B2B SaaS Marketing Strategy: 2024 Guide

B2B SaaS marketing is an extremely broad topic, and in this article we’ll break down the process of building a marketing strategy into 4 steps:

1. Establishing your marketing goals
2. Identifying and understanding your target audience
3. Choosing the right marketing channels and allocating your budget accordingly
4. Setting KPIs and measuring results

What we won’t cover in this article are the ins and outs of specific marketing practices or approaches to marketing. To learn more about those topics in depth, read our guides on B2B SaaS digital marketing, B2B SaaS SEO, and B2B SaaS growth marketing.

Establishing B2B SaaS Marketing Goals

Different decisions regarding each of these considerations will lead to the creation of different goals. Four of the most common marketing goals for B2B SaaS companies are:

• Establishing branding
• Increasing visibility and authority
• Generating qualified leads
• Creating opportunities for upsells and cross-sells

When deciding which goals are most important, SaaS companies should consider the following factors:

Company Lifecycle Stage	Marketing looks different for start-ups, established mid-size firms, and enterprise-level industry leaders.
Desired Turnaround Time for Results	Different marketing channels will have different turnaround times for their results, with short-term channels like paid ads having far lower ROI than longer-term strategies like SEO thought leadership.
Rapid Growth vs Profitability	After considering when you need results, you can decide whether you need growth immediately or if you can afford to take some extra time to maximize your campaign’s ROI.
Target Audience	Certain target audiences respond better to certain marketing channels, with B2C audiences responding more to social media and influencer marketing, and B2B audiences preferring thought leadership SEO and webinars.
Marketing Budget	All marketing campaigns are crafted with a set budget in mind, and we will discuss how to allocate this budget in a later section.

Each of these goals would call for a slightly different marketing strategy, with some common threads across multiple goals. We will cover exactly which marketing channels are best for each after we tackle the specifics of identifying your target audience, as your audience will impact your strategy just as much as your overall goals.

Identifying & Understanding Your Target Audience

After establishing the overall goal of your marketing program, identifying your target audience is the next step in crafting your marketing strategy. The audience you target determines which marketing channels you should use and what kind of content will be most effective, and by extension, which KPIs you will eventually use to track the success of your campaign.

For more established B2B SaaS companies, determining their target audience can be relatively simple: they can simply look to their existing customers and identify broad patterns in demographics like industry or job experience, or poll their userbase to learn what other audiences might be interested in their product. B2B startups will have a much more difficult time determining their target audience due to the novelty of their product, but they can look to their product’s value proposition and the target audiences of their major competitors to help make this determination.

Once you’ve identified your target audience, you should then create detailed customer personas describing that audience. These personas will help your team better understand the needs of that audience—in other words, how to effectively market to them.

Creating B2B SaaS Customer Personas

A customer persona is a detailed description of a representative member—usually fictional—of your target audience. Below are two examples of customer personas:

Sasha is an IT manager at a small finance firm. Her day is hectic, as her position forces her to wear many hats. Although she does not have direct purchasing power, Sarah runs all IT operations of the company, and is the only manager with any IT expertise; if she claims that something is necessary, she is likely to get it approved. She is always on the lookout for anything that makes her job easier.

Craig is the COO of an established apparel and accessories brand, and he is not an easy person to get ahold of. His schedule is constantly full, and he tends to only be accessible for calls and meetings with firms he is already aware of. That being said, he does spend time throughout his week searching for ways to improve operational efficiency to improve his firm’s profit margins and is open to hearing from industry authorities with which he is familiar.

These personas should be as detailed as possible, so long as they actively contribute to your marketing team’s understanding of how to connect with that person. Common questions your personas should answer are:

• Where do they look for new information, and by extension, on what channels are they easiest to reach?
• Are they likely to click on ads, or do they need to learn about a new piece of software or platform from other sources before reading branded content?
• Are they the decision maker, or do they need to convince another person in their company to make the purchasing decision?
• How is their performance evaluated, and how can you position your platform to help them meet their goals?

The answers to these questions will help flesh out your understanding of your audience, and help you tailor your marketing accordingly. The most important decision it impacts is determining which marketing channels you should use, and how to allocate your budget between them.

Choosing B2B SaaS Marketing Channels & Allocating Budget

When deciding between marketing channels, your team should answer two questions for each potential channel:

1. Does our target audience actively use this channel in a way that could lead to them choosing to invest in new software? Note that this requires that the audience be receptive to thinking about business decisions or their professional use case when using the channel. For example, while members of nearly every B2B SaaS company’s target audience will be present on social media such as Instagram or Facebook, they may not be receptive to learning more about B2B software when using that channel.
2. Is the channel compatible with our overall marketing goals? While a channel may be able to accomplishing multiple goals, its effectiveness for each will vary greatly. Digital PR, for example, has much less of a direct impact on lead generation than investing in SEO or spending on PPC advertising.

