15 SaaS Marketing Strategies to Supercharge Your Growth

SaaS marketing broadly falls into two categories - demand generation and demand fulfilment. 

If your product is in a category that is well known and understood, and lots of people are searching for a solution - then you have a demand fulfilment problem: you need to make sure that when potential customers are searching for a solution, yours is the one they find.

For example, “email marketing tools” is a well known category. There are lots of people searching for an email marketing tool every month. You don’t need to educate people on why they should use one, you just have to persuade them why they should choose your tool over someone else’s.

But what if your product is in a newer, less well-known category? And people aren’t actively searching for a solution?

That’s when demand generation comes into play - you’ll need to educate prospects and show them your solution before they realize they need it.

Depending on your product and your market, you’ll need to use a combination of demand generation and demand fulfilment marketing strategies for SaaS.

In this post, we’ll give you 15 SaaS marketing tactics that will supercharge your growth.

1.Create Good Content

Write blog posts that can help people rather than writing for search engines.

Don’t know where to start?

• Go to your competitors blog posts
• Identify one that you can improve on.
• Write a better blog post (WITHOUT plagiarizing your competitors blog post)
• Post it on  your website and distribute snippets from it on your marketing channels.
• Bonus points: use Ahrefs or KeySearch.co to find out which other sites are linking to your competitors' blog post and ask them to link to your shiny-new updated post as well
• Make sure you include target keywords in the blog post title and the article itself

This is essentially the “Skyscraper Technique” as popularized by Brian Dean of Backlinko.com. And it still works insanely well!

Remember to use internal linking for your blog posts too. This is such a quick win in terms of distributing google juice around your site, but lots of people still forget to do it.

Don’t be lazy and just copy/paste from ChatGPT. Google doesn’t penalize AI-generated content - yet - but it’s very easy to spot and generally of pretty poor quality, even if you using well crafted prompts. 

AI is fine for giving you an outline of an article and saving time, but you definitely want a human writer to spruce it up a bit before publishing.

2. Invest in SEO

Everyone tells you to do this. But what does it actually mean?

BONUS: Give your SEO efforts a headstart with this FREE list of 320+ Places to Submit Your SaaS

• Optimize your content for search engines by doing keyword research (tools you can use for this: Ahrefs, Semrush, Google Keyword Planner, Moz)
• Include one or more of these keywords on your home page, blog pages and any other pages you want to show up in google search results
• Make sure your pages are crawlable 
• Make sure you have good UX (user experience)
• Make sure your page loads quickly on mobile
• Make sure to use images (and add alt tags to them for better search engine visibility). You can use Canva or Midjourney to create images easily.
• Build high quality backlinks 

SEO has changed a lot over the years with lots of different updates - but the core ethos remains the same: do keyword research, optimize your content by mentioning those keywords in the title, headings and content on each page. And then reach out to other websites and ask them to link to your content.

More quality content + more backlinks from high-authority websites = higher search rankings.

3. Get Some Case Studies

Do whatever you can to get that first case study. 

With the sheer quantity of information out there people are looking for B2B SaaS tools that they can trust. 

If you have a case study where someone else is singing your praises it is as good as gold. 

Your case study needs to have the following:

• A human face (people react better to faces)
• Proof that your SaaS has solved a specific problem for a real customer
• Details of how your tools solved their problem
• Your customer saying: “I would recommend this to anyone who needs ….”

You need potential customers to see that someone has used your tool and it works. (If you can get someone to mention that you have competitive pricing - even better!)

4. Use Your Personal Network

Your first customers are likely right in front of your nose - your friends, family, coworkers and acquaintances. People who already know you, like you, trust you and respect you. Especially if you’ve been in the industry for a while and have a whole bunch of contacts or linkedin connections.

Yet most of us lose touch with people and don’t tell them when we launch a new business. 

For some low-hanging marketing fruit, do the following:

1 - Go to LinkedIn and grab the email addresses of all your connections. You used to be able to do this automatically, but now you’ll need to use a tool like SalesQL or Phantombuster to be able to extract that information. 

