The Ultimate SaaS Marketing Resource
1st July 2019
Marketing a SaaS business is exciting, hard, creative, analytical, rewarding and more!
SaaS is one of the fastest growing sectors in the world, coupled with digital disrupting the marketing industry over the last 10 – 20 years keeping up to date with what’s going on can be never ending. Strategies and tactics constantly evolve, new marketing software enters the market every day and there are global legal regulations to keep up with.
SaaS marketers need to build funnels, get traffic, optimise onboarding and then keep their customers happy, with the majority of SaaS businesses operating on a monthly contract that can be terminated at any time.
Competitors raise millions, there are hundreds of growth hacking ideas to try and your numbers are transparent – constantly measured – monthly, weekly, daily, even hourly.
Welcome to the world of SaaS marketing!
Xander Marketing is a marketing agency that has been marketing SaaS businesses since 2009. We specialise in growing B2B SaaS businesses – through getting more customers, leads, traffic and raising awareness. We’ve learnt a lot since 2009 and written a lot about it. Here is an organised collection of resources on SaaS marketing.
SaaS marketing in 2020
7 Smart Ideas to Market your SaaS business in 2020
Download this free white paper to get the latest insights on the ideas, secrets and key things to focus on when marketing your SaaS in 2020.
Marketing strategy
What should go in your SaaS Marketing Strategy?
A great starting point – this article asks the strategic questions you need to consider when creating your marketing strategy and provides a masterplan for pulling it together.
Formulating your marketing strategy to meet your business objectives
There are many elements that combine to form a SaaS marketing strategy and there are many ways to shape your strategy. So, how do you get your mix of marketing activities right? Explore the different marketing strategies to guide your marketing and see how they overlap with your business objectives.
What are investors looking for in your SaaS marketing strategy?
Do you need to raise funding? Inevitably any investor worth their salt is going to take a keen interest in the chief tool for organising the marketing effort – the marketing strategy document. Read this article to understand the key marketing elements investors are interested in.
How to do a competitor analysis for your SaaS business
With the SaaS landscape now more competitive than at any time, there has never been a greater need for your software business to standout. Read on to find out how to do your own SaaS competitor analysis.
Should Product Led Growth (PLG) be part of your marketing strategy?
Product Led Growth (PLG) is a buzzword in the SaaS industry at the moment. However, it is more than that – it is a solid growth strategy that has built some of the biggest and well known SaaS businesses in the world like Slack and Dropbox. Read this article to understand what PLG is and is it suitable for your product.
What benchmarks should you be aiming for in your SaaS marketing?
Are your marketing metrics inline with SaaS industry averages? Are you starting out and want some numbers to hit? Discover key benchmarks from industry leading sources for your main marketing channels
What should your SaaS marketing budget be?
What should your budget be for your SaaS product? It’s an easy question to ask, but a hard one to answer.
Our article rounds up thought leaders’ opinions and data from around the world of SaaS to answer this complex question.
How to work out ROI from marketing SaaS
So how do you work out the ROI? Many SaaS businesses ask this, believing marketing is a dark art or just ‘fluffy, brand building’. For most SaaS businesses measuring the ROI is easy – read this article to find out how.
So what do all those SaaS acronyms mean?
In the world of SaaS marketing we’re often inundated with acronyms, heck, even the industry (SaaS) is an acronym.
SaaS Marketing Strategy template
Ready to write your own marketing strategy? Download our comprehensive template to set you on the path to success.
Pricing
How to price your SaaS and what should go on your SaaS Pricing Page?
The pricing page, a common feature of SaaS websites can have a huge influence on leads, conversions and ultimately new customer sign ups. Here we take a deeper look and analyse how you can improve your pricing strategy and the way it is presented.
Marketing at different stages of growth
Where should you start with marketing your SaaS product?