The answer to both of these questions must be “yes” in order to justify including a channel in your marketing strategy. For each channel that passes this initial vetting, you should also consider (a) the length of commitment that the channel requires to show results, (b) the expected ROI of that channel, and (c) the expected cost of investing in that channel. The below table provides a high-level overview of these factors for the 10 most popular B2B SaaS marketing channels:

B2B SaaS Marketing Channels, Compared

Marketing Channel	Average Length of Commitment	ROI(3-year average)	Monthly Cost	Compatible Goals
Thought Leadership SEO	2 – 3 years	748%	$7.5k-15k	Thought leadership can be used to meet a variety of goals. It helps develop a newer brand, increase industry authority, generate quality leads, and identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
Webinars	> 1 year	364%	$5k-10k	Webinars are best for firms looking to develop their brand, increase industry authority, and generate leads– though they aren’t as effective for upselling and cross-selling.
LinkedIn Organic	1.5 – 2 years	229%	$3k-8k	LinkedIn posting campaigns accomplish many of the same goals as SEO thought leadership, but on a more limited platform that lends itself to more industry-specific use cases.
Email Marketing	4+ years	201%	$1k-3k	Email marketing is great for nurturing existing leads and accounts, qualifying and educating leads, and identifying upsell and cross-selling opportunities.
LinkedIn Ads	6 – 12 months	94%	$5k-20k	LinkedIn Ads are great for generating leads in the short term, with marginal value for improvement in brand awareness and authority.
Trade Shows	> 8 months	85%	$10k-20k	Trade shows are great for improving brand awareness and industry authority, generating a limited number of highly qualified leads, and identifying upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
Outdoor Ads	~1 year	85%	$10k-40k	Outdoor advertising generates leads and improves brand awareness locally.
PR	~1.5 years	62%	$10k – 50k	PR isn’t a great lead generator, but it can help brands build and maintain a positive image and increase their industry authority.
Basic SEO	~3 months	48%	$2k – 4k	Basic SEO can help generate leads by increasing site traffic, and can improve brand awareness by improving placement on search engines, though this effect is limited by the number of keywords currently covered by your site.
SEM / PPC	3 – 6 months	46%	$3k – 30k	PPC ads are almost entirely focused on lead generation, and they provide reliable results with low financial risk.

After selecting marketing channels, you must then allocate your marketing budget between each. We provide a full breakdown of how to do so in our guide to B2B SaaS marketing budgets, but in general, we recommend prioritizing organic channels for companies who are concerned with overall ROI.

Each of these channels will have unique content needs as well, though content can be repurposed across channels to increase marketing efficiency. Content creation is a deep subject in its own right, and we discuss it in depth in our guides to B2B SaaS content strategy and thought leadership content.

Setting Marketing KPIs & Measuring Results

The final component of B2B SaaS marketing strategy is setting KPIs and measuring the results of your campaigns. The below table shares the most important B2B SaaS marketing metrics, and benchmarks for each:

Metric	Benchmark	Notes
Return on Investment (ROI)	See Per-Channel Benchmarks	Campaign ROI is arguably the most important KPI, and is represented by the percentage of your original spend is returned in revenue.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)	$728	CAC is calculated by dividing your total marketing and sales spend by your total number of new customers, and represents how much each new customer costs to acquire.
Lifetime Value-to-Customer Acquisition Cost Ratio	4:1	Lifetime Value (LTV)-to-CAC ratio is the ratio of the lifetime revenue a customer generates for your company and the cost to acquire them. In a 5:1 LTV-CAC ratio, a customer generates five times the money that it costs to acquire them.
Annual Churn	5-7%	Annual churn is the percentage of customers that you lose in a given year. A firm with 1,000 customers that loses 100 in a year has a churn rate of 10%
Lead-to-MQL Conversion Rate	39%	Lead-to-MQL conversion rate is the percentage of leads from each marketing channel that convert. It is vital to measure these separately for each marketing channel to identify your highest-converting channels.
Visitor-to-Lead Conversion Rate	1.9%	Visitor-to-Lead conversion rate is the percentage of your website visitors that convert to leads, demonstrating the conversion optimization quality fo your website.
Unique Monthly Visitors	10% growth month-over-month	Unique Monthly Visitors is the total number of unique visitors your website gets, representing your total visibility on the internet.

These metrics will not only help you improve your marketing content and budget allocation but also audit the alignment of your marketing and sales teams. Note that the effectiveness of your sales team will impact the most important KPIs such as ROI and CAC. In other words, if your sales and marketing teams aren’t operating in tandem, even the best marketing campaign in your industry won’t provide maximum value.

Implementing Your B2B SaaS Marketing Strategy in 2024

An effective B2B SaaS marketing strategy is difficult to create and execute, and as a result, many companies struggle to get their marketing strategy dialed in. Common pitfalls are a lack of familiarity with some marketing channels, and a lack of in-house resources to fully execute on a marketing strategy.

As a result, many of these firms choose to partner with an experienced agency. First Page Sage is one of the leading B2B SaaS marketing agencies in the US, and we specialize in organic lead generation through SEO and thought leadership. Contact us here if you’d like to learn more about how we can help you execute on your marketing strategy.