Remember when just having a solid software-as-a-service (SaaS) product could get you noticed? Those days are long gone. With over 30,800 SaaS companies in the market, being “good” just isn’t good enough anymore. The market is saturated, the noise is deafening, and customers have endless options.
If you want to survive — no, thrive — you need more than a good product. You need a SaaS marketing strategy that cuts through the noise and resonates with your audience.
This guide isn’t just about ticking boxes. It’s about crafting a SaaS marketing strategy that’s as dynamic and innovative as the SaaS world you live in. Let’s dive into the tactics that work now.
SaaS marketing isn’t about flashy campaigns or one-time wins. It’s about consistency. As your business grows, so should your SaaS marketing strategy, whether you’re a startup finding your footing or a household name scaling to $100 million.
Your business model — whether targeting enterprise clients, offering freemium options, or testing limited trials — dictates your SaaS marketing playbook. But even the most brilliant strategy can’t save a bad product. We’ll explore why a great product is the foundation of any successful marketing approach.
🎯 In this post, I’ll share the strategies that took us from $6.5 million to $17 million and, more importantly, how you can tailor these strategies to fit your unique path.
Having worked across various marketing fields, I quickly realized that SaaS marketing demands a unique approach. Building Textmagic’s in-house marketing department taught me that success wasn’t just about strategy — it required cross-department collaboration.
From support to development, everyone contributed to ensuring that our message was clear and customer-focused. This collective effort has been the cornerstone of our growth.
Here’s why SaaS marketing is uniquely challenging.
Measuring the success of your SaaS marketing is everything. And by measure, I don’t mean trying to pin down every click in a no-click world. Use the right tools, track what’s trackable, and rely on self-attribution where necessary.
Just make sure you know what success means to you and your team. This data is your key to getting stakeholders on board with your growth strategy.
Let’s break down the key metrics that reveal what’s working and where you need to pivot:
Check out this graphic for a detailed breakdown of each metric and the tools you can use to track it:
Having the right tools in your arsenal is as important as knowing which metrics to track. Here’s what we rely on.
Before diving into our SaaS marketing strategy, there are a few foundational elements that guide every decision and that you should also consider.
According to Brian Balfour, “Products are built to fit with channels. Channels do not mold the products.” This concept of product-channel fit is critical — success in SaaS marketing comes from aligning your product with the right distribution channels rather than forcing it where it doesn’t belong.
That’s why we focus on tweaking our product and selecting channels that truly resonate with our audience. To explore this idea further, check out Brian Balfour’s Product-Channel Fit series.
We developed a marketing strategy that resonates with our audience and leverages our product’s strengths. Here’s a look at how we approached it.
With our product-led growth approach in mind, let’s explore the SaaS marketing strategies that worked for us and those that didn’t.
✅ This guide assumes you already have a go-to-market (GTM) strategy, a well-defined user persona, and an understanding of your business key performance indicators. For more information, check out our articles on GTM strategies for SaaS and positioning statement examples.
When developing our SaaS marketing strategy, we prioritized showing the value of our product from the start. Offering a free trial or a freemium model is nothing ground-breaking, but it’s one of the best ways to make that happen.
At Textmagic, offering free trials has consistently paid off by letting clients experience our features before committing. But a free trial is just one piece of the puzzle. Here are other strategies we’ve successfully implemented to demonstrate tangible benefits.
These tools aren’t always directly tied to our main product. They are also a way to test product-market fit for new features. We plan to optimize this area by refining CTAs and enhancing integration with our core offering.
🌟 What are you doing to ensure that your prospects can immediately see the value in your product?
Content marketing is about more than just cranking out blog posts. For most SaaS companies, it’s the heartbeat of their inbound strategy. We tailor our content to each customer journey stage, ensuring that it addresses specific needs and moves prospects closer to choosing our product.
We focus on making our content, whether a blog post, video, or case study, relevant and valuable for our users. Here’s a breakdown of how our content is crafted to guide potential customers from their first encounter to making a decision:
At the beginning of the journey, our goal is to attract and capture interest.
As prospects consider their options, our content focuses on deeper engagement.
