In this article, we discuss how to create a SaaS marketing strategy in 2024. We’ve divided the process into six steps:
- Establish your marketing goals for your SaaS company
- Identify the right target audiences to achieve those goals
- Develop your core messaging and value proposition for each audience
- Choose the right marketing channels for your goals and audiences
- Create thought leadership content based on your core messaging, audience, and channel
- Measure KPIs and adjust your strategy accordingly
Establish Your Marketing Goals
Every marketing strategy needs defined goals before the first steps of strategy development. Most SaaS marketing goals fall into one of three categories:
- Educational. Goals that prioritize increasing industry awareness and reputation for the provider and its platform.
- Sales-Oriented. Goals that prioritize generating warm leads that are more likely to close and provide revenue for the provider.
- Market-Oriented. Goals that prioritize increasing a provider’s size, authority, and/or market share within their industry.
The specifics of these goals will depend on the industry in which you operate, but general principles remain similar across markets. The table below displays the most common examples and recommendations for how each goal can be accomplished.
SaaS Marketing Goals
| Goal | Recommendation |
| Increase brand awareness | Develop an omnichannel strategy to spread your message as far as possible, with emphasis on traditional channels like email when targeting firms that need updated tech tools most |
| Generate MQLs and SQLs | Employ targeted PPC to define your audience, and organic marketing channels such as SEO to generate low CPL leads long-term. |
| Establish industry authority | Create and distribute thought leadership content to win the trust of in-industry companies and professionals |
| Educate prospects on product usage & benefits | Produce webinars, thought leadership content, and video marketing for helpful how-to material |
| Expand into new markets | Nurture partnerships with other in-industry experts or integrations with popular platforms with adjacent functions to yours and leverage their credibility |
Once you’ve defined the goal for your SaaS marketing strategy, the next step is to clearly identify the needs and objectives of your target audience.
Identify Your Target Audience(s)
Any SaaS marketing strategy inherently relies on a thorough understanding of your target audience – you’ll need to know:
- What pain points do they face that your product can help with?
- How are their lives and/or workflows impacted by those challenges?
- Which marketing channels can they be reached on most reliably?
- What kind of tone will they respond most positively to?
Similar to determining your strategy’s goals, the nature of and approach for your target audience varies somewhat depending on the industry. We recommend developing audience personas to help answer these questions, such as the ones below:
| Example 1: Sofia | Example 2: Mike |
 |  |
| Sofia is an IT department manager at a mid-sized asset management firm. She is dealing with software support tickets almost daily due to the lack of integration and compatibility between her firm’s portfolio management software and those used by her clients, and client success reps are having trouble getting clients to make a switch. As a result, she is seeking a platform with the widest array of integrations and compatible platforms to make things easier on her team. | Mike runs a three-truck long-haul firm and has been struggling to organize client data, route planning, and invoice management. He started out using basic spreadsheets when it was just him and his truck but is now looking for his first logistics software platform to keep up with the increase in data. |
In the case of B2B SaaS companies, these questions should focus on the target audience’s position, in particular their challenges and requirements. For example:
- What is their job title?
- Who do they answer to?
- How is their performance measured?
- What obstacles do they face in the workplace?
- Are they the key decision-maker in terms of getting your product/service?
Developing a thorough audience persona requires a considerable amount of research into your target audience. Assuming you aren’t trying to break into a new market, one of the best things your team can do is closely examine your existing customers to identify existing patterns within your customer base.
Develop a Core Message and Value Proposition
Your core messaging details the unique value of your platform or product from your competitors and influences key decision-makers within your target market. Creating a core message requires answering a few key questions:
SaaS marketing teams looking at a considerably wider audience will need to consider how to adjust this messaging depending on the different segments within it. For example, a more tech-adapted demographic may place more emphasis on specific cutting-edge features than an audience that is largely working with manual data systems, who might be more concerned with the cost and ease of transition. A SaaS provider targeting both will need to consider how and when their core messaging shifts to reflect these priorities.
Since your core messaging is the backbone of your marketing strategy, it needs to be thoroughly tested before going public. This is traditionally done through focus groups, but other options include limited trial runs, pilot tests, and even early marketing campaigns that target a narrower audience (and are therefore cheaper to execute than a full campaign).
Analyze feedback data from these exercises closely and be prepared to adapt your core messaging as necessary until it meets your campaign goals. Once you feel confident in your core messaging, it’s time to bring your SaaS marketing strategy to life by selecting marketing channels and creating content.
Understand and Choose Marketing Channels
One important decision that relies on your audience persona, as described in the section above, is determining what marketing channel is best to reach them. This is not always a uniform answer; for example, a CRM platform marketing strategy is more likely to include social media marketing than one for a logistics platform, whose ideal clientele is more likely to be reached through more traditional channels like email.
