The Complete SaaS Growth Marketing Guide for 2024

A study by GlobeNewswire states that the demand for global cloud computing market size and share is to surpass USD 1025.7 billion by 2028 with a CAGR of 15.80. This increasing demand for cloud-based services is driving the demand for SaaS solutions. As a result, SaaS companies are doubling down on their marketing strategy to reach a wider consumer base.

However, it is not as easy. Many B2B SaaS providers encounter roadblocks such as high customer acquisition costs, low customer retention rates, inadequate SaaS lead generation, and less-than-optimal customer lifetime value (CLV). This calls for the urgency of hiring a SaaS growth marketing agency.

Stay with us as we discuss everything you need to know about SaaS growth marketing strategy! 

What is SaaS Marketing?

SaaS Marketing focuses on building awareness, promoting, and generating leads for Software as a Service product. It helps in positioning a product, bringing a product to market, and building awareness around a SasS organization. SaaS products are typically offered in cloud-based applications that customers can access on demand. It also involves customization and upgrades to meet the specific needs of a client organization.

SaaS companies are generally subscription-based, and their fees depend on how much data a customer uses or how many users a business adds to their plan. Increasing membership is one of their primary goals for subscription-based software products so they are always looking for new ways to promote and market their product. SaaS growth marketing is focused on ensuring visibility in the market to attract new customers and promote new offerings to existing customers.

The Growth Marketing Approach to SaaS Products

SaaS growth marketing depends a lot upon the strategies you use. Here is what a competent SaaS growth marketing strategy looks like-

Ideation

Ideation is the core of your marketing plan, from where all strategies stem. This is the time to decide relevant targets and KPIs, innovate communication ideas, and draw up evidence-based marketing hypotheses to test. This stage includes - 

• Research is a vital part of this stage, based on which you will be able to identify benchmarks and set up the initial targets to aim for.
• After gathering information from the research, you have to analyze and discuss compelling insights about your customer and market. This will help you to identify consumers’ problems or needs.
• The next step is to carve out the core directions to test, build the architecture for each content territory and develop a list of content marketing ideas to test.

Setup

After outlining the basic idea and plan of your goals and objectives for SaaS market growth, you can start preparing your team and discussing ways to implement the ideas. This is the time when you set up analytics systems and dashboards, bring together all relevant marketing tools, and establish interaction between all your channels.

Testing 

At this point, you have to choose a shortlist of marketing hypotheses based on your strategic research and validate them through the launching of test campaigns. Remember, the success of your SaaS growth marketing depends on your ability to make data-driven decisions.

Analysis 

After testing and validating your ideas and test campaigns, you need to conduct a detailed analysis of the work done and tested to evaluate how your strategies have worked so far and make strategies accordingly.

Scaling 

You have researched, set up, tested, and analyzed. After that, you will probably have an idea of your current standing in the market. Now, it is time to scale and find a final team to implement your marketing strategies and plan your next steps!

SaaS Growth Marketing Strategies 

No matter your company's size or age, SaaS growth strategies will always be relevant. Here are the top strategies to know about to reach more and convert more 

1. Adopting a Saas product-led growth model

The product-led SaaS growth model is a business strategy that uses the product as the main vehicle to acquire, activate, and retain customers. You would understand it well if you have used SaaS products like Slack or Dropbox. You just used the product for free first without any salesperson coming to you for a demo. You tried it yourself.

Product-led companies generally offer a free trial or freemium version of the product. They include the following elements-

• The marketing is built around the product.
• The product should be the main vehicle and compel the users to share more information about it with others.
• Personalized onboarding is the main attraction to activating and retaining customers.
• User segmentation is based according to the user journey stage.

A product-led model approach is a very effective SaaS growth strategy. It can help you avoid-

• Rising advertising costs- users will promote your product so you will save money on advertising costs.
• Long sales cycle- referrals can shorten the sales cycle.
• Low retention and customer LTV- since product-led growth focuses on the product and user experience.

2. Focus on customer acquisition

To drive your SaaS growth, you first need to have a sound customer acquisition strategy in place. This essentially means generating leads and converting them into paying customers. To put the strategy into action, you have to determine the

•  Your target market - who are you selling to?
• Create buyer personas- what are their pain points and needs?

While developing a customer acquisition campaign, you need to have a sharp laser-focused approach to generate quality leads. This is where account-based marketing (ABM), is a targeted marketing strategy focused on key accounts and specific decision-makers within those accounts.

The primary purpose of ABM is to generate qualified leads, speed up the sales cycle and create personalized campaigns that address the specific needs of each target account.

