
- Conduct competitor research: This will help you understand what the audience in your niche is expecting, what B2B SaaS marketing strategies competitors use, and on which platforms they live.
- Evaluate your existing plans and improve them: For example, if you’re already using email marketing campaigns, you might want to add a newsletter or send your latest content pieces to your existing customers.
Understand Your Ideal SaaS Customer
How do you create a laser-focused SaaS marketing strategy? By knowing your ideal customer in and out. Here are two ways to do that:
#1 Use customer personas
A customer persona represents the type of people who will benefit the most from your product. It details their behavioral patterns, demographics, interests, goals, attitudes, skills, etc.
Many businesses also include niche-specific details in this customer persona, such as company size or goals of each department.
Here are some starter questions for preparing your customer persona:
If you want to understand more on this topic, refer to this guide by Userpilot.
#2 Create a simple customer journey
A customer journey map helps you create strategies for different stages in the journey. For example, let’s suppose you have created a map like the one given below.
At the awareness stage, you might want to adopt SaaS marketing strategies like creating TOFU content or encouraging user-generated content and influencer marketing. At the decision stage, you might want to create more comparison articles or send personalized emails noting the benefits of adopting your tool.
If you’re yet to create a customer journey for your SaaS business, here’s a guide by Hotjar you can look at.
Give Your Audience Free Stuff
“Free trial” and “no payment needed” are synonymous with SaaS websites.
There’s a reason why. With so much competition in every SaaS niche, it isn’t easy to encourage a customer to buy your product on the first go. So, what do you do? You tell them they can use your product’s free trial before committing to it.
Once they try your product, you can show them the premium features they’re missing out on and gently nudge them towards shifting to a paid plan.
The world’s leading SaaS companies, like Shopify, advertise their free trial on their homepage.
Your free model could have dozens of iterations like;
- A free trial
- A trial with no credit card
- A freemium model
- A limited version free
- Making it free forever
When it comes to SaaS, giving away your product for free as long as you have a strategy behind it could be a great customer acquisition approach.
Top 21 SaaS Marketing Strategies
The following SaaS marketing strategies will help you generate more targeted leads, scale customer acquisition, streamline customer onboarding, and reduce customer churn.
Along with how to apply these strategies to your business and some best practices, we’ll show you real-life examples and case studies of how businesses are utilizing them for their industry. Let’s get started.
#1 Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
A well-defined SEO strategy can help you drive leads organically without relying on paid ads. One of the main goals of SEO is to position your business in the top-ranking results for niche-specific keywords.
For example, whenever someone searches for “poster design templates,” which brand do you think will surely come up on the first page of Google?
Canva? Absolutely.
To have your brand get the same visibility, here are two aspects of SEO you must focus on:
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is optimizing your web pages to improve rankings and boost traffic. Here are some on-page SEO techniques you should adopt:
- Perform keyword research and ensure your content is optimized for relevant keywords
- Optimize images with alt tags
- Optimize URLs, meta descriptions, and title tags
- Work on your internal linking structure
- Check for site speed and mobile responsiveness
Off-Page SEO
Want to know how effective off-page SEO can be? With a mix of on-page and off-page strategies, our team helped Postalytics increase its organic traffic by 28 times in less than a year.
One of the most crucial off-page SEO factors is building high-quality backlinks. It’s one of the most important factors among Google’s 200 known ranking factors.
While building backlinks, ensure you’re focusing more on the quality than the quantity of backlinks.
#2 Content Marketing
The internet is filled with SaaS success stories that result from solid content marketing strategies. For example, if we asked you to name one SaaS tool doing great in the “sales” niche, how many of you would say HubSpot?
HubSpot’s blog itself attracts over 4.5 million visitors every month. This traffic doesn’t just lead to conversions, but it also positions HubSpot as an authority leader when it comes to its niche.
Here are five different avenues you can cover in content marketing:
Blogs
Many companies convert visitors with actionable blogs. One such company is Ahrefs. If you look at this article, you’ll see that they don’t share fluff. They guide users on how they can tackle
They are top-notch at naturally inserting their product wherever applicable.
If you’re just getting started with writing blogs, here’s free access to blog post templates.
Landing Pages
Did you know that having 10-12 landing pages can increase your leads by up to 55%?
You can do many things through landing pages, like collecting important demographic information about your prospects, discussing your deals and offers, and linking to your PPC ads.
Webinars
A webinar is an online seminar that turns your presentation into a real-time conversation with people from anywhere in the world.
Many SaaS companies conduct these webinars to create hype in their niche, give valuable information to their audience and prospects, and find ways to plug in their products naturally.
Videos
Video marketing has been a game-changer for many SaaS companies.
Whether you want to provide short clips on important features or educate users about best practices, videos are an easily consumable format to reach your target market.