The following table breaks down the most effective SaaS marketing channels, including information on ROI, customer acquisition cost (CAC), and which of the goals discussed earlier each channel is best suited for.
| Channel | CAC | ROI | Best For – Goals |
| SEO | $647 | 748% | Establish Thought Leadership |
| Build brand trust and loyalty | |||
| Generate MQLs and SQLs | |||
| PPC | $802 | 36% | Expand into new markets |
| Drive sales | |||
| Social Media | $658 | 430% | Educate users |
| Increase engagement | |||
| Webinars | $603 | 430% | Increase engagement |
| Educate users | |||
| Generate upsell opportunities | |||
| Video | $743 | 496% | Build brand trust & loyalty |
| Educate users | |||
| Traditional Advertising | $721 | 386% | Expand into new markets |
| Drive sales |
Teams developing a SaaS marketing strategy that prioritizes increasing reach (e.g., expanding into new markets, raising brand awareness) will likely need to consider a combination of two or more of these channels. It’s also important to consider support channels like email marketing to nurture existing leads towards an eventual conversion.
Create Marketing Content for Each Audience and Channel
The nature of your content is going to vary somewhat depending on the goal, target audience, and marketing channel; all good SaaS marketing content shares a few key characteristics:
- Answer Audience Intent Quickly. Your content should always begin by answering the reader’s or viewer’s questions near the top of the page to earn trust and keep readers from leaving the page. In SEO, we call this search intent, but the same principle applies across all channels.
- Skimmability. Content should be as lightweight and aesthetically broken up as possible and keep the reader’s eye moving down the page. In the case of written content such as blog articles or white papers, make use of bullet points, tables, charts, and graphs where possible and relevant, and put them near the top of the page to give readers a “road map” of the rest of the article so they can jump straight to the details they value.
- Include CTAs. Effective content leaves your audience with clear next steps. This can take the form of “hard” CTAs (e.g., “reach out to our sales team”) or “soft” CTAs (“read more about here”) at the end of the page.
How you structure your content depends also on where it falls in your marketing funnel. This refers to the process your leads must follow toward an eventual conversion. Your marketing funnel breaks down as such:
| Top-of-funnel | Lead generation content designed to attract the attention of your target audience and raise awareness. |  |
| Mid-funnel | Lead nurturing content designed to warm up leads over time and educate them on platform features. | |
| Lower funnel | Conversion-oriented content meant to give readers the final push before a close. |
As the diagram above suggests, mid-and-end-stage content is less designed to attract new leads and more about nurturing and persuading them towards an eventual sale. Members of your target audience are likely interested in evaluating whether your product does what it needs or how it compares to other products/services currently on the market. In these cases, consider making content along the following lines:
| Stage | Content Type |
| Top of Funnel | Comparison blogs |
| Ads targeting specific problems | |
| Mid-Funnel | Case studies |
| White Papers | |
| 3rd party reviews | |
| Lower Funnel | “Contact Us” web page |
| Service/Product landing page | |
| Hotline number |
Measure Your KPIs and Adjust Saas Marketing Strategy Accordingly
Developing and maintaining a successful SaaS marketing strategy requires careful observation and adaptation to ensure that your campaign is aligned with the goals and objectives outlined in the early weeks of the process. This means paying close attention to KPIs that reflect how well your campaign is doing.
The KPIs included in the table below reflect general marketing KPIs used with any goal, target audience, and marketing channel, but we should note that your choices in these areas often mean using more specific KPIs to effectively measure your performance.
| KPI | Benchmark | |
| Campaign ROI | SEO: 748% PPC: 36% Email: 201% | Trade Shows: 85% Webinars: 364% LinkedIn Ads: 94% |
| CAC | $728 | |
| LTV-to-CAC Ratio | 4:1 | |
| Annual Churn | 5-7% | |
| Lead-to-MQL Conversion Rate | 39% | |
| Visitor-to-Lead Conversion Rate | 1.9% | |
| Unique Monthly Visitors | 10% growth month-over-month | |
Implementing a SaaS Marketing Strategy
One unintended takeaway from this article is how difficult it is to develop a SaaS marketing strategy. Bringing a successful strategy to life– and keeping it alive– in the real world requires a significant amount of both effort and expertise. Assuming you have an in-house team available, it’s critical to have team members who are already familiar with this process to spot and avoid pitfalls early on.
If you don’t have a team with the right expertise, consider partnering with a SaaS marketing specialist. Outsourcing this work to an expert firm like First Page Sage provides access to a team of digital marketing specialists who not only develop your SaaS marketing strategy for you, but also implement it on your behalf. If you’d like to discuss a partnership or learn more about our services, you can reach out to our team here.