At this point, we’re focused on converting prospects into customers.
Dragos Voicila, our content marketing manager, shared a few words about the essence of our content strategy:
“Crafting journey stage-specific content is not just about attracting attention but about nurturing relationships and guiding customers toward a decision. By delivering valuable content at every touchpoint, we meet our customers’ expectations and demonstrate our product’s value at the same time. This ensures that we’re building strong connections and fostering trust, which is key to turning interest into loyalty.”
The best promotion often comes from your customers themselves. Word of mouth is your most powerful marketing tool — far more impactful than any paid ad campaign. Being a real partner in your customers’ success is one of the best ways to promote your SaaS product.
Here’s how marketing can step up its game to make this happen.
Effective SaaS marketing relies on targeting the right channels from the start. Be strategic and intentional about where you invest your time and resources from day one.
As a T-shaped marketer, my core strengths are search engine optimization (SEO), content, and analytics. Since entering the SaaS industry, my view of SEO has evolved — especially given Textmagic and Touchpoint’s unique challenges. I firmly believe prioritizing UX is key to better SEO.
While technical optimization, strong backlinks, and competitive analysis are still important, the focus should be on building a great site for your users. Prioritize fast loading times, intuitive navigation, clear information architecture, and engaging content.
This guide offers a thorough breakdown of SEO specifically for SaaS.
Adela Ionita, our dedicated senior SEO, shared some insights into how to successfully integrate SEO with UX to achieve optimal results:
“When traditional SEO tactics don’t move the needle, the problem might be your website’s UX. Poor UX can drive users away, ultimately hurting your search rankings.”
Leveraging email marketing for SaaS involves crafting targeted campaigns that align with your customers’ journey. It’s an excellent tool for nurturing leads, onboarding customers, and building lasting relationships. Consider the following actionable tips to get the best results.
Consistency and relevance have been vital in our experience. Here’s what we’ve found to be results-oriented.
Creating and capturing demand are two sides of the same coin in a SaaS marketing strategy. Demand creation is about educating your audience, making them aware of a problem they didn’t know they had, and then positioning your product as the solution. This is crucial because most of your target audience (around 97-99%) isn’t actively searching for your product. They don’t know what they need until you show them.
On the other hand, demand capture targets a smaller segment of your audience (about 1-3%), who already know what they want and are ready to buy. Channels like pay-per-click (PPC) are effective, but if you’re only focused on capturing demand, you’ll quickly reach your total addressable market (TAM).
⚖️ You must balance creating new demand and capturing existing interest to sustain growth.
Our performance marketing manager, Daniel Ivan, shared his thoughts on generating product demand and developing a scalable content engine for long-term success:
“The media machine is a strategy that turns marketing into a continuous flow of demand generation. Producing consistent, high-quality content that truly resonates with your audience builds authority, trust, and engagement across various platforms. This shifts the focus from chasing quick wins to nurturing long-term relationships, creating a sustainable growth engine that drives results over time.”
Now that you’ve built a solid foundation for generating demand, capturing this demand through various advertising strategies is crucial. Our approach involves a strategic combination of targeted ads, including the following.
We focused on growing through partnerships and affiliates for the last piece of our SaaS marketing strategy.
The idea was simple — encourage our current customers and partners to spread the word about our product by offering them rewards. Based on performance, the commission percentage can increase. This worked well because people tend to trust recommendations from those they know, so it helped us reach a new audience more organically.
As a result, one of our affiliates brought in one of our top 10 highest lifetime value clients, while other partners contributed over 40 new clients to our business.
We also regularly support our affiliates with new product information, marketing collateral, and bonuses. This strategy has also helped us secure placements in relevant lists that rank for transactional keywords by inviting these publications to join our program.
🕵️♂️ Running an affiliate program, however, is not without its challenges. Constant oversight is required to ensure affiliates are aligned with your brand and to check for fraudulent activity.
We also teamed up with industry influencers with a strong presence in our niche. By carefully selecting influencers whose audiences align with our target market, we ensured that their endorsements added credibility and trust.