It will take you a few days or weeks to do this without LinkedIn flagging your account, so just go slow and take your time with extracting the email addresses.

2 - What you’re looking at right now is the beginnings of an email list. BUT WAIT. They haven’t technically opted in yet (whether a linkedin connection has opted in to receive emails from you is a bit of a legal grey area).

So you want to send them an email or two first. Explain that you’re launching a new business, who it’s for, and what sort of content you’ll be sharing via email going forward. 

Then give them 3 options:

 (1) if they’re happy to continue receiving emails from you, they don’t have to do anything

 (2) if they’re not interested in receiving any emails from you, they can unsubscribe (include a link here)

 (3) if they know anyone who might be interested in your new product, ask them to set you up with an intro.

Now, when you’re ready to launch your business, send a few emails to build anticipation and then ask for some small favours - upvoting you on ProductHunt, sharing a blog post, forwarding your email to a colleague etc.

This isn’t really a repeatable tactic, but it doesn’t cost a lot of money and many SaaS startups totally neglect the potential customers sitting right in front of them. 

Put your personal network to work and you can gain some early sales and marketing momentum.

5. Create Referral Programs

Word of mouth marketing is powerful. But unless you motivate and incentivize your customers to spread the word, you're likely missing out.

The "gold standard" referral program is the double-sided incentive (as used successfully by PayPal, Uber, DropBox and more). 

When a customer makes a referral, they get a bonus and so does the person being referred. That way there's an incentive to both spread the word, and for the person being referred to actually take action and sign up. Win-win for everyone.

There are a lot of founders who often feel like they don’t have anything extra they can give as a reward. But there is always something. 

For example:

• Amazon gift cards
• 1-month free for every referral
• x% off for every referral
• White-glove onboarding 
• Specialized customer support

What’s important here is that you choose what you are realistically able to give.

But be generous here, customers who are referred by other customers tend to convert into paying customers at a higher rate than average and tend to stay as customers longer than average, so it's worth looking after them as much as possible!

6. Partnerships & Using OPA (Other People’s Audiences)

Map out your customer’s journey. What products and services do they use immediately before, during, and immediately after they use your product?

All of these products and services are targeting the same people you are - and they are all potential partners.

Next, you want to reach out to these potential partners via cold email and ask if they’d be interested in collaborating.

Maybe you each do an email blast out to your list promoting each others’ products. 

Maybe you run a joint webinar and promote it to your respective audiences. 

Maybe you each write a guest post for the other’s blog.

There are lots of ways you can collaborate with other businesses and get in front of their audience at the same time. 

And if you do this repeatedly, you can grow much faster - and for a lot less money - than if you focused purely on growing your own audience from scratch.

7. Run a Cold Email Campaign

One of the cheapest and fastest ways to start a conversation with a potential customer is to email the decisionmaker and introduce yourself.

To run a simple cold email campaign you’ll need to find the prospect’s email address. Often you can find them on LinkedIn and then use a tool like SalesQL, Skrapp or Adapt.io to find the email address from there.

Then you’ll need to write a persuasive email introducing yourself and explaining how you can help solve their problems. 

Make sure you have a clear CTA (call to action) at the end - do you want them to get on a call with you? Start a free trial? Redeem a discount code? Download your lead magnet?

Of course, if you want to scale this up and send out hundreds or thousands of cold emails every day, you’re going to need a much more comprehensive system. 

Check out our course “The Cold Email Secret Sauce” - it will show you step by step how to create such a system.

8. DMs on Social Media (Especially LinkedIn)

Sending direct messages on LinkedIn is one of the best ways to reach out to new leads. 

Bear in mind that you’re restricted to only 100 connection requests per week - and less than that if you have a lot of connection requests pending. 

So don’t spray and pray, you want to be targeted about who you connect with and the messages you send them.

Also in my experience inmails are usually a waste of time. People assume they are spam and never ready them. Just stick with connection requests and always send a message with it.

