While most marketing teams include demand generation and sales funnel analysis in their campaigns, SaaS providers focus more on these approaches. Besides traditional brand marketing approaches, you must also track your customers through funnel before picking the right moment to reach out to them.

So, what are the most important facets of this marketing approach? And how do you get the best from your campaigns? This comprehensive piece has all the answers. 

What Does SaaS Marketing Entail?

Software as a service (SaaS) marketing doesn’t seem to differ from regular campaigns where you promote and market a product and then hopefully find a lot of clients to sell it to. But SaaS products require a unique approach because they lack a physical presence.

Specialized SaaS marketing specifically focuses on content marketing and digital channels. Thus, your campaigns should stand out in the fast-paced SaaS product market if you need new customers that can potentially sign up.

SaaS marketing also differs from traditional approaches because it’s difficult to prove its ROI; it could result from the deep focus on tech and the fully-online nature of the service or product. But it’s possible when you focus on the following leading elements of SaaS marketing:

• Positioning – It deals with how you position your brand concerning your business rivals, including your overall brand identity and unique selling proposition. While this may not be crucial for small or mid-sized entities, it still helps create a robust foundation.
• Strategic Narrative Building – It centers on your ability to articulate a compelling and clear vision and strategy for your brand’s future. You’ll easily outperform your rivals with a clear understanding of where your company is headed.
• Technology Adoption – Tech has transformed SaaS marketing by creating more immersive and personalized campaigns. Including it in your SaaS marketing strategy can help you achieve a more integrated ecosystem ideal for today’s marketers.
• Brand – B2B brand building is usually centered around making users love your services and always consider your offering when they’re ready to buy.
• Budget – Successful SaaS campaigns require significant capital investment. So your strategy must dedicate sufficient resources to the channels with the greatest returns potential.
• Team – Lastly, your marketing department should comprise multiple teams to handle different aspects of your campaign. Your strategy may also entail co-marketing campaigns for wider outreach. Thus, you need upfront organization planning to get it right.

Understanding Product Marketing

This step is crucial in linking your products or services with your go-to-market strategy. It requires an understanding of how the customer, market, and product relate. Therefore, your strategy should dedicate sufficient time to research.

The primary elements of a robust product marketing strategy include:

Personas

What you’re selling is as crucial as the person you’re selling to; so you should first define your buyer personas or ideal customer profile. Any content you create should be relevant to the personas.

They may seem blurry initially, but you’ll learn more about them when you talk with more customers and crunch business data.

Competition

Every savvy marketer studies their competitive landscape and understands how to stay ahead of competitors through continual updates. They then share these insights with the rest of the company, allowing the product team to tailor their roadmap and the sales department to tweak their conversations. It is a great way to find an edge in the competitive landscape.

Product Launches

Product launches are coordinated efforts to introduce your offering to the market. Your SaaS marketing plan should outline the marketing strategy and appropriate messaging to get clients to adopt your new product.

Pricing

Your pricing structure can determine how you position your offering in the market. It’s also a crucial growth lever. Your marketing team should take part in or lead the discussion.

Research

It’s challenging to develop a stellar SaaS campaign if you don’t know your target audience. So begin with examining your previous leads and current customers. Pay attention to the existing patterns and commonalities, the state of conversion funnels, and how your leads interact with your content. Such insights are an untapped gold mine in the competitive SaaS market.

Demand Generation

It involves creating and nurturing new sales opportunities and revenue from organizations matching your buyer persona. A robust SaaS demand generation program allows you to scale the opportunities you source through additional budgetary allocation predictably and covers the following facets:

B2B Growth Frameworks

The idea of B2B growth frameworks is to create a strategic approach to efficient SaaS marketing, and you can use it for long-term campaigns. Thus, you must make it repeatable and streamlined to serve your SaaS brand for a reasonably long duration.

Inbound Marketing

This approach uses valuable content to attract leads to your brand. Inbound marketing content has to be entertaining, educational, and welcomed. It comes in different forms, including events, blogs, and social media posts.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO knits with content marketing, and your efforts will go down the drain if you don’t promote or optimize your content for search engines. You should aim to appear in the top ten, as anything on page two and beyond rarely gets clicked on.

