How to Make a SaaS Marketing Plan – the Ultimate Guide to SaaS Marketing

When it comes to the world of advertising Software as a Service (SaaS) marketing is different from historical marketing in a number of key ways. For one, you’re not just selling a service – historically speaking, this wasn’t that unusual – you’re selling something truly intangible. For another, most SaaS products don’t offer a “buy once and you own it forever” model, but rather get revenue from recurring payments, making extant customers nearly just as important an audience as new ones are. 

In this blog post, we’ll dive into everything that makes SaaS marketing unique, especially B2B SaaS marketing, and dissect the many techniques and ways you can improve your marketing for your SaaS brand. 

Let’s get started helping you become a master of SaaS marketing!

Why Is SaaS Marketing Different from Traditional Marketing?

You may assume that marketing is marketing, and if you know how to market product or service A, you can reasonably market SaaS B. It’s true that the fundamentals of marketing will be more or less the same wherever you go – you need to entice people to buy your brand offering – but if you want to truly excel at SaaS marketing, you need to understand the nuances and complexities of marketing a B2B SaaS brand. 

Here are just some of the ways that SaaS marketing is different from traditional marketing:

• Emphasis on recurring revenue and customer retention. Rather than driving a one-time purchase, SaaS marketing revolves around recurring revenue. As a result, while there is absolutely still a drive to acquire new customers to grow your business, from a financial perspective, retaining existing customers is just as important. Long-term engagement is a key priority for SaaS businesses.

• Demos, free trials, and freemium models. If you’re a marketer selling children’s toys, or your B2B offering is selling industrial-grade parts to manufacturers, there’s really no way to demonstrate the value of what you offer without the customer actually making a purchase, which can be a significant hurdle.
  
  
  SaaS marketing is actually easier in this regard, since you can not only have your team offer a live service demo and answer questions from prospective clients, but also offer free trials or freemium models where you can let these clients test your software at very low investment before making a commitment. 

• Rapid innovation cycles. Your SaaS offering is probably not the same today as it was a year ago, if not six months ago or even less. With frequent updates, new features, and improvements, SaaS marketing has to keep up with rapid changes in the product itself.
  
  This is different from even traditional service-based B2B marketing; if you’re a law team offering legal services to businesses, your core offering will likely be the same from one year to the next. SaaS marketing must continue to iterate to keep up with how your SaaS itself changes and evolves.

• Tons of data to use. If you sell a physical product, you can probably have a decent idea of how your customers are using it through polls, focus groups, and general observation – but that’s not the same as having cold, hard data. SaaS businesses thrive on (and are swimming in) data.
  
  With access to info on user behavior, engagement metrics, and subscription trends, SaaS marketers can make data-driven decisions to optimize campaigns. Like the ability to offer freemium models or demos we mentioned earlier, this is a big boost, but not all SaaS marketing teams use it effectively.

• The importance of upselling and cross-selling. Freemium models can be great at getting your foot in a customer’s proverbial door, but unless you’re getting clients to upgrade to the paid model, you’re not actually getting revenue from a user.
  
  SaaS marketing isn’t just about acquiring new customers or retaining existing ones; it’s about getting existing customers to upgrade to higher-tier plans, too, or buying complementary products or services through cross-selling. The focus of a great SaaS marketer is on increasing customer lifetime value (CLV) through boosting ongoing engagement.
• Digital-first strategies. Nobody’s saying that you can’t advertise your SaaS through traditional models like print, radio, or TV ads… but your business is online, and if your customers are all online, your marketing likely will be, too. Strategies like SEO, content marketing, email marketing, and paid online ads dominate the world of SaaS marketing, and you should have mastery of these techniques if you want to succeed as a SaaS marketer.

So, now that we know how SaaS marketing is different from traditional marketing, what does this mean for your approach? In such a crowded market, how does your B2B SaaS marketing break through the competition to deliver meaningful results like growth and real, paying customers instead of vanity metrics like clicks or “leads”? 

Building a SaaS Marketing Plan: Plans are Worthless, but Planning is Everything

As the boxer Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan – until they get punched in the mouth.” Or, to use a slightly less full-contact saying, the Prussian military leader Helmuth von Moltke had words of advice that are often paraphrased as “no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.”

These quotes are important because they illustrate a key point about marketing – you can plan all you want, but your competitors are planning to, and all of your plans together are ultimately at the mercy of your audience. If there was a foolproof plan that could guarantee marketing success, everyone would be doing it. 

So, does that mean that there’s no point in making a battle plan for your B2B SaaS marketing campaign, since you can’t foresee every outcome? Of course not! Here’s a third saying to live by, this time by General (and President) Dwight Eisenhower: “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”

In other words, even if things don’t proceed exactly as you’ve laid out – and the point of an emergency is that it can’t necessarily be anticipated – the act of planning and putting together your strategy will give you the knowledge and resources you need to handle just about anything you’ll face.