But before you start doing this you have to:

• Set clear goals. Are you aiming to increase brand awareness, generate leads or establish thought leadership?
• Aim for meaningful connections in your industry.
• Personalize each DM you send. A great way to do this is to comment on details that you’ve seen on that person’s profile. 
• Send shorter messages - these usually have a higher response rate than messages with more than 700 characters.
• Try to send messages during the week and on Sundays. (But avoid Fridays and Saturdays).  

9. Participate in Communities

There are a lot of great communities out there - on Reddit, Quora, Facebook Groups, Slack and Discord and even good old-fashioned forums. Most of them are free or relatively low cost.

These spaces are filled with people who are looking for help and advice and - if you first establish yourself as a credible authority - you can easily convert some of these discussions into opportunities to market your product.

Most communities are pretty hostile to blatant self-promotion though, so make sure you offer value FIRST by helping people, and only mention your product if it is legitimately relevant to the discussion.

Communities also provide a great opportunity to get feedback but also for you to understand people’s pain points and needs. You can use this to adjust your product and guide your feature development plans. 

Active participation in communities can also lead to backlinks. When you share valuable content, others can link to it thus improving your website’s SEO. Higher visibility in search results can attract organic traffic.

IMPORTANT: Community marketing isn’t about self-promotion. It’s about real, genuine engagement. So choose the right platforms, be authentic, and contribute meaningfully. 

10. Paid Ads

Paid ads can be a great way to acquire customers if you’ve got your messaging and marketing funnel figured out. They’re fast and easy to scale. But paid ads also tend to be one of if not THE most expensive way to acquire customers - especially if you haven’t nailed your messaging and funnel yet. So proceed with caution.

Typically I don’t recommend paid ads if you’re bootstrapping or just starting out. Treat it as a “phase 2” channel once you have one or two other channels working well first and just need more visitors in the top of your funnel.

The trick with paid ads is to get your audience targeting right. Otherwise it is going to be a huge waste of time and money. With paid aids you need to know EXACTLY which demographics, behavior and interests of your ICP.

Along with this you also need to optimize your ad campaigns for specific actions like sign-ups or trials. If you don’t know what you want people to do, then you can’t guide them to anything. 

Lastly, take your time to do A/B testing. Test out your headlines, landing pages, images and see which ones do best. Remember to only test one variable at a time in order to measure it accurately.

11. Affiliates

Promoting via affiliates is a win-win tactic for your marketing strategy as a SaaS. Basically, your affiliates promote your software product to their networks, driving potential customers your way. So they earn commissions, and you get new users.

Most SaaS companies either join an established affiliate network or they manage their own affiliate program and invite affiliates directly.

If you want to join a pre-existing network, consider the following. Just bear in mind this is usually a lot more expensive and you’ll have far less control than rolling your own. Also, affiliates on these platforms can be ruthless, and will drop and and promote your competitor if your offer doesn’t convert as well as expected.

• Commission Junction
• ShareASale
• Awin

Alternatively if you’d like to build you own network of affiliates (and maybe tie that into your partnership program) here are a few suggested tools:

• Rewardful
• Tapfiliate
• FirstPromoter
• Partnerstack

Affiliate marketing has a number of advantages

• It’s performance based - you only pay when an affiliate sends you a paying customer
• It’s relatively easy to scale
• It spreads awareness around your brand
• Managing affiliates is a lot less time-intensive than many other marketing activities like writing blog posts or sourcing email addresses

To implement this successfully you need to provide your affiliates with valuable marketing materials such as social media posts, email templates, and banners. The easier you make it for them the more likely they are to promote your SaaS.

Make sure you track the performance using affiliate links to monitor conversions. Using these metrics, optimize your campaigns accordingly.

It is really important to give you affiliates an incentive. You can offer commission, bonuses or even tiered structures. 

The best results come from finding something that they are excited about and plugging into that. The more motivated your affiliates are, the better results you’ll get.

12. Integrating with other products to get listed on their app store ecosystem

Find a tool that offers a complimentary service to yours and plug in with them.  

The first step to achieving this is research. Identify the platforms that align with your SaaS offering (A good place to start might be Salesforce AppExchange, HubSpot App Marketplace, and Slack App Store). 

It’s important to choose the ones that cater to your target audience and have a strong user base.

