The software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry is one of the most booming industries of 2023, with a global market size of $260 Bn , and it is expected to grow by 400% to $1.3 Tn by 2030.
It’s insane growth!
But for a SaaS business, it means more competition. In a highly competitive market, generic SaaS marketing strategies couldn’t deliver you the desired results. You’ll struggle to get customers or ROI for your business.
But you shouldn’t be worried about it because I’m sharing the top SaaS marketing strategies in this guide that will open the floodgates for traffic, customers, and higher ROI for your SaaS business.
Best SaaS Marketing Strategies For Growth
Here are the proven strategies to grow your SaaS business multiple times.
Re-Evaluate Customer Persona
If you don’t know your target customers or are targeting the wrong customer persona, it’ll be difficult for you to acquire customers and scale your business consistently, no matter how skilled your marketing team is or how much money you have.
Knowing your ideal customers will get you the best results and ROI and help you scale with a small budget. It’ll also help you refine your SaaS marketing campaigns to target the right points with the right messaging, ultimately improving your SaaS marketing performance and ROI.
That’s why it must be the first thing to do before planning your SaaS marketing strategy for the next quarter or year. I’d recommend reevaluating your customer persona once a year to refine your target audience and better understand them.
To refine your customer persona, you should talk to your sales team and interview your customers to learn more about their challenges, goals, desires, and how they use your product. Also, try to figure out what kind of businesses are getting the best outputs from your tool.
The key to success is in the right kind of customers you’re interviewing and questions you’re asking them. For example, interviewing the most successful customers could give you insights about what works best for you, while an average customer can give you insights into what changes you should make to help them succeed.
Leverage SEO
SEO is one of the highest ROI marketing channels for organically growing your SaaS business. A successful SEO campaign not only helps you with organic traffic and sales but also builds the brand and improves other marketing channels.
These days, a traditional SEO approach is not enough due to the high competition, Google’s Complexity, and AI nuances. That’s why you need to think out of the box to achieve sustainable SEO growth.
Here are some ideas to do it;
Use Ad Campaigns Data
SEO tools like semrush and Ahrefs don’t know everything about your customers and their search queries. So, you’ll miss hundreds of easy opportunities and keywords if you solely rely on them.
That’s why you should use Google Ad campaigns to plan your SEO strategy and ensure good SEO results. Choose the keywords that are performing well through ads in terms of sales and target them with SEO. You can choose low-competition keywords to rank them on Google easily.
But if you’ve not run any ad campaigns in the past, then you can create a list of top money-making keywords and target them with ads first to find the top-performing keywords and their variations.
Start With Money Keywords
How faster you can get results with SEO depends on your SEO strategy. To get better SEO results, you should target Bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu) keywords before anything else.
Focus on the keywords that your customers search on Google to make a purchase.
- Best CRM for b2b agency,
- CRM software deals,
are the examples of these keywords.
If you’re a SaaS startup or have limited resources, you should target low-competitive keywords so you can rank them easily and attract customers. But you can target competitive terms if you’re a medium-to-enterprise brand or have enough resources.
Co-marketing And Partnerships
Co-marketing is one of the best ways to generate awareness and leads for your SaaS business. You can partner with other companies having the same audience as yours but are not in direct competition with you.
(Hubspot co-marketed with Survey Monkey)
For example, an SEO agency can collaborate with a website design agency or CRM software can collaborate with survey software.
You can also partner with other non-competing companies. If you do this correctly, you can grow your business multiple times in a very short period of time because you will gain the existing customer base of another company.
One great idea is to come up with company swag ideas and send these branded merch to your partners and therefore create a stronger bond with them while promoting your business.
If your SaaS tool can add value to another company’s offering to serve their customers, then they’ll definitely be interested in partnering with you. For example, For a digital marketing tool, partnering with a survey software will be useful for their customers.
This strategy works really well for SaaS companies.
For example, Bonjoro, a video engagement platform has tripled its customer base by partnering with leading Email marketing software named ActiveCampaign.
You get customers on auto-pilot by partnering with other brands. It helps you to scale with high ROI.
Offer Free Trials
Offering free trials is a low-cost SaaS marketing strategy to boost customer acquisition. It doesn’t cost much to a SaaS business, but it can attract customers. Studies show that free trials contribute at least 10% to the acquisition of new customers for most SaaS businesses.
A free trial helps customers understand exactly how your SaaS product can solve their challenges by using it without costing any money. So, if they get any value from your SaaS tool then they’ll continue as paid customers.
The time length of a free trial must be according to the complexity of the tool. Otherwise, users couldn’t understand the tool’s value with A shorter time free trial or it could be costlier to offer longer period trials.
That’s why you should offer free trials for the required time period and all required features of the SaaS tool.
Content Marketing
I’ve generated millions of dollars worth of business with content marketing.
Hubspot has built a billion-dollar company with the help of content marketing.
Leo Widrich, the cofounder of Buffer, acquired their first 100K customers in nine months through content marketing.
There are so many examples of growing businesses with content marketing— no matter what the industry and scale of your content marketing campaign.
The success of content marketing depends on the right platforms and the value of the content you share. For SaaS businesses, content marketing is growth fuel.
As customer behaviour is changing due to new technologies (like AI), platforms, and content formats (like reels), your content marketing strategy must be planned accordingly.
Instead of following a typical content strategy, you should plan a customer-centric content strategy that answers all customers’ queries, challenges, and doubts and guides them to achieve the most from your SaaS software.
Focus on persona-driven content rather than keywords, as well as the informational value of content instead of word counts and content length.
It will help you increase customer acquisition and retention at a lower cost.
Along with it use email marketing, guest blogging (on leading sites), get listed in listicle posts, and promote your content on social media to increase your reach to new customers.
Pro tip: You can include quotes from top industry experts and influencers to boost your reach and content marketing results.
Smartly Integrate Channels
With a typical templated approach, promoting a business on multiple platforms requires a big budget, team, and resources to get the desired results. Also, you need to plan separate strategies, content, and execution for each platform, and still no guarantee of results.
That’s why you should learn how to get out the most with existing or limited resources, especially when you have a limited budget and resources. Also, it helps you to optimise operations and scaling.
You should integrate different marketing channels with others so you can get out the most with limited efforts. For example, combine SEO with content marketing and email marketing to get the best results or get listed in listicle content can also help with SEO and referral traffic. (single effort for multiple outputs)
You can do other things like content repurposing; you can create a social media post from a blog post (or ebook) and create blog post content from a video script or vice versa.
It will reduce your marketing efforts and increase your output.
You can completely automate it with the help of AI and a little bit of experience.
Final Words
There are so many SaaS marketing strategies, channels, and ideas for promoting your SaaS business. But success depends on your approach. Understand your business goals and targeted audience, and use the right platforms and strategies to give you massive growth and ROI.
Prefer SaaS marketing strategies that cost you nothing but have the potential to grow and scale your business multiple times and support other marketing efforts. Focus on the profit and ROI from day one. No matter if you’re a funded SaaS company or bootstrapped.
The SaaS marketing strategies I shared above are proven strategies for growing any SaaS business to manifolds with higher ROI. I’ve used them for various industries and SaaS companies of different sizes. Every strategy has the potential to scale your SaaS to $100K MRR.
So implement these strategies and scale your SaaS business.