Website

Your prospects first interact with your site, so always strive to make a good impression. Invest in a user-friendly experience and optimize your pages for search engines by making the site indexable and crawlable and adding relevant keywords to your content.

B2B Lead Generation

Leads fuel your business, so you must do everything possible to grow them. Your strategy may entail:

• Digital ad campaigns
• Conference sponsoring for lead lists
• Content syndication
• Buying cold email lists
• Content creation and attaching emails and ads

Paid Growth

Setting a budget for expanding your user base and building your brand is important. You can effectively reach high-intent potential buyers using Google AdWords. It may be a costly affair, but you’ll target prospects further who are more likely to buy.

Social Media Marketing

SaaS brands can benefit a lot from social media marketing. Your target audience is most likely using social networking sites, and communications via these platforms can be highly effective. The sites are also highly collaborative and can be excellent sources of reliable insights and data.

Display

Savvy B2B marketers use display advertising for retargeting campaigns and driving awareness. The best platforms for these are Adroll and Google.

Content Syndication

This strategy involves targeting a broader audience by republishing content on other websites. Of course, the needs aren’t usually ready to buy, so ensure you nurture them down the sales funnel through follow-up approaches like email campaigns.

Review Sites

The importance of building a positive presence online cannot be underestimated. As few as five reviews can increase a customer’s likelihood of purchasing your product by 270%. Moreover, getting your brand on a software review directory boosts its visibility, builds trust, and generates acquisition-driving social proof.

Sponsorships

This strategy involves funding certain events (partly or wholly) to reach the fan following or audience attracted to the event. It may be an ongoing partnership for multiple events or a one-off deal for a particular occasion. Done correctly, the plan should cover the entire event, from brand awareness in the early days to smart follow-ups with interested leads later on.

Email Marketing

Your B2B SaaS marketing strategy must also entail promoting your brand via email platforms. You’ll generally send specific emails to leads at each step of the buying journey with the overall objective of converting.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

This effective SaaS marketing strategy targets specific accounts. Unlike targeting general leads, ABM lets you customize your efforts to each value account’s specific needs. But you must be conversant with your ideal client and target market. Your strategy should include:

• Identifying target clients.
• Building an email database.
• Creating buyer-personalized programs.
• Sharing client success stories.

Outbound Sales

This corporate selling approach involves initiating and driving client interaction by sales teams. Generally, your strategy should entail looking for buyers and reaching out via cold emails and calls. This approach strategically moves the prospect toward a purchase decision through negotiations, demos, and follow-ups.

Event and Field Marketing

While SaaS companies specialize in digital products, your campaigns should involve field or on-site brand-building activities. These include direct sales promotions, SaaS product demonstrations, webinars, roadshows, or events. Field marketing involves measurable activities that educate, inform, persuade, and influence purchase decisions.

Marketing Operations

These operations ensure your team runs as a smooth machine. Successful marketing ops entail software implementation assistance, marketing attribution, data flow, and marketing analytics.

Marketing Funnel Metrics

These SaaS marketing metrics are vital indicators of your brand’s performance at each sales funnel level. Generally, the sales funnel comprises five stages:

• Acquisition
• Activation
• Retention
• Referral
• Revenue
• Lead Score

Lead scoring helps you track the value of client actions and pass leads to sales. It’s mostly based on user behaviors, company firmographics, and client demographics.

Marketing Attribution

Every SaaS provider struggles to make sense of every touch point affecting stakeholders. But marketing attribution can help you gather, join, and clean your revenue-related data. Thus, it’ll be easier to present clear, actionable evaluations of your B2B revenue drivers.

Marketing Software

Tech is now a core component of successful B2B SaaS operations. While different tools can come through for you, automation software is the most crucial segment of your campaign tech stack. These tools can help you track potential customers, send emails, and run marketing campaigns.

Sales Enablement

SaaS sales enablement is crucial in your marketing strategy because it enhances your sales team’s performance. It entails equipping your sales team members with the right knowledge and tools to optimize their sales and conversion methodology.

