12 Excellent B2B SaaS Marketing Strategies to Make an Impact

SaaS has become a highly competitive market. Between promoting new products, creating thought leadership content, and generating sales leads, technology firms invest billions of dollars annually to achieve their marketing goals. However, when it comes to B2B SaaS marketing, spending the largest budget doesn’t equal getting the best results.

We are entering a customer-driven era where clients value experiences and personalization over anything else. This means that, with creativity, emerging SaaS startups have a unique opportunity to compete for their audience’s attention. To help you take advantage of this trend, I came up with 12 effective B2B SaaS marketing strategies and included practical examples to learn from.

Let’s go!

 

1. Find Your Unique Selling Proposition

Saas has become a commodity. And since there are thousands of SaaS companies offering similar services, clients are often overwhelmed with so many options to choose from. That’s why, to position your brand effectively in your prospects’ minds and help them save time, it’s important to convey what’s unique about your service and what sets you apart from the rest. 

You can do that by defining your Unique Selling Proposition, the distinctive, key benefit that makes your business or product better than the competition. Basically, you have to ask yourself, “What can I offer that others don’t?”. 

Webflow achieves that by promoting itself as a service that makes designing a website without coding possible. Their homepage conveys that perfectly and concisely with the phrase: “Build with the power of code—without writing any.” 

 

2. Develop a Customer Relationship Marketing Strategy

With advancements in open-source technology lowering the entry barriers to this industry, you must develop a customer relationship B2B SaaS marketing strategy to stay relevant among your clients.

By leveraging CRM, you can develop customer profiles, strategically plan loyalty programs, provide a superior level of care that delivers value on an ongoing basis, and establish meaningful relationships with your clients. All of these lead to high satisfaction with your brand and increased chances of becoming long-term customers. 

 

3. Gain Your Visitor’s Trust with a Compelling Website 

A high-quality website is one of the most important aspects of any B2B SaaS marketing strategy because it’s the first impression potential clients get, and it speaks directly to the quality of your products. 

To make sure you leave visitors with a positive impression and prevent making any common website mistakes, you need to design a page that answers two fundamental questions any user will ask themselves about your service: 

1. “Does it satisfy my specific needs?” 
2. “Does it really work?” 

An easy way to do that effectively and efficiently is by adding video testimonials—at least, that’s how we do it. 

Testimonials enhance your credibility because they’re third-party acknowledgments that your service delivers what it promises. Moreover, they place the focus on the client and their positive experience with your service: why they needed it, which challenges they faced, and how they overcame them thanks to you. So, these videos also demonstrate your service’s features in real life, helping visitors picture themselves using it to fulfill their needs.

 

4. Use the Right Keywords and Increase Organic Positioning

Getting consistent traffic and quality leads to your website is one of the biggest challenges emerging SaaS companies often face. This stems from the fact that many software companies offer unique solutions for very specific problems, which some clients might not even realize they have! 

Scribe, a company that turns processes into step-by-step guides, offering an insanely niche-type product, was in this exact situation. However, they were able to increase website traffic by writing blog articles centered around the specific problems they tackled. The key to this B2B SaaS marketing strategy was using the same wording their clients employed in searches to discover the right keywords to target and write about.

To achieve this, they recognized that potential customers would not specifically search for their service but rather would like more information about workflow optimization, which led to the company deciding to write articles on these topics. By thinking about how decision-makers and their teams could discover their software, they were able to target the keywords their clients used and start gaining valuable traffic.

 

5. Take Advantage of Content Marketing

It’s no news that the B2B sales cycle is relatively long. Businesses look for solutions that provide them value, so they’ll research a lot of information on your product before making a purchase. Luckily, effective content marketing can be a way to educate prospects on your product, answer their doubts, and increase the funnel velocity.

Thinking about funnel velocity implies asking yourself: “How long do I have to wait for my content marketing efforts to provide the desired revenue?” Your business goals don’t depend only on how many leads convert but also on how quickly they move through the sales cycle. After all, if more prospects convert in shorter periods, your earnings will also increase.

Drum achieved that perfectly by taking advantage of video content. This entertaining and engaging form of content helps convey complex information in an easy-to-understand manner, which, in turn, helps shorten the customer’s journey. By using motion graphics animation, they showcased how their service works visually, which is ideal for SaaS solutions that don’t possess a physical product they can display.

 

6. Invest in Email Marketing

Email is the go-to format for communication among and inside companies, making it one of the best B2B SaaS marketing strategies you can employ. As you probably already know, you can take advantage of it as a content distribution channel to foster relationships with your clients and pitch in new products or features. 

However, to obtain the best possible outcome, you need to choose the right time to send out your mailings. Hubspot did it by looking at their past data and metrics to see which day of the week and time of the day resulted in more opens and clicks. 

They realized that their emails were received better between 9 pm and 12 pm—that’s right, just before lunch hour. Moreover, rates dropped right after it—this is because people entered their break and didn’t want to deal with anything related to work.

As you can see, email can be a great marketing idea—as long as you don’t bother people outside business hours!