Congratulations! You had your eureka moment and have successfully managed to follow through and grow the seed into a SaaS product. For every SaaS product that is actually created, there must be dozens of ideas that fall by the wayside; it’s not easy, so well done. Now comes the really hard bit! Marketing… So, where do you start?
What marketing should you do as your SaaS grows?
What marketing should you do to find product/market fit, search for a repeatable and scalable business model and then scale your business.
Brand
How to position and brand your SaaS product
In this article we talk through 8 of the steps required to brand and position your SaaS product.
Escape from the shoal – establish a strong SaaS brand and own your category
Unique ideas around functionality only last so long in SaaS. Your competitors update their products, ‘stealing’ your killer feature. Inevitably, you end up swimming along together in a shoal and it’s hard to stand out. So how do you stand out?
An influencer marketing strategy for SaaS businesses
What do we mean by influencer marketing and how you can apply this practise to your SaaS product? Here we outline the 5 steps to identifying influencers for your SaaS business, the key characteristics of influencers and how you go about getting them onboard!
Website
This Website Design Brief Template asks the right questions to ensure your website covers all areas and provides a template for you to write your own website design brief.
How to double your SaaS product’s customers without increasing advertising spend
It’s a common convention in marketing SaaS products that, if you want to double your customers, you double advertising spend. However, what if we could tell you that you could keep your advertising spend exactly the same, and still get double the customers?
7 elements to split test on your SaaS website
Split-testing your SaaS website is a great way to increase conversion rates; small incremental improvements can add up over time. What would doubling or trebling your conversion rate do for your SaaS business? Here are 7 things you can split test on your SaaS website.
9 Quick Ways to Increase Your Website Conversion Rate
Are you suffering from a low conversion rate? Never fear, here are 9 quick tips you can implement with ease to banish a high bounce rate.
Content marketing
Many of the most successful SaaS businesses use content marketing. Read this in depth guide to see how content marketing enables SaaS businesses to differentiate, lead and succeed.
Email marketing
Lead generation email marketing best practice guide for B2B SaaS businesses
This in depth guide focuses on winning strategies, experience and the best practice ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ of SaaS B2B lead generation email marketing.
3 important tactical practices for testing email marketing for inbound SaaS lead generation
Here are three of the most important email marketing testing tactics for maximising engagement and inbound lead-generation.
PPC
How should you set up your SaaS PPC campaigns for success?
Pay Per Click for your SaaS business is more than just setting up a simple Google Ads campaign and letting it run. Firstly, there are a lot more networks than Google Ads and secondly, most people won’t convert on their first visit to a site. So how do we approach PPC campaigns for our SaaS clients?
Why you should be using retargeting for your SaaS business
Visitors to your website who are retargeted with display ads are 70% more likely to convert or make an enquiry. Read more here.
Brand building
How can SaaS businesses use Quora for their marketing?
Quora gets hundreds of millions of monthly visitors worldwide and is increasing its advertising options so it’s important to see what Quora is all about and see how it can benefit your SaaS business.
How to research, source and pitch to the right media outlets for your SaaS business
Read our tips for creating a targeted strategy to approach the most relevant media outlets, and knowing what to do once you’ve found them, you’ll be able to make sure your business is being talked about for all the right reasons.
Account Based Marketing
How can Account Based Marketing help SaaS businesses generate more leads?
It’s very easy to spend large chunks of marketing budget on broad brush campaigns, which seem to generate brand awareness, but ultimately don’t convert into pipeline. To increase the ROI on campaigns, many SaaS businesses are turning to Account Based Marketing (ABM) as a more effective way to generate leads.
Growth hacking
9 Growth Hacking Ideas for your SaaS Business
Growth hacking is about investing in more creative ways to get your business talked about. Those who have tried it swear by it and, particularly for technology and SaaS companies, it is becoming an essential part of the overall marketing strategy.
We’ve compiled nine great ways you can utilise growth hacking to grow your user base.
