To help marketers optimize their marketing budget, we’ve ranked the top SaaS marketing channels based on client data gathered over the past 5 years. We then organized this data based on key criteria that we believe are most relevant:
- Cost: The average monthly (unless otherwise stated) cost of a quality campaign within a given channel. While there may be options that cost less than the given price ranges, we recommend opting for reputable partners within them.
- Time Until Results: The amount of time it takes to see an increase in qualified leads or relevant conversion behaviors. This can help in deciding which channels to pair with others by ensuring your marketing budget covers both short-and-long-term channels.
- Expected ROI: The average return on investment over 3 years. We use a 3-year average to ensure factors like seasonality and market fluctuations are accounted for.
We also added a summary to each channel to clarify their key benefits and drawbacks (where applicable).
The Best SaaS Marketing Channels for 2025
Channel | Average Monthly Cost | Time Until Results | Expected ROI | Notes |
SEO | $10,000 – $15,000 | 4-6 Months | 748% | While initial results take time, thought leadership paired with an effective campaign strategy delivers exceptional ROI and consistent long-term lead flow. |
PPC / SEM | $3,000 – $30,000 | 1 month | 36% | While ROI is notably low, PPC’s time until results is unmatched in its speed. This makes it a great pairing for higher-ROI, long-term strategies like SEO. |
Paid Social | $5,000 – $20,000 | 3-4 months | 192% | Similar to SEO vs PPC, paid social media provides lower ROI but faster results than its organic counterpart. |
Organic Social | $500 – $3,000 | 6-8 months | 229% | Organic social media is easy and cheap to implement but provides results more akin to lead nurturing channels than other marketing channels, making it a solid addition to a more comprehensive marketing plan centered around more outreach-focused channels like SEO and paid ads. |
Email Marketing | $1,000 – $3,000 | 3-6 months | 312% | Similar to organic search in its lead nurturing capability, ease of deployment, and low cost. As a result, it plays a similar role as an accessory to a marketing strategy involving more aggressive channels. |
Trade Shows | $10,000 – $250,000 per show | 7-9 months | 85% | Trade shows offer high exposure to industry professionals, making them useful primarily to B2B SaaS firms. They are expensive, and position firms right alongside their competition, though, which makes them riskier investments for firms that don’t compete as well head-to-head with their competition. |
PR | $4,000-$25,000 | 3-6 months | 62% | PR is pricey, but offers exceptional brand awareness and industry authority when paired with other marketing channels, particularly when launching a new platform or new features within an existing one. |
Public Speaking | $25,000 – $40,000 | 2-4 months | 856% | Speeches at industry events can involve costly travel and hotel bookings, but they deliver high ROI and improve industry authority—provided you have a well-known and/or talented speaker at your company. |
ABM | $25,000 – $35,000 | 4-8 months | 240% | ABM has a high resource demand, but can also offer high rewards in industries with large contracts. It is worth investing in if your SaaS platform focuses on a few, high-value prospects and you have a talented sales team.. |
Influencer Marketing | $100-6,000 per post | 2-4 months | 650% | Influencer marketing’s value is largely reliant on your access to relevant content creators. This makes it more suitable for B2C markets and B2B markets with strong online communities. |
Webinars | $15,000 – $35,000 | 2-4 months | 430% | Webinars offer an opportunity to educate your audience and connect with industry professionals. They are often attended by high-level decision-makers and can be created relatively easily by repurposing existing content, making them a great complement to other content marketing channels like SEO. |
SEO
Best For |
SaaS companies who prioritize long-term ROI and industry authority |
When executed well, SEO is the highest-ROI digital marketing channel on this list and the second-highest overall, behind only public speaking. Considering the total size of both investment and return, this makes SEO a strong choice for most SaaS firms. The SEO process also generates a library of written content that improves industry authority among both a company’s peers and its potential clients.
The main drawback to SEO is that it can take longer than most other marketing channels to see revenue increases—though this can be mitigated through campaign strategy. These results, though, do tend to last far longer than with other marketing channels. This, along with the benefits of higher ROI and unmatched industry authority, far outweighs the longer runway for results.
PPC/SEM
Best For |
SaaS companies looking for quick results and simple scalability, preferably those that are also leveraging one or two other marketing channels |
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, also called SEM or Paid Search, is similar to SEO in that it is a search-based marketing channel. The difference is that it offers more of the benefits of traditional paid advertising by allowing SaaS firms to buy ads and get near-instant results. Since firms only pay for each click an ad gets, it is also a very sustainable form of paid advertising to scale, so long as the pages the ads link to are optimized for conversion.
The drawbacks are that the results end the moment ads aren’t being paid for anymore, and they are fairly expensive, reducing ROI substantially. This makes them a great add-on marketing channel for slower but higher-return channels. The best complement to PPC is SEO, since PPC fills the short-term gap left by SEO, and the long-term reliability of SEO allows firms to easily and predictably scale back PPC investment over time.
Paid Social
Best For |
SaaS firms with more specific target markets, especially B2B SaaS firms |
Social media advertising excels at targeting the right customers– so long as you’re on the right platform. While social media sites like Facebook, X, YouTube, and Instagram offer a wide pool of ad viewers, they are better for the SaaS providers that serve B2C markets. For B2B Saas firms, LinkedIn is the highest priority for investment due to its focus on professional networking, and the information they have at their disposal that makes it possible to target users based on job title, industry, and more.
Similar to other paid ad channels, the ROI on paid social media is lower, which is balanced by its shorter time to results. Large-contract B2B SaaS firms tend to have an easier time getting higher ROI from paid social, though they also tend to have longer business cycles, which can delay this return. This is largely a result of LinkedIn’s unique value.