Content Strategy

Content is the core of your SaaS marketing campaign. But to get the most from it, you must provide relevant information that answers your reader’s questions. Thus, you need the guidance of a robust content strategy in line with your organization’s goals and audience needs.

Common Content Types

To stay ahead of the competition, your SaaS content strategy should explore all forms of marketing content to convey your expertise and demonstrate that the brand values its clients.

Effective SaaS Marketing Strategies

Businesses vary, and companies use different approaches to achieve their marketing goals. However, some effective best practices are specific for SaaS providers, including:

Identify Your Success Metrics

The first step to achieving a robust SaaS marketing campaign involves measuring your success metrics. Doing this lets you know how your audience reacts to your brand message, communication, and campaigns. These insights can also help you amplify the efforts that earn the greatest returns and tweak the areas that aren’t delivering as expected.

Differentiate Your SaaS Brand

Offering the best solution in the market isn’t enough; you must differentiate your brand in ways that apply to your buyer personas. You can consider their sole outcomes and how your brand can help them meet these objectives. This entails these four steps:

• Examining the competitive environment
• Determining what makes your solution stand out
• Establishing a robust brand voice
• Creating a simple, straightforward brand message

Make It Easy to Sign Up

The last thing your client expects is an unnecessarily long signup form. Since it’s your ultimate goal, you must make the process as simple as possible.

Generally, your form should require nothing beyond the absolute bare-minimum details. You should limit it to emails and probably usernames if it’s a free trial. On the other hand, paid versions should only request the least details your credit card processor requires. The goal is to limit the barrier to entry.

Be Transparent About Your Pricing

Arguably one of the greatest considerations, your pricing greatly influences your buyers’ decisions. Thus, you should make it as transparent as possible.

Pricing transparency enhances your customers’ knowledge, cuts uncertainty, and builds trust. It also emphasizes your solution’s value and forces you to improve your pricing game. Lastly, the strategy can help you filter out unqualified leads.

Offer Freemium Use Or A Free Trial

Trial versions of your SaaS offering can be a win-win for your potential clients and your company. Your prospects get the opportunity to try the product or service before purchasing without any risk, and you can use this chance to show how your product can change their outcomes.

Provide an Outstanding User Experience

Technically, an outstanding user experience increases user satisfaction by making the site more responsive, accessible, and engaging. So focus on providing value with your app or landing page instead of tricking users into taking your preferred action. Effective user experience approaches include:

• Creating a compelling homepage
• Using a straightforward layout
• Making your platform accessible from any devices
• Using effective CTAs
• Incorporating interesting visuals
• Improving your site’s readability
• Providing complete contact details

Develop A Content Marketing Strategy

Content runs B2B SaaS marketing, enabling audience reach, and lead generation. Those consuming your content will develop an impression of your brand, and your business will be considered trustworthy and authoritative. Your campaign should comprise various content types and communication channels and promote your content to reach more people.

Optimize Your Website for Google

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should guide your content marketing strategy. While valuable content can expand your visibility and boost your credibility, you need to be there when your prospects are looking for information. Optimizing your site for Google gives you better chances of reaching a wider audience that befits your buyer personas.

Have a Digital PR Strategy

An effective public relations strategy is now more important than ever, and successful SaaS providers have found the right ways to use PR to their advantage. Since SaaS brands depend on social media buzz and word of mouth, PR can effectively get the word out.

In an industry with a constant relevance battle, it’s essential to tell a story that engages customers and builds brand awareness. So first, find out what sets your brand apart and create messages that resonate with your persona. Effective strategies include:

• Publishing a blog on your site weekly
• Regularly participating in Twitter chats
• Involving yourself in niche events and groups
• Creating a customer-resonating story after determining your unique selling proposition
• Writing press releases

In SaaS, your current client is a potential source of new customers, but you must get them talking about your brand positively. Testimonials and word-of-mouth campaigns are the most effective approaches. Always highlight what makes your offerings different from the rest and maintain a distinctive website look and feel.