SaaS directories
Need a directory to list your SaaS business in? Here’s a few to start with…
How to write a Capterra review that gets people clicking
Directories like Capterra are essential to lead generation for many SaaS businesses. But, with thousands of businesses present on such sites, how can your SaaS business stand out and get those all-important clicks?
Partnerships
How to grow your SaaS business with partnerships
This article explores who your SaaS business could partner with, the types of partnerships to consider, how to engage with partners and how to adapt your marketing strategy to partners.
Onboarding
Getting Customers Onboard: 6 Stages to Ensure Your SaaS Free Trial Converts
A comprehensive guide to what you need to do to get more free trial users into paid customers. From the right strategy, communication and ultimately conversions.
Great, someone’s booked a demo for our SaaS product
Ping! Another lead comes in. Someone wants a demo of your product. Job done! Or is it?
As you know a demo is only the start of the sales process. Your first challenge is to actually get the demo booked and in the diary, then you have to ensure someone turns up, and only then can you start selling and think about a solution and ‘close’.
Software
Are you ready for marketing automation?
If you’re looking at how to market your SaaS product more effectively, it’s likely you will have considered investing in a marketing automation software platform. Done right, these tools are a great way to propel your marketing strategy forward, and attract new prospects. However, if you choose the wrong solution, or implement it at the wrong time (or in the wrong way), it can have the opposite effect.
How is AI going to change your SaaS product’s marketing stack in 2020?
There have been all sorts of wild claims about how AI is going to change our lives within relatively short timescales. There is a very sci-fi derived pop-culture image of robots replacing humans. See what marketing AI is coming in 2020.
3 tools that SaaS businesses can use to personalise their marketing and outreach
In recent years new easy to use tools have come to the market to help with personalisation. This article looks at 3 of these you can get started with today.
Churn
Don’t let churn undermine efforts to scale your SaaS business
One thing that it’s easy to overlook and that really undermines any attempt to grow the customer base is churn. In the rush to create growth, it’s easy to take existing customers for granted and to start losing them. See why marketing is more than just generating leads and getting customers onboard.
How to measure and reduce churn rates
In this post discover some of the ways in which to pinpoint exactly what your churn rate is, and how to reduce the footfall that’s walking in the wrong direction.
SaaS Marketing team
Who do you need in your SaaS marketing team?
Here we look at the job roles and skills required to put together a marketing team for a SaaS business.
When does a SaaS venture need a CMO/Marketing Director?
What resource should a SaaS business use to execute its marketing? And when is a dedicated CMO required?
How much does an in-house marketing team cost?
If you decide to take your marketing in-house, and realise no one person (however great they are) can do everything how much will it cost?
A full team of marketers with specialist skills in all the required areas might equate to 10 people. Even if you had the budget for one marketer, you might find it difficult to find someone with a complete range of skills. So how do you have a team of 10 for the budget of one?
Outsourcing your SaaS marketing
Should You Outsource Your SaaS Marketing?
We cannot get away from it. You need to market; you have to market. You must market. However, it can be a puzzle trying to work out how best to promote your SaaS business. Download our free guide to weigh up the options.
How to select the right marketing agency for your SaaS business
For many SaaS businesses, marketing services are pivotal to plans for growth and continuing success. Here is a process that helps to select a marketing agency that is a good match for your business.
How to work with an outsourced marketing agency
So you’ve decided to outsource your marketing, chosen a partner and are excited to work together. What should you be doing as a client to get the most from this partnership?
Should you work with an agency that’s not local?
This blog explores the businesses that remote working works best for (and ones that don’t), how to have a productive remote working relationship and the tools we use to work remotely.
SaaS Marketing from Xander Marketing
Xander Marketing works in partnership with SaaS businesses around the world to support growth through new customer acquisition, increasing leads, generating more website traffic and raising industry awareness. If you lack the time, resource or know how to undertake marketing then get in touch and book your free 30 minute consultation.
