The software as a service (SaaS) business model is becoming more common across various industries. Between 2020 and 2025, the SaaS market share is projected to increase by almost $100 billion. While many SaaS companies are experiencing tremendous growth and profitability, there’s more competition than ever—and it’s only increasing.
What SaaS companies need now more than anything is a way to set themselves apart from their competitors. The best way to do this is by improving their SaaS marketing strategy.
We’ll cover how B2B SaaS marketing differs from more traditional marketing methods and how to market your SaaS business with three effective strategies.
SaaS marketing vs. traditional marketing
There is one thing that makes SaaS marketing different from any other regular marketing strategy—you can’t show potential customers a physical, tangible product.
Not only are SaaS products intangible, but they are often complex and packed full of features.
To be successful, your SaaS marketing team will have to get creative. The way you promote your product has to be simple enough not to overwhelm potential buyers but informative enough for them to clearly see how your software can solve their pain points.
How to market SaaS software: Three components of a successful SaaS marketing strategy
There are two things you need your SaaS marketing strategy to do—bring in web traffic and showcase how your product can help your target audience. It all starts with SaaS content marketing.
1. SaaS content marketing & SEO
While content marketing is a proven lead generation tool that’s useful for just about any company, it’s especially powerful for SaaS marketing. Publishing high-quality content that aligns with your target audience’s interests is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your site.
It’s important to not only optimize your content for keywords and user intent, but you also need to have the right content available for potential customers in all stages of your sales funnel.
From foundational blog posts to landing pages, white papers, and case studies, you want your leads to land on the content that will help move them through the funnel and, ultimately, make a purchase.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is effective at boosting website traffic and fits in perfectly with SaaS content marketing.
At a basic level, an SEO strategy involves making calculated changes to your website so that it appears higher on search engine results pages. Investing in SEO and a strong SaaS content marketing strategy is one of the single best ways to grow your company and start making more sales.
2. SaaS advertising: PPC
One of the most effective types of SaaS advertising is pay-per-click (PPC). However, it’s not a replacement for SaaS content marketing and SEO—it’s a complementary strategy. If you’re looking to generate more traffic quickly, you can’t beat this combination.
Every SaaS marketing budget should include branded search terms, like your company name and any words and phrases your largest competitors are likely to target.
The key to investing in SaaS advertising like PPC ads is figuring out how to get the most out of every click so that your customer acquisition costs don’t skyrocket. This means your SaaS marketing team needs to create engaging, eye-catching ads that can convey the benefits of your product to prospects.
So, how do you create SaaS advertisements that convert? You’ll want to research a large variety of keywords, create different variations of your ad copy, and closely monitor the metrics. At first, it will involve some trial and error while you experiment to find the combinations that get you the most clicks for the lowest cost.
3. Discounts, deals, and CTAs
Once you’re driving more traffic to your site with SaaS content marketing and advertising, you still have to make the sale. You need to show prospective customers the value they can get from your SaaS product. And other than making the initial sale, offering discounts and deals make for great upselling and cross-selling opportunities.
The biggest mistake we see in this area is running these promotions all the time. If your customers notice that you always have some sort of deal going on, they’ll feel no sense of urgency to buy your product. Instead, they’ll come to view that discount as your product’s regular price and will expect access to it at any time, leaving them free to shop around for other solutions.
You’ll also want to implement clear calls to action (CTAs) into your B2B SaaS marketing strategy to make it easy for your potential customers to navigate your site. When done right, many of your visitors will find themselves signing up for a trial or demo even when that wasn’t their initial intention. And they don’t have to be complex—simple buttons like “sign up for free,” “learn more,” and “pick your plan” can easily help progress users through your site.
Successful SaaS strategies start with the right product
These three SaaS marketing strategies might seem simple, but you’ll find them at the core of any successful campaign.
You can find more advice about building, marketing, and scaling your SaaS product on our blog—The SaaS Founder. And if you’re ready to design and develop a successful SaaS platform, book a free call with us at VeryCreatives to learn how we can help.
