There’s no secret recipe to SaaS marketing success.
There are, however, an array of ingredients that typically go into an effective SaaS marketing strategy.
And while there are certainly more exciting ingredients, the implementation of SaaS marketing best practices is a very important one.
In this helpful guide, we run through the essential best practices we follow for every campaign build.
With these 8 pointers as ammunition, you’ll be smashing your SaaS company’s marketing goals in no time and charging yards ahead of your competition.
Why top SaaS companies follow best practices
There’s a reason why top-performing SaaS marketing teams stick to a few trusted tactics and strategies. After all, best practices are usually the result of brilliant marketers spending years finding the best way of doing things.
Savvy marketers will build on them to create something innovative, compelling and unique. However, following best practices as a starting point is always a smart move.
Ps: It’s probably important to note that when we refer to “best practices” in this article, we’re referring to ones that have been organically created by SaaS marketers like ourselves, and shared with the community.
This is as opposed to those suggested by specific platforms which can often have a dual purpose.
8+ Foolproof SaaS best practices
Now that we’ve addressed why they’re paramount to your SaaS marketing strategy, let’s leap into the actual best practices we stick by.
1. Understand your audience (intimately)
Any seasoned marketer knows that the KEY to attracting SaaS customers is understanding them. And we don’t just mean knowing what job title they’re likely to hold or what industry their company falls under, we mean understanding everything about them.
From their daily job responsibilities and place in the organisational chart to their wants, needs, dreams and pain points. Knowing your personas back to front is the only way you’ll be able to market to them successfully.
With this in mind, if you haven’t already got well-researched, accurate buyer persona documents that you can circulate with your marketing team. This is the single best way to ensure your SaaS marketing strategy is geared for success.
2. Do content marketing – well
Because the sales cycle is typically far longer than that of other industries, content should be a central part of any SaaS marketing strategy. In fact, it’s necessary in most cases to prove your value and build trust with your prospect for many months before you are able to close a sale.
We wrote an article on building a successful SaaS content marketing strategy that should give you everything you need to execute this best practice like a pro. We also have a list of KPI-smashing content marketing examples to take your understanding a step further.
Top tip – make sure you’re always thinking about funnel stages and personas before creating any content! Without this kind of forethought, your content efforts are unlikely to reap lasting rewards.
3. Use a mix of channels
Something that we recommend for all our B2B SaaS clients is to use a mix of different marketing channels across the various stages of funnel stages.
Don’t get us wrong – we’re not suggesting you simply throw money at different platforms for the sake of it. Without direction or reason.
We’re simply suggesting you diversify your approach. As we believe a holistic, multi-channel approach is critical to growth.
Here are some of the channels we use regularly in concert with one another:
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
- Facebook Ads
- LinkedIn Ads
- Youtube
- Google Ads
- Email Marketing
- Comparison Sites e.g. Capterra
- Conversion Rate Optimisation
- Tik Tok (Don’t be sceptical – we’ve seen it work!)
4. Offer a free trial (if possible)
Another best practice for B2B SaaS marketing is to offer a free trial.
In the SaaS world, players who don’t provide an opportunity for the customer to test drive their tool before committing to anything will find it very hard to compete. It’s a tried and tested staple of any successful SaaS marketing approach.
While free trials can be used at different points in the customer journey to different audiences, we find them most impactful at the bottom of the funnel. Free trials and a warm audience are a perfect match.
This is because they do a particularly good job of convincing prospects who’ve already consumed top and mid-funnel content (blogs, eBooks etc.) from your brand to transition to paying customers.
They are a friction dissolver and that’s exactly what you need!
5. Re-engage with retargeting
Having a strong retargeting component is a golden rule for a lot of SaaS marketers.
As the sales cycle can be SO long, marketing to people who have already engaged with your brand at any stage of the customer journey, is often necessary to drive long-term results.
And it’s as simple as building up buckets of people in your ad platforms (from website visits, lead gen forms, company page visits etc.) and ‘retargeting’ them with other relevant content and offers suited to the stage they’re at.
The intention being to push them further down the funnel, and ultimately, to a sale.
While retargeting is a feature across the marketing approach for most industries, the emphasis is heightened for SaaS.
Retargeting tip – Don’t just rely on one channel to do your remarketing! If you’re running a campaign through LinkedIn and sending traffic from it to an LP, you can not only retarget them through LinkedIn but also through Facebook and Google.
Omnichannel marketing and retargeting go hand in hand for optimal results.
6. Streamline the signup process
Creating a sign-up process that is as sleek and seamless as possible is a SaaS marketing best practice. After all, why spend time and energy building brand awareness and driving traffic to your website if your sign-up process isn’t optimised?
It’s far wiser to wait till you have the highest chance of conversion first and then, strike! So, before you start running ANY ads, you want to make sure you have this one down pat.
But how do you nail your sign-up process?
Ask yourself:
- Are all the steps currently in my current signup process necessary?
- Is the language used in my signup process direct and to the point?
- Is the UI clean and simple?
- Are all the questions asked of your prospects necessary?
- Is it clear exactly what prospects have to do at each step of the process?
If you can answer all of the above with ‘yes’ – that’s great. You can tick off the first step.
But now it’s time to put it to the test. If you have some impartial staff (perhaps in another department) or from a completely different company, ask them to go through the entire sign up process and jot down any thoughts they have.
Ideally, you’ll have a list of questions to help guide their note-taking. Was it clear throughout what you were doing? Did you feel at any point that the process was clunky or overly complicated? Did you feel like you were asked for too much to justify your completion?