Podcasts
Many people have started listening to podcasts in the last few years. One reason is that people can easily listen to them while commuting or taking care of small errands.
Here’s how Mailchimp has a separate section on its website for inspiring podcasts:
#3 Content Upgrade Strategy
A content upgrade is a piece of content you offer your readers for free in exchange for their email addresses. These content upgrades are usually in the form of PDF guides, videos, podcasts, ebooks, checklists, lists of resources, case studies, and templates.
For example, if you have written an article on “how to design better websites?” you can place a CTA at the end of your blog that talks about giving away free website inspiration templates that readers could use.
This allows you to get contact details of your prospects without seeming salesy, and you can even understand their preferences. For example, you can keep sharing content related to design with those prospects who regularly opt to receive your design templates.
Hootsuite, a social media marketing tool, smartly places content upgrades at the top of their blogs, taking readers to a landing page where the user gets a free resource in exchange for their email address and important details. Here’s one such landing page:
#4 Influencer Marketing
Do you think influencer marketing is meant for just D2C brands or fashion companies?
SaaS companies are breaking this myth. For example, Buffer, famous for its youthful image and blog posts, did not start great. Their blog posts weren’t reaching a lot of people. So, they started writing content that would appeal to influencers. These influencers then helped spread the word on Buffer’s behalf. Combined with guest blogging, this strategy helped Buffer increase their blog numbers and subscriber base to the count of 100,000 users in just one year.
You can get the same results for your brand by choosing the right set of influencers and reaching a wider audience that is compelled to subscribe to your tool.
#5 Behavioral Retargeting
Do you want one more chance to convert those visitors who visited your pricing page and opted for a plan but didn’t complete the purchase?
Behavioral targeting can help you do that. Here’s what it looks like.
This kind of marketing uses cookies – a small piece of identifying data that lets the site identify the visitors and even track the pages they visit and the products they buy.
The various types of behavioral retargeting strategies you can use are:
- Display Ads: Once your visitor leaves your website, your display ad starts getting featured on applicable websites the visitor visits. You may have seen this happening with many ecommerce products you browse.
- Social media retargeting: Your potential customers start seeing your brand, ad, or page on the platforms they use, like Facebook or Instagram.
- Email retargeting: If the visitor has left their email address on any of your forms or created an account, you can use that email to create a personal connection and encourage them to buy.
#6 Video Marketing
Video marketers get 66% more qualified leads per year. It doesn’t stop there. 8 out of 10 people purchased a SaaS tool or an app after watching a brand’s video.
This shows that video marketing is effective if used strategically. With shorter-sized video formats becoming more popular with the advent of reels on Instagram and TikTok becoming more popular, you can leverage these features to garner more engagement.
Let’s suppose you have a social media management tool. Here are the different videos you can experiment with:
- Share informational videos on YouTube. Example: “How to create a social media planner”
- Share trending news. Example: “What does the new Instagram update mean for businesses?”
- Share product updates. Example: “What’s new in our tool in 2024?”
- Collaborate with influencers. Example: A reel on “How XYZ uses our tool to garner content ideas?”
- Create product demos. Show your features and product in action.
Here’s how Canva shares tips and product updates with Instagram reels:
Don’t stop at video creation and posting them on one platform, like YouTube. Get clever with distributing these videos via your email campaigns, embed them on landing pages, on your website, etc
#7 Email Marketing
Email marketing generates an incredible ROI of 4200%, which makes it one of the best SaaS marketing strategies.
You can create email campaigns for different purposes like:
- Welcome emails
- Promotional emails
- Milestone emails
- Onboarding emails
- Newsletter emails
- Reactivation emails
- Product update email
Here’s a newsletter example from Hootsuite that encourages marketers to read their entire email as it starts with a powerful subject line: “58% of people are motivated to buy from Instagram stories.”
To get started with email marketing, here are some best practices that we recommend:
- Use engaging visuals to capture attention and break the monotony of all-text emails.
- Make it more personalized. For example, instead of “Dear subscriber,” address the email by the subscriber's name.
- Play around with multiple subject lines. Starting with a question can be a great idea to get your readers hooked and encourage them to open your email.
- Keep it short and simple. Nobody wants to read five long paragraphs when they could have gotten the message in just a few lines.
- Always include a CTA.
#8 Google Ads, Paid Search, and PPC
Are you relying on organic marketing to get leads and convert them? This approach is great. But should you keep waiting till you get the results?
What if you could complement your organic efforts with paid efforts? With millions of people still discovering and converting via paid ads, you can start getting results from the get-go with these strategies.
You can also give your business the awareness it requires via paid search.
While creating these ads, use proper keywords, focus on landing page design and bid on competitor names. For example, look at the ad results for the keyword “Zapier alternative.” Look how Zapier’s competitors come up on this keyword search.