To track performance, we used Urchin tracking modules (UTMs), unique links, and discounts. These partnerships have benefited brand awareness, and some YouTube influencer collaborations yielded a return on advertising spend (ROAS) of 500% or above.
Additionally, we’ve partnered with SaaS providers offering complementary products. For instance, we’ve partnered with scheduling tool providers while focusing on communication. Through content partnerships, we boost each other on various publications and blogs, doubling the win for all involved.
Community building is one of the most powerful yet challenging and time-intensive SaaS growth strategies, and we’re currently underutilizing it. Instead of sharing generic advice, I’ll recommend this practical guide by Outverse.
With the stakes higher than ever, and costs per acquisition (CPA) skyrocketing, fine-tuning every step of the user journey is just something you NEED to do as part of your SaaS marketing strategy.
This is why conversion rate optimization (CRO) matters.
In the past, our conversion rates were strong, with over 35% of trials converting to paid customers across all channels. Our non-branded PPC alone saw a 60% trial-to-paid conversion rate. However, recent economic shifts and regulatory changes have caused growth to slow, with trial-to-paid conversions dipping.
Despite ongoing interest in Textmagic, friction along the user journey has become a barrier. We’ve partnered with a CRO agency to optimize our website and app, aiming to boost user engagement and conversions.
Here are some CRO strategies we’re implementing.
☝ Final takeaway: CRO is not just about making changes but about making the right changes.
SaaS marketing doesn’t always go as planned, and some strategies take time before delivering results. You’re not only trying to win over customers but also needing to justify bold moves to shareholders, such as unconventional social media campaigns or new CRO tests that your product team might be wary of.
That’s why having a structured process for testing new strategies is crucial. Instead of diving straight into new strategies, start with small tests to see if they work. This way, you can prevent major failures and improve ideas before investing further resources.
Here are a few ideas you could test:
Personal note: SaaS marketing is a rollercoaster. That viral post? Maybe not. Your account-based marketing (ABM) campaign? It might just flop. But that’s all part of the process.
Remember:
Persistence pays off.
Test small, scale what works.
Keep refining your strategy.
Want more? Here are my favorite SaaS marketing strategy examples that have set themselves apart.
Image source: zapier.com
Zapier is a fantastic example of SaaS marketing done right. It has an ecosystem of over 7,500 app integrations. Instead of just focusing on general SEO, Zapier started creating content for each integration. That way, when people search for ways to link their favorite apps, Zapier’s content shows them how to solve their issues.
What also sets Zapier apart is its strategic partnerships with other app providers. This means they’re not just promoting their solutions — they’re working with the apps people already use. This approach keeps Zapier relevant and helpful, driving visibility and user engagement.
Image source: public.canva.site
Canva understands the power of community. It’s built a platform where influencers and micro-influencers can design and sell their creations, helping them turn their skills into a source of income.
It’s not just about pushing Canva products — it’s about giving people the tools to make a living doing what they love. This is an excellent example of affiliate marketing that benefits both the creators and Canva, making it a true win-win.
Image source: coda.io
Coda nailed a key aspect of a great SaaS sales strategy — showcasing product benefits. As a collaborative workspace tool designed to “supercharge your work,” Coda demonstrates its value through a well-curated template gallery.
You don’t need to make any commitments to see how it works. Just sign up for a free account, and you can start using the templates right away. Plus, you get a clear view of each template’s appearance before you dive in. This approach helps users instantly understand the product’s value, making it easy to integrate the tool into their daily tasks.
Looking ahead, several trends are set to reshape SaaS marketing.
Developing a genuinely effective SaaS marketing strategy is an ongoing process. Our 10-step framework provides a structured approach to building a strategy that drives tangible results, from lead generation to customer retention. Feel free to tweak our approach to better align with your goals and business model.
Building a successful SaaS marketing strategy takes time, effort, and a willingness to learn and improve. Don’t be discouraged if things don’t click right away. Keep experimenting, stay focused on your goals, and remember that every mistake is an opportunity to learn and grow.
Stay tuned to our blog for more insights into product development, SaaS, and GTM!
Marketing manager for TextMagic. I like figuring out how things work. Passionate about fitness and video games.
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