While asking people you know to help out is great, if you have the funds and time, it is also worth investing in a more formalised user test. For example, from a platform like trymyui.com.
With a testing tool like this – simply plug in your scenario, choose some qualifiers, share some basic instructions and any particular things you want your testers to comment on. Then send it out and see what comes back.
Once you’ve got a bunch of responses, look for the commonalities between them and take away some insights that can help you improve your sign-up process. Anything you can mine from users will be super valuable!
7. Get clever with your CTAs
Another core SaaS marketing best practice is nailing your CTAs. Whether it be on a website blog post, Facebook carousel ad or in a re-engagement EDM or newsletter, you need to be the master of selecting CTAs in order to get ahold of the results you desire.
This means being very tactical and always thinking about your audience and funnel stage. Are you writing a top-of-funnel blog post on a persona pain point e.g. Employee Experience?
At the bottom of that blog post (and throughout it depending on its length), you could place a CTA to an in-depth eBook that connects this pain point to your solution in a clever way.
Then on that eBook, you could place a CTA to a case study that shows the results a client got by using your solution, and from there to a free trial offer.
By looking at every CTA you touch through the lens of persona and funnel stage, you’re able to maximise every opportunity to convert (& level up your results by 1000%).
Bonus tip – It’s also very important that your CTAs are as clear and compelling as possible. There should be no question or hesitation about what their purpose is.
8. Leverage social proof
In SaaS land, social proof is currency. As a result, you need to put a lot of emphasis on acquiring, packaging up and promoting case studies, testimonials and client videos.
Testimonials and brand logos are a staple and on the easier side of the spectrum. You can get approval for these pretty easily and integrate them into your website, emails and any landing pages you’re pointing traffic to without much effort.
On the other side, everyone knows getting a client to agree to and fill out the information required for a case study isn’t always easy. However, it will pay off 10-fold in new customers.
So get your sweet-talking boots on and get asking!
These are particularly important when it comes to the bottom of funnel stage when prospects are narrowing down their options and deciding whether to opt for your solution.
9. A/B test
Best practice #8 is an obvious one but a critical one (which is why we haven’t skipped it). You need to A/B test!
For sure you can make some informed guesses as to whether or not a certain tactic, audience set-up, content asset, ad creative or messaging will work based on experience and research. Particularly after years in the field.
But at the end of the day, any experienced marketer will tell you – you don’t know if something will work until you put it out there.
Everything depends on the specific circumstances surrounding your campaign.
For this reason, you need to make sure you’re always testing. Testing gives you the best chance to see what is resonating with your audience and having the biggest impact on your KPIs.
Even when something is performing well, continuing to test enables you to continually improve and reach for better results.
Hungry for A/B testing tips?
- Testing only 1 or 2 aspects of your campaign at once – having too many tests running at once is a shortcut to mayhem. It makes it very difficult to determine valuable insights from the data you generate, and as a result, makes it difficult to act on these insights in a meaningful way. For example, you could start by testing your ad messaging, and then move onto the visual element.
- Be clear about your goal – Before going into your test blindly, you need to make sure you have a solid reason for conducting your test before you start it. This ensures that your test is set up in the most effective way to give you the insights you want to get out of it.
- Decide on ‘significance’ – Another thing you need to decide on before you start testing is at what point your test will end (how significant the results will be before you decide on a winner). For example, you could choose significance based on time (set up a test and after 4 weeks see what is performing better) or by variance. There’s no right or wrong you just want to make sure before you start testing, how you will determine the ending.
- Be smart with your budget – While we believe A/B testing is a must-do for any KPI-pumping campaign, you need to make sure any testing you do is backed by enough budget to be meaningful. For example, if you only have $100 a day to spend on your LinkedIn activity, don’t split this between two different audiences to test them out ($50 on each). In this case, it might make more sense to do a smaller scale test e.g. between different variants of ad copy and do a larger test when you have more budget.
10. Don’t forget about reporting!
The final but not least important best practice we’ll cover is reporting.
What is success if you’re not able to view, measure or share it with your team and superiors? How are you meant to tweak and optimise your campaigns if you don’t know how they’re performing? How do you know if your SaaS company’s overall marketing spend has a positive ROI?
As a best practice for any SaaS marketing campaign you run, you need to set up dashboards that display all the key metrics you want to focus on. And they need to be displayed in a clear and easy to read format.
You want to be able to take one quick glance at a report and know what’s happening with performance.
Luckily there are so many powerful reporting platforms available in the market that make reporting a breeze. And are designed for SaaS companies. For example, Hubspot, Funnel and Google Data Studio.
Best practices on their own, aren’t enough
While all of the SaaS marketing best practices listed above are a great starting point for directing your marketing efforts, they are definitely not enough on their own.
It’s probably more helpful to look at them as the building blocks or foundation which you’ll build on with your own skills and knowledge.
It’s when you unite best practices with your own creativity, current SaaS marketing trends and your experience and knowledge about your personas that you can really cut through the noise. And generate lasting results.
Combining all of the above is the key to building a SaaS marketing strategy that hits all the spots it needs to succeed.
Need a growth partner who understands the challenges your SaaS Company faces?
You’re in luck. We’re Digital Rhinos: a full-service marketing agency that helps SaaS companies like yours reach their growth goals. We have a whole team of digital marketing experts that can help you not only exercise industry best practices but go beyond that and curate a tailor-made strategy that can:
- Get more leads
- Increase Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
- Grow your customer base
If you’re interested in learning more about us, you can learn more here, or book in a quick 15 minute discovery call. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!