3. Enhance your sales and marketing efforts

A full-proof customer acquisition strategy depends on your sales and marketing structure to work in force. This calls for the need for a team of professionals with specialized expertise in fields including demand generation, lead nurturing, sales enablement, and product marketing to attract, convert, and close successful deals.

Additionally, you will need the right tools and technologies such as CRM software, marketing automation software, and sales intelligence software to allow your team to focus more on high-level tasks such as strategy and execution.

Here is how you can improve sales and marketing efforts-

• Identify the right mix of marketing channels and activities to generate more leads by creating a robust marketing plan.
• Equip your sales team with the resources they need (product collateral, sales crips, and training) to close more deals by investing in sales enablement.
• Measure, track, and optimize results by analyzing your metrics which could include customer acquisition cost and gross margin.

4. Develop a competitive pricing strategy

Pricing will determine how much revenue you will generate from each customer, as such it plays a vital role in SaaS growth. A price too high will repel customers, and a price too low will negatively impact your revenue. Therefore, you need to find the right balance between generating revenue and attracting customers.

One of the smartest pricing strategies in the SaaS industry is offering a free trial. This way customers can try out your product before committing to a paid subscription and it gets way more people to try your product.

Here is how you can improve your pricing strategy-

• Offer various pricing options in different tiers. It allows customers the flexibility to choose a pricing plan that suits their needs.
• Focus on developing a pricing strategy for each customer segment. Determine how you will price your SaaS solution for each type of customer and in what ways it can impact your growth.
• Create an ideal subscription model for your SaaS product to generate more revenue.

5. Invest in SEO and content marketing

SEO and SaaS content marketing can be huge pillars contributing to your success if you know how to do it. SEO can give you more visitors organically while content marketing can convert those visitors into leads and paying customers.

SaaS growth marketing into SEO and content marketing helps you deliver high-quality informative content optimized to reach your target audience. It involves elements such as keyword research, backlinking, internal linking, link building, and more to drive more traffic and engagement to your website.

This process involves producing high-quality content that is keyword-rich and informative. (The image below lists the content types buyers consider most valuable when making a software purchase decision.) Also, emphasize optimizing key pages such as your homepage and landing pages for higher conversions.

You can improve your SEO and content marketing by

• Optimize your website by making it SEO-friendly. This translates to utilizing the right keywords, having a mobile-responsive design, and enhancing the site speed.
• Develop informative and engaging content like blog posts, infographics, case studies, ebooks, videos, etc to attract your target audience.
• Partner with a SaaS growth marketing agency if you lack internal manpower resources. They will help you reach your goals way faster and more efficiently.

How to improve SEO and content marketing

Make your website SEO-friendly. This includes optimizing your website for the right keywords, having a mobile-responsive design, and improving the site speed.

Generate quality leads with content marketing. Create helpful and engaging blog posts, infographics, case studies, ebooks, videos, etc., to attract your target audience.

Promote your content. Get the word out about your content by promoting it through social media, email marketing, and other channels.

6. Explore new markets and geographies

Limiting yourself to one particular market or geographic area is the least challenging thing to do for your business. Instead, think about new ways to penetrate your SaaS business into new areas. This will help you to identify and reach out to new customer segments and boost SaaS

You will not only find a new customer base and diversify but also limit your dependence on any one market or geographic area. You can take more chances and worry less about the loss if you have multiple customer bases scattered across markets and geography.

You can try to explore new markets by

• Building a local presence by targeting new geographies or by creating pages specific to those locations. Optimize those pages for local SEO, including country specific-keywords
• Researching and learning about new markets. This will help you identify specific  SaaS markets with high potential to target for your expansion plans.
• Modifying or reinventing your SaaS solution if needed to meet the needs of your customers in newly targeted markets or geographies.
• Developing a go-to-market strategy to plan your marketing and sales efforts in the new market.

7. Utilize more videos in SaaS growth marketing

80% of video marketers say videos have directly helped them increase sales, while 8 out of 10 people have purchased software from SaaS companies or an app after watching a brand’s video. As much as it is appealing to the consumers, it is also notoriously time-consuming to put video content together. If not done correctly, all your efforts might vanish into thin air.

Youtube is a great place to put out and promote a video marketing strategy for SaaS businesses with over 2 billion logged-in active users each month. You can start by putting up ads and answering FAQs for your industry niche. Youtube is also an excellent way to go for an inbound marketing strategy as your videos stand a chance of ranking on Google.

You can improve your video content marketing in the following ways

• Try to build video content with as much keyword strategy as you would for your blog post or any other content.
• Distribute them with every opportunity to be seen. You can try to fit them into sales funnels, email journeys, and especially your PPC landing pages.
• You can use video tools like Piktochart, Veed, and VideoAsk to create, manage, and host videos.