 

7. Create Tutorials and Give In-App Product Tours 

A common challenge many B2B SaaS companies face is that they offer intricate solutions with complicated features. However, this also means that if a client doesn’t understand how to use your service, the benefits they should be getting from it won’t be perceivable, and thus, customer retention will plummet.

After all, if a person sees an expenditure every month from a service they aren’t getting benefits from or don’t know how to use, chances are high that they’ll decide to cancel the subscription. Fear not, because there’s a way to avoid it: You can teach users how to make the most of your tools with product tours or educational videos, just like Kommunicate. 

Whenever users try a feature for the first time, the platform triggers an interactive walkthrough that allows them to learn at their own pace. Additionally, they regularly upload tutorial videos breaking down how to use certain features for anyone who might have other doubts beyond the app’s dashboard. 

Besides their usage of personalization, what makes this one of the best B2B SaaS marketing strategies is how they take advantage of screencast videos. This type of video consists of a recording of your screen as you go through the features of your product, so they’re ideal for demonstrating how to use a solution in a step-by-step manner.

 

8. Devise a Referral Program

Referral marketing is one of the most powerful B2B SaaS marketing strategies on this list. Instead of wasting effort contacting leads and gaining their trust, this strategy leverages the reputation and networks of your existing clients to acquire new ones, which can help you gain more leads and boost your sign-ups.

In return for their recommendation, you typically have to offer some benefits to both the referee and the referred customers. The only downside lies in the fact that you don’t control what others say about you. If your referrals don’t convey your company’s benefits properly, you may end up wasting your efforts and disappointing both parties. 

 

9. Leverage Reviews on SaaS-Centric Portals

SaaS-centric review portals like Capterra, G2, and Clutch are valuable resources for both SaaS clients and companies. Users visit them to analyze potential services, read other people’s opinions, and understand your product better. At the same time, they are great marketing tools for businesses because the reviews on these sites offer third-party validation for them.

To be displayed on one of these platforms, you just need to contact the site, and once they’ve verified your company’s information, they’ll put your profile up. Then, to start getting those reviews, you have to encourage past clients to leave their opinions. Look at how Fotoware did it: they wrote this guide on how to leave G2 Reviews and explained why comments are valuable not only to them but also to other potential users. 

That way, they’re educating their audience while encouraging them to leave a review with reasonable and compelling arguments.

 

10. Pay Attention to Community Marketing

Joining online conversations and public platforms can be one of the best B2B SaaS marketing strategies to build a loyal community around your company. To get started, you can join groups on Discord or Telegram and help users asking for advice.

Furthermore, by reading what’s being said online, you can gain valuable insight into what challenges potential customers are facing and what needs still haven’t been met. Doing that is an excellent way to engage with people who have a high chance of converting, as they’re actively looking for information related to your brand. Moreover, since many users display their job positions on their profiles, you can directly target decision-makers and CEOs who could be interested in your service.

 

11. Attract Customers with Paid Advertising

While SEO and B2B content marketing help drive organic traffic to your website, paid ads offer a more direct approach to getting your prospects’ attention. How? Well, an advertising B2B SaaS marketing strategy allows you to place ads on search engines like Google and only pay for each click they get, optimizing your budget spent on lead and sales generation.

It might be the perfect tool for achieving specific goals for your brand. For example, imagine you offer optimized data processing services for eCommerce, and you want to publicize your SaaS before specific dates like Black Friday or Christmas. With paid ads, you can hone in and display your advertising to a specific target audience at the right time on the right channel.

That’s what Next Glass did with this highly-targeted video ad. By using paid advertising, they were able to reach a very specific audience of beer brewers that may be hard to reach organically. Additionally, their use of video was spot-on. Video ads can drive more conversions because they combine motion and sound in ways that make them successfully stand out.

 

12. Don’t Be Afraid of Doing Manual Outreach 

If you’re looking for a simple but effective B2B SaaS marketing strategy, you can look for decision-makers on networking social media sites like LinkedIn and reach out to them directly to pitch your service. As long as you make a compelling proposition that offers recognizable benefits to potential clients in a respectful manner, you could gain valuable accounts for your SaaS.

Nowadays, there are tools like Hunter.io that allow you to obtain someone’s email from their LinkedIn profile. Although this may sound a bit intrusive, you can avoid being bothersome and gain their attention by going the extra mile and personalizing your mailings. After all, you need to differentiate yourself from the countless daily emails they receive from other businesses and colleagues.

Properly go through their profiles on these platforms and find a topic in common you can discuss or a recent challenge they faced that your SaaS can fix. Luckily, we’re in the age of content, and many experts are sharing bits of their professional lives on these platforms. Then, send them a customized email highlighting your background, explaining how you can be of assistance to them, and detailing how your service could positively impact their lives.

 

Wrapping Up

IT has changed the way many companies do business today, making it easier than ever to work from anywhere and changing how companies interact. However, the ensuing competitive landscape forces both emerging and well-established companies to constantly reinvent themselves. 

For your B2B SaaS marketing to bear fruit, you need to have a strategic plan. Following these practices, you can approach your target audience in new, effective ways, offer them valuable experiences, and leave positive impressions of your brand in their minds.