So, here’s how you can create a properly structured B2B SaaS marketing plan.

1) Define Your Target Audience

Who are you targeting?

This question seems like a straightforward one – and to some degree, it is – but it’s actually one of the most vital questions you can ask yourself as a SaaS marketer. Answering the question, itself, is more complex than you might think, because this one question is actually two, namely:

Who Is Buying Your Product? 

An individual consumer might see an ad for something they like and impulsively click the ad and purchase, but the B2B buying process is significantly more involved and complicated, requiring quite a few individuals or committees to sign off on a purchase. 

Your job is to make your ads appeal to people at every stage of the chain, so that you can convince them – or help people lower down on the purchasing chain convince their supervisors (e.g., through “dark social”)  – that your SaaS product will, ultimately, improve productivity, save money, or both.

In order to succeed in this, you need to understand the B2B buying process, which is different for small businesses, large businesses, multinational enterprises, and everything in between. Understand the different types of arguments that will move the various stakeholders, and at which point in the sales funnel they become relevant. This way, you can prioritize your B2B SaaS marketing strategies accordingly, to tailor ads and campaigns for maximum impact.

However, to most effectively make these arguments, you need to understand…

Who Is Using Your Product?

Is your product meant to help coders? Sales teams? Project managers? All of the above, and more? 

Not every SaaS product is all-purpose; some are highly tailored and, as a result, maximally effective for a very niche use case. Others are meant for broader adoption across an entire organization.

Think about who is using your SaaS offering. What are their goals? What are their pain points? How does your software meaningfully improve their workday? 

Once you understand that, you can make the argument to the purchasing team more effectively. Sally Sales and Cody Coder might have different needs in their day-to-day work lives, for instance, but both will have their productivity – and thus, the business’ bottom line – improved by your software. 

2) Set SMART Goals

How will you know if your campaign is successful? Vibes? That’s no way to put together a SaaS marketing plan! 

SMART goals are the cornerstone of modern business initiatives, because they are a way to conclusively determine if your strategies are having the desired results. Your goals should be:

• Specific – e.g., “we want to grow sales by 25%.”

• Measurable – i.e., it should be something you can track, not something nebulous. “We want to increase our popularity” is not measurable; “we want to increase engagement on our social media profile” is. 

• Achievable – you aren’t dethroning AWS as the top B2B web services provider in your first year on the market. Your goals can be ambitious, but they should be realistic. 

• Relevant – the goal must be reasonably impacted by the marketing initiative; “we want to reduce IT ticket time by 20%” is a great goal for improving UX and retaining clients, but your social media marketing campaign has nothing to do with it.
• Time-bound – to put it in another way, at some point you need to end the initiative and see how you did. “We want to grow sales by 25%” means very different things if the time-frame is 2 years or if it’s 20 years. 

A corollary part of the SaaS marketing strategy at this stage is to decide which metrics you’ll track. There are countless pieces of information and data you can get from your marketing efforts, and not all of them will be highly relevant – and trying to track and pay attention to all of them will wind up drowning you in data. So, you need to decide which metrics you’ll be following.

For SaaS marketing, especially B2B SaaS marketing, we recommend some or all of the following:

• CLV (Customer Lifetime Value)
• CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
• RMR (Recurring Monthly Revenue per acquisition)
• Churn rate
• Conversion rates

3) Identify Your Unique Value Proposition (UVP)

What sets you apart from your competitors? 

Why should my business spend my dollars with you, and not with your rivals? 

You need to have a good, concise answer to that question. There needs to be a reason that people hire you, and not your competitors, to serve their needs. 

Sometimes, that can be as simple as “we do it better.” Sure, you could work with Company X, but our software is easier to use, or we provide white-glove custom solutions, or we cost 10% less for equal boosts to productivity, for example. 

But before you even start explaining why you’re better than Company X, why does a business need to hire either one of you at all? What does your offering do to their bottom line?

Think about your elevator pitch – keep it short and sweet. For instance, “We help construction businesses reduce waste and shrinkage through better tool-tracking solutions,” or “we offer a better way for project managers to keep track of progress and identify bottlenecks,” or “we help manage remote and hybrid workforces while reducing cybersecurity risks.”

At the end of the day, you need to answer the question: “Why should I hire you?” And you need to do so quickly, clearly, and concisely.

4) Choose the Right Channels

How are you going to reach your customers? As we mentioned way back in the start of this blog, SaaS marketing benefits by being nearly completely online. But which channels are you going to use for your campaigns?

Different channels have different but connected purposes, after all. So, depending on your SMART goals above, you might choose one channel vs. another in your SaaS marketing plan.

SaaS Content Marketing

Content marketing is the backbone of B2B SaaS marketing. It serves to educate potential customers, establish authority in your field, and guide prospects through the buyers’ journey. By using SEO-friendly content, you can target prospective customers through all parts of the sales funnel.

• Awareness – blogs, white papers, and videos help prospects identify their pain points and understand your UVP, which is to say, how you can solve their problems.