8. Make effort to identify customer needs beyond your product

The needs of your customers go far beyond your product. After all, they are humans. So, it is always a good idea to go the extra mile and learn as much about your audience as possible. You can start by researching your current product user base. Who are those people? How did they notice you and why? Are there any trends among them?

To form a more meaningful connection with your customers, you can go beyond and ask them about their needs outside of their product, their struggles, or even their mental health. Once you have identified the needs of these people beyond your product, you can try to meet those needs while staying aligned with your mission and vision. 

For example, a business management SaaS company named Holded, whose users are SMBs started creating video documentaries about the entrepreneurial journey of the people behind these SMBs, especially in a tough year during the pandemic. After testing a few concepts, they invested much more which led to the creation of Holded TV.

9. Get hyper-personalized via targeting 

SaaS tools constantly evolve to fit the demands and requirements of the trending market landscape. To stay relevant in every day and age, it is vital to concentrate your efforts on advertising and delivering customized sales flows depending on personas and user needs.

This is how you can try to get it the correct way

• You have to be super-targeted in your approach to ensure you are reaching and delivering to your customers effectively. 
• Start building flows and content variations that speak better to the personas you are targeting.
• Keep your targeting and personalization needs from end to end.
• You can start creating awareness through PPC campaigns, onboarding flows, etc.

10. Improve retention with exceptional customer care

Keeping customers is harder than gaining them. If correctly influenced, happy customers can even become advocates and sources of referrals. But how can you do it? You can focus on training your customer care department to interact and approach customers in different ways. Implementing a live chat on a website can also be a great idea to provide a better user experience and increase retention.

According to Kayako, 41% of customers prefer live chat over any other channel and 52% of existing customers are likely to stay with the company if it offers live chat support.

Considerations When Hiring a SaaS Growth Marketing Agency 

B2B SaaS companies are multiplying their marketing efforts to help them gain more market share and drive more leads to their businesses. Hiring a SaaS growth marketing agency has proven to be the smartest and most effective method to achieve this.

However, hiring a SaaS B2B Growth marketing agency will not magically solve all your problems. You have to know how to ask questions and demand clarity on terms to know how compatible you are with each other. 

Here are some things you should consider to ensure to choose the right SaaS growth marketing agency for you-

Clarity on expectations

Most companies are dissatisfied with their agencies due to their inability to achieve unclear expectations. This mismatch occurs when you do not communicate clearly. Many companies expect the agency to take on all of the positioning, acquisition, and scaling issues and want results. But marketing is a long-term game and it takes time to see results. This takes us to the next point.

Clear communication

As already mentioned, both parties need to be on the same page and have a clear understanding of the company’s goals and objectives. Without this, it is likely for the agency to overpromise and underdeliver or for the company to be dissatisfied and frustrated with the agency’s work.

So what can you do to ensure the agency is worthy and competent to meet all your goals?

Start by asking the right questions

What is your strategy or approach to growth marketing for SaaS?

What is your process? Can you walk me through it?

What tools do you use?

How do you track results? How do you set your goals?

Can you show me some of your use cases?

Asking the right question will help you to determine if the agency really knows what they are talking about, or if they are just pretending to and planning to figure it out along the way.

Best SaaS Growth Marketing Agency 

TripleDart Digital

TripleDart Digital is a fast-growing SaaS growth marketing agency with a dedicated marketing squad to help you reach all your goals faster and more efficiently. We strategize for your revenue growth and help you optimize for cost-efficient growth. We closely work with your in-house marketing team to help you reach your goals.

Here is what we have to offer

Organic SEO

We craft SaaS SEO and content strategies to help you get more CTA clicks and drive organic traffic to increase sig-ups, activations, and MRR. We-

• Analyze to scale your SaaS SEO operation with data-backed SEO and content strategies.
• Evaluate your current competitor landscape, and keyword gap analysis and identify new keywords/themes/audiences to scale beyond existing campaigns.
• Perform asset research to come up with ad copies/creatives and LPs to get pre-qualified leads.

Paid Media

We create tailored PPC strategies for SaaS with custom messaging to boost conversions. We-

• Audit existing accounts to understand the gaps and opportunities from the current set of campaigns.
• Find newer opportunities by evaluating the current market landscape.

Saas Content

We plan, create and optimize content to help you acquire leads, build market awareness, and nurture opportunities. We-

• Build smart content strategies that help improve acquisition and rates and sales conversions.
• Educate buyers to help them understand the problem, your solution, and supporting evidence to make a purchase decision.
• Align the content produced to your ICP’s needs to drive high-intent signups and conversions.

