What is a SaaS marketing strategy?

A SaaS marketing strategy is a plan SaaS businesses create and implement to promote their software and company. The purpose of the plan is to outline the steps and channels needed to 

reach your ideal customers and convince them why your software is the solution they need. 

The most popular SaaS marketing strategies are:

• Content marketing: Creating web content such as blog articles, for educating and promoting your SaaS in a longer format.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Optimizing your online content so that it shows up in search results when potential customers are looking for solutions you offer.
• Email marketing: Using emails to keep existing customers engaged and upsell/cross-sell.
• Social media marketing:  Creating videos and short posts for grabbing the attention of your audience and leading them to your landing page.
• Paid advertising (PPC): Using paid channels to drive traffic and conversions quickly through engaging ads.
• Referral marketing: Encouraging existing customers or affiliate partners to refer new users to your SaaS product by word of mouth.

Unlike traditional marketing methods, these SaaS ones are much easier to implement, optimize and measure. 

The benefits of all of these SaaS marketing strategies are increased visibility, cost-effectiveness and data-driven optimization. You can easily measure the performance of each marketing channel and adjust based on real-data and analytics over time.

The best marketing strategy for you will depend on your target audience, budget, goals, and available resources. If you are selling an expensive SaaS product B2B, you should focus on strategies directed at decision makers, which often include a long-term plan with marketing activities that highlight your expertise and niche authority. 

While if your primary goal is brand awareness and free trial sign ups, you can use strategies that lead to faster conversions.

Best practices

Adopting a customer-centric approach by focusing on solving real customer problems and addressing their needs is #1, alongside maintaining consistent branding and messaging across all channels.

Our second piece of advice is emphasizing quality over quantity – it’s more beneficial to produce fewer pieces of high-quality content than to churn out a large volume of low-quality material. Focusing on one marketing strategy and channel at a time makes it easier to track, measure, optimize and drive conclusions than splitting your budget and trying to maintain all at the same time.

Make sure you are guided by data analysis rather than gut feelings; real data and customer feedback should be the only reasons for steering marketing strategies. Finally, patience is necessary for SaaS marketing, as strategies, especially those related to SEO and content marketing, often take time to build up results.

Examples

• HubSpot uses a wide range of content (blogs, e-books, webinars) to attract leads and educate them on inbound marketing, gradually leading them to purchase their software solutions.
• Slack: It grew through word-of-mouth and a strong social media presence by offering a product that easily integrates with many tools and solves communication problems for teams.
• Dropbox: Implemented a referral program that rewarded the referrer and the referee with extra storage space –  using existing users to attract new ones.