Utilize Paid Advertising

Paid ads work. While you can improve organic traffic via content marketing, paid ads on popular platforms can deliver excellent ROI. Pay-per-click advertising lets you pay for the customers you bring in, and your website design, content, and product can do the rest.

For the greatest ROI, optimize your ads for top keywords and monitor your Google Ad quality score. It also helps if you prioritize desktop ads over other formats.

Unleash The Power Of Referral Marketing

Referrals are among the most effective lead types. While cost-effective and close relatively fast, most SaaS providers lack a program. Creating many recommendations without incentives is difficult, but you risk getting low-value referrals when you over-incentivize. So first, determine what works for you and optimize for it.

Prioritize Customer Reviews

Testimonials, reviews, and case studies mostly influence a B2B customer’s purchase decision. Therefore, your strategy should promote these content types by showcasing them prominently on your site and marketing materials. Such social proof can speed up conversion. Moreover, case studies will show your offering’s value and possibilities.

Offer Discounts and Deals

Psychologically, the word “discount” is attributed to happiness, and an exclusive offer brings delight and joy. This action also applies to companies in the SaaS space where the goals are customer onboarding and retention.

Discounts and deals can nudge prospects in the right direction, but only when used at the right time. Examples include:

• Discounts for beta users
• Time-sensitive discounts
• Referral discounts
• Seasonal promotional campaigns
• Loyalty discounts

Remember that discounts influence customers to pay more, not less. What’s more, they need scarcity to be truly effective.

Make Your CTAs Clear and Obvious

The CTA is the most crucial segment of your signup page, so you must make it stand out. It shouldn’t look the same as other buttons or blend into the page background. Rather, you should differentiate it from other parts using a larger font, contrasting colors, and prominent positioning.

Offer Live and Evergreen Product Demos

Product demos are tangible proof of how your product or service aids your client’s goals. They go a long way in influencing their purchase decision. Moreover, they can enhance your products’ appeal to a wider audience by establishing a sense of acquaintance with your brand.

Build A Community Around Your Product

Between the rise of cookie policies and ad blockers, customers are sick of traditional ad campaigns. Savvy SaaS marketers are now building communities to stay ahead. It involves inviting users to online communities for networking, discussing issues, sharing success stories, and seeing how other organizations are using their offerings to grow.

Identify Heavily Used Features As Growth Opportunities

A successful B2B SaaS marketing strategy focuses more on the areas with the greatest returns while enabling improvements in the underperforming elements. Thus, you should consider the most commonly used features as growth opportunities and maximize them.

Feature Customer Success Stories

Success stories are pivotal to your SaaS marketing campaign and can effectively demonstrate the value of your brand to other companies. When presented effectively, they can be a useful resource for educating your potential customers about the outcomes of your product and the results they should expect.

Market Specifically to Each Segment of Your Audience

Audience segmentation entails identifying target audience sub-groups to offer tailored brand messaging for enhanced connections. These categories may be based on geographic location, industry specialization, or business size. The approach aids your campaigns by offering valuable insights that may otherwise be unavailable.

What SaaS Marketing Metrics Matter The Most?

Pay attention to the following metrics as you monitor your ads campaign:

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

CLV exemplifies the total value a client will bring to your company throughout your relationship, including purchase revenue, referral value, and other benefits.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

CAC is the money you spend to acquire new clients, measured by dividing the total expenditure by the number of new clients. CAC helps you determine your spending and whether it’s sustainable.

Activations

Actvation is the rate customers switch from free to premium plans within a specific duration. The subscriber will determine this metric because it coincides with the moment they learn and appreciate the value they gain from your offering.

Signup for Paid Conversion

This B2B SaaS marketing metric applies to companies offering freemium plans. While your acquisition efforts may appear to earn activations and signups, you may still not get many paying clients. Identifying your signup-to-paid conversion rate can help you predict conversions, determine marketing ROI, and attribute subscribed users to previous acquisition efforts.