ABM

We are a saas ABM agency who targets the right accounts at the right time, and with the right message to help your organization grow faster. We-

• Focus on building a result-driven playbook to increase conversions and the pipeline velocity of your business.
• Create a book of business and create new opportunities to help your business grow predictably.
• Implement strategic and impactful campaigns to boost your growth trajectory.

Our success depends on our client’s growth. Here is how we helped Fincent generate $150k in the pipeline with $65k spent in less than a quarter through Meta ads and Google competitor campaigns.

Fincent is a financial management SaaS platform that hired us to pilot their performance marketing efforts over paid channels. We initiated by performing a SWOT analysis backed by data from big players in the accounting realm, competitor landscape, Fincent’s ICP, and geographical stretch. Google and Meta were identified as the most promising channels for penetration after gathering all insights.

We worked on identifying the niche value prop that leveraged better conversion by experimenting with paid search and multiple campaigns. This helped us to tone down the supplement features of Fincent and tailor our messaging to position only the key offerings that were in high demand.

Every campaign in the paid social started fuelling the pipeline but the lead-to-conversion ratio was not great on some. The primary reason for this was that the copies had highly-competitive keywords. So, TripleDart pitched in with a gap analysis and then upgraded the strategy to include long-tail, low-search volume items. This attracted a predictable volume of demos while increasing the demo-to-conversion rate as well. Fincent witnessed a 5x increase in SQLs while reducing their CPC by one-third.

Here is how we did it

• Swapped highly competitive keywords with long-tail, low-search volume terms
• Tailored messaging positioned based on use cases
• Reconditioned landing pages to include key-value props and frictionless forms
• Created email and text nurturing flows with qualifying questions to reduce no-shows
• Generated contacts via native lead gen or demos at half the spend

Single Grain

Single Grain is a SaaS growth marketing agency focused on growing ROIs. Eric Siu bought Single Grain when it was a failing business and turned it into a multi-million dollar-full-service digital marketing agency. They have a team of experts that specializes in creating marketing strategies for each client. Single Grain offers marketing advice for both B2B and B2B SaaS businesses.

Single Grain highlights

• PPC  management team with a Premier Google Partner status to assure you always get the best value for your money.
• Customized SaaS marketing proposal for every client. They use a combination of the best digital marketing growth hacks and remain up-to-date with the current trends.
• A friendly support team that is proactive in offering the best assistance.
• Expertise in promoting products and services on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other leading channels.

Bay Leaf Digital

Bay Leaf Digital was founded in 2013 to help B2B SaaS businesses promote their products through advanced inbound marketing strategies. They offer services from content marketing to analytics, and from marketing automation to SEO with a team of expert marketers.

Bay Leaf Digital highlights

• Has an expert PPC marketing team who are well-versed in managing SaaS advertising campaigns on channels such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Bing.
• Bay Leaf Digital is a HubSpot Gold partner. Therefore, all the lead generation and tracking activities are monitored closely via the HubSpot marketing platform.
• They offer a B2B SaaS analytics service to help businesses improve conversions and lower the cost per head.
• Their SEO tactics are focused on scaling the growth of your SaaS product and reducing the cost per acquisition.
• They have an experienced B2B social media marketing team that identifies the top social media platforms to shape your brand personality and reputation.

SimpleTiger

SimpleTiger is a B2B marketing agency based in Washington. They coordinate tasks by integrating with your team through a shared Slack channel so that you are always updated regarding the campaign's progress. SimpleTiger offers consistent growth for your B2B SaaS platform by leveraging SEO and paid to advertise.

SimpleTiger highlights

• They use industry-leading tools like Semrush and Ahrefs to perform keyword research and have years of experience in generating traffic for websites.
• They specialize in technical optimization powered by top tools like Ahrefs to get the best SEO recommendations in real time.
• Offers competitor content analysis, keyword research, landing page content optimization, content production strategy, and existing blog optimization.
• SimpleTiger handles complete link-building processes like analyzing your competitor’s backlink profile, link prospecting, outreaching, and quality link placement to help you generate authentic and relevant backlinks.
• Their team manages and optimizes your paid ad campaigns to get more leads to your SaaS platform.

Closing Thoughts

Well, that was pretty much it.  We tried to be as extensive as possible and touched all vital areas of SaaS growth marketing. Now it is up to you to decide how to implement the strategies or ask someone to tailor-make and implement SaaS growth strategies for you. Someone like us!

Book an intro call now!