Organic Social
Best For |
SaaS firms looking for a high-quality lead nurturing channel to go alongside more lead generation-focused channels |
Organic social media marketing provides higher ROI than paid social, with a longer time to results, similar to the relationship between organic SEO and PPC. While it can generate leads, organic social is most useful as a lead nurturing tool and provides the most value when leveraged alongside more outreach-focused strategies like SEO and paid social.
The reason for this is that building a strong online presence with educational posts with strong calls to action is most effective when another channel drives traffic to a SaaS firm’s social media profile that houses this content. The benefit of organic social is its relatively low cost and lasting results once enough traffic has been converted into followers.
Email Marketing
Best For |
SaaS firms looking for direct-contact lead nurturing to boost lead/customer engagement. |
Email marketing is another channel more focused on lead nurturing than outreach. As a result, we recommend utilizing email marketing alongside outreach-focused channels like SEO and paid advertising that can get more leads signed up for email lists, and improve brand awareness to increase the likelihood that campaign emails are opened.
Email marketing is one of the easiest and cheapest to start, especially when combined with a modular content strategy, which improves its ROI and makes it a staple in nearly any industry. For SaaS firms specifically, emails offer a convenient channel for lead/customer education, especially for more complex software platforms.
Trade Shows
Best For |
Startup SaaS firms that are still trying to find their ideal market |
Trade shows offer a unique opportunity for SaaS firms to meet face-to-face with their clientele. This almost exclusively benefits B2B SaaS firms, as industry trade shows are typically filled with industry professionals. While this can help make connections, it also means that many competitors will likely also be attending, and potential clients will be able to more easily compare firms with one another. Trade shows can also be expensive.
As a result, trade shows are best for SaaS firms whose platforms compete well when directly compared to their competition. They also level the playing field a bit between newer firms and their larger competition. Features aren’t the only things being compared, though SaaS firms looking to attend trade shows need to ensure they have a high-quality booth and an excellent sales team that can set them apart and create unique relationships with leads.
Public Relations
Best For |
SaaS firms with complete, established platforms looking for a channel focused on building brand awareness |
PR is designed to build a positive brand reputation and get well-known news outlets and organizations to discuss a platform. This is extremely powerful, and is a key factor in the success of most mainstay brands in any industry. While good press does wonders for growing firms, PR is expensive, which can make its usefulness for SaaS platforms largely reliant on proper timing.
Since PR is low-ROI and high-cost, it is best leveraged when a SaaS firm has a more complete platform. Software is constantly developing, but if a firm knows it needs to get further down its development roadmap before its platform is truly competitive, PR should be deployed when the platform is farther down that roadmap.
Public Speaking
Best For |
SaaS firms with a reputable industry authority and talented speaker among their ranks |
Public speaking is an oft-underestimated marketing tool, but its ROI is exceptional. It is underutilized because it requires a reasonably well-known name and talented speaker in order to be effective. If your SaaS firm has someone like this, it can be a great option to increase brand awareness, industry reputation, and high-quality lead flow. It can also serve as a good recruiting tool.
If your firm has talented speakers who aren’t well-known yet, start off with some compelling paid video ads or a PR campaign with public speaking training to potentially elevate their brand and create demand for them as a public speaker.
ABM
Best For |
Large-contract B2B SaaS firms with talented salespeople |
Account-based marketing (ABM) leverages deep research and insight into particular leads to increase conversion on high-value accounts. If done correctly, it offers high ROI and creates lasting relationships with extremely high-value clients. Due to the high labor and sales talent requirements, it is best reserved for B2B SaaS firms specializing in large contracts, as that ensures that the value is high when a deal is closed.
Influencer Marketing
Best For |
B2C SaaS firms or B2B SaaS firms working in industries with strong online communities |
Influencer marketing provides high potential ROI and a fairly short turnaround time for results, with the availability of relevant influencers being the primary limiting factor. For B2C SaaS firms, this hurdle is less cumbersome, but the ROI is also not typically as high since consumers are constantly inundated with consumer-focused ads and sponsorships from their favorite content creators, and ad-avoidance behaviors are near-instinctive.
B2B firms often have a much harder time finding relevant influencers because their industries lack strong online communities. However, industries with robust online communities generally offer exceptionally high ROI since most of them center around a few key content creators. This makes a single post far more valuable than in B2C markets. Since the cost is generally pretty low, this is a channel we recommend experimenting with a bit as a marketing “side-project” to see what results are attainable within your industry.
Webinars
Best For |
B2B SaaS firms whose biggest hurdle is client education |
Webinars provide a great opportunity to offer high-level industry education and turn it into a marketing opportunity. Business owners will often attend webinars and have their teams attend them to educate them and identify trustworthy industry experts that they will look to in the future for ideas and solutions. This allows firms a long-form opportunity to create good relationships with their potential clients and position their SaaS platform as a tool that leaders in their industry should use without trying to condense its value into a quick sales pitch.
The value of webinars is maximized when they are leveraged alongside other content marketing strategies like SEO and organic social media since they aren’t a high-volume marketing tool, and SEO content can often then be repurposed for a webinar. Firms that pair webinars with these other channels often see moderately high ROI and short-to-moderate turnaround time for results.
Choosing the Best SaaS Marketing Channels
SaaS firms often need to diversify their marketing strategy in order to maximize value, which requires education on the unique value and obstacles found in each marketing channel. As a result, many companies choose to work with an expert marketing partner that can guide them toward the best distribution of their marketing funds, and serve as a provider for some of the marketing services they need.
Our firm specializes in developing and implementing comprehensive marketing campaigns for SaaS platform providers. We’ve executed successful campaigns with SaaS companies in a variety of industries, including Salesforce, Verisign, and Cadence. If you’d like to discuss a partnership, connect with us here.