Make sure that your integrations enhance the overall value proposition for users. Ask yourself how your SaaS complements or extends the functionality of the existing platform.

Reach out to the platform owners or partner teams of complementary platforms or services. Explain the benefits of integrating with your SaaS solution and collaborate with them. It’s important to make sure that you have a smooth onboarding process for your integration.

You have to make it easy for them, otherwise it won’t work.

The most important part to remember is that you are trying to solve real-world problems for users and create a win-win situation for both your SaaS and the platform you integrate with.

13. Webinars

Webinars can be a powerful addition to your SaaS marketing strategy because they help you to educate your customers.

Before planning your webinar, make sure you have clearly identified your audience. Are they existing customers? Are they potential customers or are they professionals in the industry? Based on the answer, you’ll need to create your content accordingly.

Choose relevant topics and make sure that the people attending your webinar will get value out of it. 

For example, addressing pain points is a great way to get people onto your webinar.

The best place to find out your customer’s pain points is usually the complaints section of your competitor's site (Google reviews also help with this.) Another good place to look is Reddit. 

Make sure you stay up to date with industry trends and that your product features are actually in demand.

Promote your webinar. You can use social media (like LinkedIn) and cold emails. Using multiple channels ensures a wider reach. 

During the webinar, try to engage with your audience and answer their questions with as much detail as possible. Don’t just try to sell them your tool immediately. People are more likely to buy from you if they feel like you want to help them.

Lastly, remember to follow-up after the webinar. This is the part where many people fail. The follow-up is just as important as the webinar. 

14. In-Person Events

People like interacting with people. 

In person events like conferences, meet-ups or workshops are a great way to connect with your ICPs. You can either sponsor certain items for the event, like baseball caps or paper bags to make people aware of your brand. 

Another great way to connect to potential customers and partners is by presenting a workshop that adds value through:

• Solving a problem
• Providing actionable advice
• Giving new insights on existing data

Keep in mind that attending conferences without a strategy will be a waste of your time. If you are attending and you want to make connections, use your time wisely. 

Excuse yourself gracefully from conversations that you are not interested in or that don’t add value to you. It seems superficial but you could be meeting your next big customer instead of making small talk about the weather. 

Make sure you know who will be at the events and use that to your advantages. Apart from networking it is also a great learning experience for you.

15. Lead Magnets

Lead magnets are the educational freebies that will put you on the map.

The basic concept of lead magnets is to attract potential customers by offering valuable content in exchange for their contact information. 

Here are some examples of good lead magnets:

• eBooks: These are like blog posts on steroids. Creating comprehensive eBooks related to your SaaS niche are a great way to provide value to your potential customers.
• Email Drip Courses: Break down complex topics into a series of emails.This way you nurture leads by providing valuable content over time. Each email should move them further down the funnel.
• Online Courses: You can offer mini-courses related to your SaaS solution. Teach practical skills or address pain points. 
• Checklists: Simplify complex processes with an actionable checklist. For example, a “SaaS Security Checklist” could guide prospects on securing their data in the cloud
• Worksheets and Templates: Provide practical tools that your customers can use and that will make their lives easier. Things like project management templates, budget spreadsheets, or content calendars.
• Tools and Calculators: Create interactive tools that your customers can use to solve their problems. E.g. an ROI calculator for your SaaS.
• Communities and Forums: Offer access to exclusive communities or forums where users can connect, learn, and share insights. Position your brand as a hub for industry knowledge and insights.

Remember to align your lead magnets with your SaaS strengths. Solving real problems in an effective way will get you real, long-term customers.

Conclusion

These are just a few strategies you can use to up your SaaS marketing strategy. They need to be continuously optimized and revised because the SaaS landscape is ever-changing.

A quick recap of what we covered in this post:

1. Creating good content
2. Investing in SEO
3. Getting case studies
4. Using personal networks
5. Creating referral programs
6. Partnerships ad OPA
7. Cold email campaigns
8. DMs on social media
9. Participating in communities
10. Paid ads
11. Affiliates
12. Integrating with other products
13. Webinars
14. In-person events
15. Lead magnets