#9 Social Media Marketing
Many SaaS companies ignore social media because they think it is for brands like Starbucks and Sephora. But with 4.6 billion social media users and so many of them using these platforms to discover products, it would be a mistake to miss out on this potential.
Social media marketing is not just about gaining leads. It can be used for many other things, such as showing social proof, creating awareness, sharing success stories, creating informative content, showing off your company culture, and understanding audience reactions.
Here are three major social media platforms where you can create a community:
You can use this platform to share product updates, educate users about your different features, and share case studies.
Here’s how Slack creates a Facebook video to share a product update.
LinkedIn is a great platform for connecting with business leaders and managers. Ensure that the content you create for this platform matches the tone and requirements of the target audience.
Here’s how Slack shares its market trends report with its audience on LinkedIn.
X (formerly Twitter)
Many SaaS companies make use of X to engage with their audience. For example, you may ask niche-relevant questions and garner audience reactions and retweets.
Slack shares a poll on X to find out customer preferences.
Other Social Media
You can use social media platforms like Instagram to share user-generated content (UGC) and partner with influencers to generate brand awareness and trust.
Slack partners with an influencer to create a solid video for its Instagram users.
#10 Co-Marketing
Co-marketing is when you run a marketing campaign with another company that complements your product offering or shares a similar view or approach to your business.
For example, suppose you’re in the niche of social media scheduling. You partner with a “social media analyzer” tool to publish an ebook on social media strategy for 2022. This way, you reach the same target audience and leverage each other’s following to generate leads.
Before you partner with a brand, be clear on these fronts:
- What should we collaborate on?
- Who will be responsible for what part?
- What will be our budget? How will we split the costs?
- What will be the timeline?
- How will we garner engagement?
Here’s a co-marketing example in the form of an ebook by LinkedIn and HubSpot:
#11 Referral Marketing
Referral leads have a 30% better chance at conversion than leads generated from other marketing channels. That’s not all! High-quality referrals will also lower your customer acquisition cost and increase lifetime value.
To get started, define what a quality referral means for your business. This definition could include the company size, niche, job titles, etc. Based on this, you can create an incentive plan for customers who bring referrals that meet your requirements.
These incentives could be discounts, free upgrades, access to premium features, etc.
Dropbox was one of the first SaaS companies to start using referral programs. They started with a simple and direct message – “For every person who joins and installs Dropbox with your referral, we’ll give you 16 GB of bonus space.”
The numbers they received were nothing short of extraordinary:
- 23 million referrals were sent out in just one month
- Dropbox doubled its growth every three months
- 3,900% total growth in 15 months
#12 SaaS Pricing
If your SaaS pricing is confusing or users cannot find your pricing page, you’re missing out on valuable conversions.
Look at how Moosend has adopted a clear pricing structure.
They also have a comparison section below the pricing where you can see the features you’ll get in each plan.
Before selecting a pricing structure, do a competitor and market research to find out which pricing structure and approach will get you the best results.
Also, showcase your free plan (if any) on your pricing page to convert those who are still doubtful.
#13 Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
ABM is a growth strategy that focuses on creating personalized buying experiences for high-value accounts.
You’ll need to gather insights from multiple departments, like marketing and sales, to create a powerful ABM campaign. Here are some steps to get started:
- Build your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
- Research on them. What challenges are they facing? How can your SaaS product help them?
- Develop personalized content and messages to drive awareness, consideration, & conversion.
- Make use of a multi-channel approach to reach your target accounts
#14 Testimonials and Customer Reviews
Have you ever subscribed to a SaaS tool without reading its product reviews? Hardly ever, right? Statistics prove the same. 93% of consumers say that reviews influence their purchasing decisions.
Here are four avenues to leverage for testimonials & customer reviews:
Review Websites
People generally do not trust the reviews they see on company sites. They often flock to third-party review websites like G2, Capterra, and Product Hunt. Having a presence across these sites provides social proof and increases the visibility of your business.
Testimonials
It’s always a good practice to embed customer testimonials on your home page and important product pages. Here’s how Trello’s home page shows these testimonials right before the CTA to encourage users to take action.
Video Testimonials
This format has become more popular recently as people can see a real person talking about your company. It adds a layer of authenticity to your testimonial. You can put these videos on your homepage, customer page, or product/service page. Whichever place you choose, make sure you put strategic CTAs around those videos.
Look at how Slack shares a video testimonial on their “Customer Stories” page.
Customer Success Stories
Customers subscribe to your product to meet a specific purpose. Whether improving productivity, getting access to design workflows, or boosting revenue, your audience needs to see if your current customers are getting these results. Your customer success stories can meet this objective and help build trust in your brand.