• Consideration – case studies, ebooks, and product comparison guides can help prospects evaluate their options and can make the case that your business is superior to Company X.
• Decision – demos, testimonials, and product-focused guides can address objections or hesitation points prospects might have, making the case that they should, at the very least, sign up for a demo. 

Content marketing can have serious SEO benefits (more on that in a second), but more importantly, it builds trust and answers questions that prospective clients might have.

SaaS Email Marketing

While not necessarily great when it comes to growing your customer base, SaaS marketing is just as much about upselling and reducing churn as it is about acquiring new customers – and regularly touching base with those customers via email, letting them know about new features or other promotions or new releases, is a great way to do this.

Regularly send newsletters, announce feature rollouts and other service upgrades, and offer personalized recommendations to keep current customers engaged. Alternatively, promote higher-tier plans, add-ons, or complementary products to up- and cross-sell. 

This isn’t to say that there’s no role that SaaS email marketing plays in acquiring new clients for your business. You just need to get their email first! (For instance, gated downloadable content like an ebook, as we mentioned above). 

Here, you can execute lead nurturing drip campaigns to educate prospects about your product, share success stories, and guide them through the sales funnel to make a purchase. You can also improve onboarding with tutorials, welcome emails and more, so that the transition is easier and your new customers have great UX from the beginning.

SaaS Social Media Marketing 

Social media platforms like LinkedIn and YouTube play a critical role in building relationships, expanding your reach, amplifying your brand, and engaging directly with your audience.

Social media is often seen as just a tool for B2C brands to play around with, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. B2B SaaS brands can benefit from social media presence and ad campaigns in a number of ways:

• Brand awareness – sharing educational content or thought leadership articles, and promoting product and feature upgrades to stay visible and relevant.

• Increased engagement – interacting with followers, answering their questions, and participating in relevant conversations is a great way for your social media manager to deliver excellent customer service of a different kind. 
• Lead generation and paid ads – people are on social media actively, so it’s a great opportunity to get some eyeballs on your brand. Run targeted ads or promote gated content like webinars and white papers (which you can then use to get contact info for SaaS email marketing). 

SaaS SEO Marketing 

The best content in the world won’t help you if people don’t read it. Search engine optimization (SEO) is vital when it comes to generating free organic traffic and ensuring that your SaaS company appears when people search for solutions like yours. 

Research keywords that people search for at every stage of the sales funnel, optimizing your content for terms relevant to your audience, like “Best CRM for small businesses” – or, for that matter, “B2B SaaS Marketing guide.” (See what we did here?) 

You should write content using these keywords, but you should also make sure the rest of your site is optimized for the most relevant traffic – check your product and services pages, your landing pages, and any other pages that you want to be getting organic traffic and make sure they’re following SEO best practices.

Don’t forget technical SEO tips, like ensuring your site loads quickly and is friendly to all devices, especially mobile ones. 

Good SEO ensures that more potential customers will discover your SaaS offering without you needing to spend a dime on paid advertising. And, speaking of which…

SaaS PPC (Paid) Advertising 

Paid ads, also called PPC (pay-per-click) ads, take many forms – social media ads, search ads, and display ads on various sites, to name a few. These provide immediate visibility for brands that haven’t had the time to build up their organic web presence through thoughtful content and meticulous backlink building. 

SaaS PPC ads are a great way to get some highly effective lead generation for a B2B SaaS brand – with precise targeting of potential customers, you can promote gated content or offer free trials and demos on vast ad networks like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, LinkedIn, Facebook, or other platforms.

Display ads and retargeting campaigns keep your SaaS product in front of prospects around the clock. You can also engage in SaaS account-based marketing (ABM), where you run highly personalized ad campaigns targeting decision-makers in specific companies; however, we recommend working with some professionals on this, since it can be highly technical.

The bottom line is this: Paid ads for SaaS generate quick visibility, help you attract targeted leads, and supplement organic strategies for more immediate results.

So, Which Is the Right Channel?

Each of these has its own place. Realistically, they all work to complement each other.

• SEO and paid ads drive traffic to your website, where visitors can find highly optimized, thought-provoking content that engages.
• Social media and email marketing engage and nurture leads, providing ongoing value and building more trust.
• Email campaigns, content, and retargeting/remarketing ads all collectively guide prospects to convert and take action, like signing up for a demo.
• Email marketing, social media engagement, and continued creation of thought-provoking content ensure that customers remain engaged and loyal.

The Next Steps on Your SaaS Marketing Journey

Now that we’ve shown you had to make a SaaS marketing plan… what’s next? Hopefully, you feel like we’ve armed you with just some of the tools you need to start marketing your SaaS brand today.

But if you’re not sure, or you’re not yet confident you’ll execute these SaaS marketing strategies well, why not call the experts? SevenAtoms has proven success helping SaaS brands like yours find, acquire, and keep customers. 

Give us a call today.