Churn Rate

It refers to the percentage of clients who cancel subscriptions in a given duration. The industry standard is between 5-7%.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

This metric measures your client satisfaction level and indicates the value they realize in your product. Enquiring about their likelihood of recommending your product will let you know whether you should focus your future campaigns and offerings on their response. Generally, a higher NPS translates to a healthy customer relationship, while a lower score could lead to low conversion rates.

Why Should You Offer a Free Trial?

Free trials are any SaaS company’s superpower. Your clients probably want to glimpse your offering before they commit, so a no-obligation trial can go a long way.

Of course, you need some details for follow-up, but their card details or phone number aren’t really necessary. Instead, follow up with them via email and ask if they need someone to walk them through. If they agree, you’ll use the opportunity to show your product off to its full potential.

Here are the three practical approaches:

Free Trials

At its core, a free trial allows the user to play with and explore your platform for some time. This step makes it easier to convert the trial version user into a premium one. Ensure they experience some interactions, onboarding prompts, and marketing content for a better chance of success.

Freemium Versions

These versions offer unlimited, free access to your product, but you’ll gate specific features or capabilities with a price tag. You’re halfway there if the lead is convinced to pay part of the fee. Marketing and personalized support can be the tipping point for long-term client retention.

Personalized Demos

Lastly, you may also offer a live demo where potential customers interact with a representative in real-time, allowing them to seek clarifications. On the other hand, you also learn about your prospect’s needs. But your platform must be straightforward to succeed without actually offering a trial.

Inbound Marketing

Your B2B SaaS marketing strategy must include inbound marketing, where you attract leads by providing value precisely where they need it, usually through content. This approach isn’t intrusive and can make your prospects come back for more. It is way better than annoying unsolicited phone calls or emails.

Let’s explore the pillars of a remarkable inbound marketing strategy:

Content Marketing

Content truly is king, allowing you to provide value and attract more site visitors. While it’s important to optimize your content for search engines, focusing on the user lets you create ideas-rich, engaging content. You should also prioritize quality over quantity to stand out.

Your content marketing strategy should cover the different types of web content and tactical posts. Be sure to offer a good balance of assets relevant to leads at each sales funnel stage and your target buyer persona. Ideally, 70% of your content should target the top funnel, 20% focusing on the middle, and 10% addressing the bottom.

User Testimonials

These are first-hand accounts of how your offering helped a customer. Prospects rely on them for a real-world, unbiased view of your product and can access them on your site, social media, or popular review sites. Testimonials build trust, show results, and add credibility to your brand. You need them to build brand awareness and attract new clients.

You can encourage your current and past clients to leave their reviews by making the process easy for them, sending follow-up emails, and asking for them in person when you have the opportunity to speak with them.

Influencer Marketing

Inbound marketing also entails collaborating with online influencers to market your offering and improve brand recognition. Unlike celebrities, an influencer can be anywhere or anyone. Their influence lies in their massive social media following.

Some influencers may have thousands or millions of followers, while others may seem like ordinary people with a reputation for excelling in their fields. Depending on their specializations, these individuals discuss specialist topics through engaging social media posts.

Working with them can benefit your SaaS marketing strategy in the following ways:

• Building brand awareness
• Helping you reach new audiences affordably
• Enriching your content strategy
• Quality lead generation
• Cost-effectiveness

Currently, about 40% of marketers acknowledge using influencers to build brand awareness, while 36% of brands leverage influencer marketing for lead generation. Lastly, you can potentially generate $5.20 for every $1 you spend on influencer marketing.

Events and Webinars

These are crucial additions to your SaaS inbound marketing strategy for many reasons. For instance, they nurture relationships with current customers and prospects while allowing you to display your offering and reach your target audience directly. They also build brand awareness and aid lead generation while letting you establish your brand as an authority.

What Lies Ahead for Your B2B Saas Marketing?

There you have it, the most effective B2B SaaS marketing strategies. By including all these elements in your campaigns, you can generate leads, grow your conversion rates, increase sales, and grow your enterprise.

Remember to leverage different marketing channels for the best outcomes. Finally, always be ahead of B2B marketing trends to adapt your strategies effectively.