Here’s how Zapier does it:
#15 Improve User Experience
The success of your SaaS business depends on your user. Is your user satisfied enough with your product to continue using it? Do they love the product enough to recommend it? Or would they easily switch to another tool?
Improving your user experience is key to retaining your customers and turning them into loyal fans of your SaaS business.
Here are a few ways you can optimize user experience:
- Add/improve existing features
- Make navigation easier
- Solve more pain points of your users
- Add a search functionality on your website or blog
- Add tooltips to help the user learn as they go
- Offer helpful content to your customers so they can reap benefits by subscribing to your tool
- Ensure your customer support team is always ready to help
#16 Sign-Up Flows and CTAs
Have you ever encountered a long and confusing sign-up process? Did you abandon it? More often than not, people don’t like sign-up flows that keep stretching on forever.
Here are some best practices to follow for sign-up flows:
- Keep the information required to a minimum: You don’t want to have your user type in too much. Have options wherever possible that the user can easily tick.
- Make use of progressive profiling: This means breaking the registration process into multiple stages, making your form seem shorter.
- One-click registration: Allow for one-click registration through a third-party social media platform or Google.
- Avoid complex password rules.
To direct users to sign up, you need powerful CTAs that persuade them to complete the desired action. They should be prominently placed and written in such a manner because they evoke the action you want from the user. Here’s a guide you can use to design your CTAs.
#17 Limit Customer Choice
Have you ever put off making a decision because you were confused with the hundreds of options you have? This phenomenon is called choice overload.
While you don’t want customers to have only one option, you don’t want to overwhelm them with too many choices.
The key here is to find a happy middle ground. For example, look at Miro. While it offers many features to interest its users, it limits its paid plans to three with clear value propositions. Prospects can see which plan fits them the best and make a quick choice.
#18 Deals and Discounts
Who doesn’t like getting a great deal? Deals & discounts, especially limited-time offers, can be a great way to motivate prospects to take the leap.
But make sure that you run these offers on occasion only. If you’re constantly giving discounts, the users will stop taking them as special offers and instead think of the discounted price as the regular price.
Many SaaS companies also use this strategy to upsell their plans. Here’s how Grammarly cleverly did the same by praising its users for a great year and then subtly giving a discount offer to nudge them to upgrade their plan.
#19 Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)
As marketers, we often think of increasing our conversion rates. This automatically means thinking of strategies that will require more money and resources.
Let’s take an example to understand.
Scenario: You get 100 visitors to your website. 10 convert. Your conversion rate is 10%
Goal: You want to increase this conversion rate to 20%.
How: Do additional marketing and create more campaigns to drive more traffic to your site.
But what if there was a better way? CRO helps understand what users want when they visit your website by studying how they engage with different web pages and systematically converting more visitors into buyers. This way, you increase your conversion rate to 20% without additional costs.
Disclaimer: These numbers are here for the sake of simplicity. The industry benchmark rate is close to 2.4%, according to FirstPageSage.
#20 Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Have you heard of a little something called ChatGPT? It took the world by storm when it arrived, making many tasks easier for marketers. Artificial Intelligence has also pushed many SaaS companies to re-think their previous models and introduce AI features.
For example, Buffer now offers an AI assistant that helps their users brainstorm ideas, write faster, repurpose posts, and get inspired.
The marketing teams in SaaS companies can now use AI for many tasks like generating ideas, offering personalized experiences to their customers, improving client engagement, offering fast assistance to customers, creating automated workflows, and boosting team productivity.
#21 Marketing Automation
Marketing automation tools use technology to automate repetitive marketing activities.
For example, you can use CRM tools like HubSpot to gather customer information in one place. You can then use this information to guide your marketing campaigns. You can even record the conversations your team had with your customers, so you always know at what stage the customer is at.
Before choosing these tools, here are some things you should keep in mind:
- Determine your business needs and fix a budget.
- List tools and then explore how they compare against each important feature.
- Explore analytics and reporting options.
- Find the integrations each tool provides.
- Read reviews of these tools on third-party websites such as G2 and Capterra.
- Request a demo/free trial.
Ready to Improve Your SaaS Marketing Strategy?
Marketing a SaaS business is a complex and never-ending process. The 21 strategies mentioned above will help you craft a marketing strategy that attracts, converts, and retains customers.
Remember that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to SaaS marketing, so you’ll have to spend time understanding your target market and their behaviors.
If you’re short on time and require expert guidance, get in touch with MADX. We have numerous years of experience working for SaaS clients and getting them extraordinary results.
Check some of those success stories below:
- How Good Annotations secured 300 new backlinks in 90 days?
- How we 28x’d Postalytics organic traffic in a year?
- How Longvadon grew organic site traffic by 277% in a few short months?
