5 marketing strategies to help grow your SaaS business5 min read

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SaaS is one of the fastest-growing business models in the world, and it’s not hard to see why. The model offers a number of benefits to companies such as product flexibility, scalability and cost-effectiveness. However, if you want to succeed as a SaaS business, you need to be able to market your SaaS product effectively.

So just before we enter Q4 and businesses around the world start to plan for 2023, here are five marketing strategies that can help you to market and grow your SaaS business:

1. Understand your target audience and where to find them. 

Finding your target audience is the obvious first step to any winning marketing/sales strategy but it can take time. We have found that two paths can be explored 1. You find the ideal user of your product and you go to where they are and educate them as to your offering or 2. You market your product based on the solution it offers to a user. As you might expect we have found that the best pathway to success is to have an amalgamation of the two. 

Finding the perfect customer fit usually takes time, getting some trialists or paying customers onboard, and identifying the core traits that they have in common. This could be their job title, industry, location, or what other types of software they use. Establishing this allows you to target them from multiple angles. Marketing channels such as LinkedIn ads allow you to target them based on these criteria and focus your marketing efforts on customers that are likely to convert into paying customers. The same can be said for sales outreach or attending events that are likely to have your ideal profile of customer attending. 

The second part of audience hunting is working out where potential customers are looking to find a solution to their problem that you can solve. In most cases, you can’t go wrong with Google ads (sneaky hint: also advertise on Bing for similar users at a lower CPC) you can identify the core terms that users are searching for and then scale either at a local, national or even global level depending on your businesses growth plans. Another great place to showcase your solution is on software review sites such as Capterra, Getapp, or G2. These sites are specifically built to detail the best software solutions to firms and are a place you want to be visible on. 

2. Create a winning brand strategy

Branding is more than just picking out a logo or writing a tagline—it’s about learning how to communicate with your customers and potential customers in ways that make them want to engage with your product or service. It’s about getting your message across and showcasing your service to potential customers. 

Whilst we are still a new business in an industry that is very young (low search demand on Google) we strive to portray ourselves as the leading customer retention software for subscription-based businesses. Building respect and credibility will help to grow your business reputation, drive sales and then hopefully if you’re lucky will lead to customers referring you or taking your software with them as they change jobs.

3. Get your message across through content marketing

Your content marketing strategy is also essential in helping to build awareness for your business and brand. You should have a plan for where the content will live (blogs? social media?) and what kind of tone it will take on. Writing content across a variety of topics that your company has experience/ authority in is a great way to build brand authority as an industry expert.

Doing keyword research can help you generate blog titles and content themes based on trending topics but it can also help you to write content that will start to rank on Google and drive traffic organically to your website. We recommend creating a content calendar so that you don’t end up posting sporadically or not at all. 

4. Use email marketing for lead generation

Email marketing is one of the best ways for SaaS companies to reach customers when they’re not actively looking for new services or products. If your industry/ software is brand new then email marketing is a great way to educate and introduce companies to your offering. Email marketing allows you to create targeted outreach campaigns based on customer demographics such as job title, industry and location. This has many benefits including the obvious purchase of your software but has secondary benefits such as helping to increase your brand exposure within your ideal customer demographic.

5. Be seen on social media

Finally, developing and growing your presence on social media is an incredibly important method to help fuel your growth goals. Social media allows you to combine all the aforementioned marketing tactics. It has your ideal customer who is looking, you can educate those who aren’t aware of what you do and finally it helps to build up your brand presence. 

The importance of the reach that social media can give you can’t be understated. Linkedin’s own research shows that 55% of decision-makers use thought leadership posted on Linkedin to decide whether they want to work with that company. So it’s no wonder that 61% of B2B marketers have increased their use of social media to show off their content and to try and drive decision-makers to their businesses.

By identifying who your target audience is and where you can find them you can start to develop initial traction for your SaaS business. Then by growing your brand through social media based on the back of a well-put-together brand and content strategy you can start to garner the respect as an industry leader that will help you to achieve your growth goals in Q4 and beyond.