12 Best SaaS Marketing Strategies for Business Growth

You’re undoubtedly looking for ways to drive more customers for your SaaS business. 

With that in mind, here’s our list of the top tactics to consider when putting together your SaaS marketing strategy.

1. Offer a Free Trial

Offering a free trial lets users try out your software before they commit to a paid subscription, which can reduce customer acquisition costs and increase conversion rates.

Trials usually last between seven and 30 days and provide users with access to many of the software’s features. Which allows those users to test out the software extensively to see if it’s the right fit for their needs.

It’s a suitable option for intuitive, easy-to-use software that users can get started with on their own fairly quickly. But it’s not the best fit for more complex solutions that require customization.

If your software is a good candidate for a free trial, use these tips to make the offer as appealing as possible:

• Determine the right trial length: The best length for your trial period will depend on your product’s complexity, price, and how often the average user will need to use it in their day-to-day work. While 14 days is fairly standard for SaaS products, you might benefit from reducing or extending that period. 
• Include access to as many features as possible: Don’t limit access to specific features too much during the trial period. Let users try out all your software’s capabilities if possible, so they can be sure it’s the right fit for them.
• Emphasize your trial’s risk-free nature: Don’t force users to enter payment information to sign up for the trial. And make it absolutely clear to users that signing up for a trial comes with no strings attached. 
• Use a compelling call to action: Instead of “Sign up,” experiment with something a bit more compelling. Such as “Try it for free.” Here’s a good example from Trello:

2. Create a Product Demo

A product demo allows you to showcase your software’s capabilities while telling a story that addresses your target users’ needs to help them see how your software can improve their workflows.

This can ultimately help you convert more visitors into users.

Here’s how to create an effective product demo:

• Research your target audience: Gain an in-depth understanding of your target audience by performing customer interviews, running market research surveys, and organizing focus groups 
• Keep context in mind: Center your product demo on common use cases that would be relevant to your target users. And explain how using your product can help users solve pain points they have.
• Show—don’t tell: Make sure to guide users through any action or feature you mention in your product demo. Don’t expect them to automatically know or understand what you’re talking about.
• Address objections: Talk to your sales team to understand the most common objections prospects have about your product. And try to address these objections throughout the demo.

You’ll also need to decide whether to gate your demo (i.e., ask users for contact information before they can view it).

Gating your product demo can help you identify high-intent leads and allow you to route them to your sales team. But it can also result in a large percentage of your website visitors skipping it because they didn’t feel comfortable sharing their contact information.

You might even experiment with both options to determine which one delivers the best results for your product.

3. Make It Effortless to Sign Up

Simplifying the sign-up process for your software helps to remove any frustrations and can convert more of your site visitors into users. 

One of the best ways to do this is to only require an email address to set up an account (something a developer can help you with). Because few people find it frustrating to fill out a single field.

You can then automatically generate a password for them and collect other information (such as their name and company name) later.

If you need more than just an email address to set up a free trial, consider using progressive profiling. Which allows you to gain more information via a series of steps (first is entering an email address, second is entering first and last name, etc.) to avoid overwhelming visitors. 

Some other tips for making registration as easy as possible include (it’s also a good idea to consult with a developer regarding these options):

• Allowing users to sign up without payment information: Many users worry about entering this information because they fear they’ll get charged accidentally or that their information might be compromised
• Use microcopy: Incorporating short text snippets that explain the steps (e.g., password requirements) makes it easy for users to complete the process
• Implement third-party login options: If it makes sense for your product, allowing users to login via Facebook, Google, or another platform makes it that much easier to get started

4. Refine Your Buyer Personas

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your target customer that informs the messaging you use, the platforms you focus on, and many other details that go into your overall marketing strategy. 

And a persona usually includes these types of information:

• Demographics: Age, gender, and location
• Socioeconomics: Education, employment status, and income level
• Pain points: The issues your target customers are dealing with on a regular basis
• Behavior: What your prospects’ day-to-day lives look like, how they buy SaaS products, and more
• Interests: Any personal interests or hobbies your target customers might have

You can use Semrush’s One2Target tool to learn more about your target audience. 

Here’s how:

Start by entering up to five of your top competitors’ domains. Then, click “Analyze.”

The tool will perform an analysis and present you with a detailed report on your target audience.

In the “Demographics” tab, you can see your audience’s age and gender breakdown.

Scroll down to the “Distribution by Country” section to see the geographical breakdown.

Then go to the “Socioeconomics” tab to see information on household size, income level, education level, and employment status.

And go to the “Behavior” tab to gain information on your target audience’s interests and social media use.

You can then use all of this information to build a buyer persona with the Semrush Persona tool.

Just, fill out all the sections in the template with data you’ve gathered from your research.

5. Map Out the Customer Journey

The customer journey includes the stages a user goes through before and after becoming a customer, and it allows you to see your product and what goes into learning about it from a customer’s perspective.

It can also help you determine the right messaging and marketing tactics to use depending on which stage of the journey a customer is at. And allow you to create a better customer experience overall.

To create a customer journey map, you’ll want to start by breaking down the customer journey into stages. For a lot of SaaS companies, the customer journey will roughly look like this:

• Awareness: A person becomes aware of a challenge or pain point (e.g., managing online reviews for their business is time-consuming)
• Consideration: They research and compare different solutions to their problem (e.g., by looking at roundups and comparisons of review management software options)
• Decision: They decide on a specific solution and sign up to become a user

For each stage, you’ll need to identify touchpoints—any instances where a potential or existing customer interacts with your brand (e.g., by reading a social media post or seeing an ad). And list the associated actions, pain points, and emotions that were present.

Once you do that, you’ll end up with a map that looks like this:

6. Embrace Content Marketing

Content marketing involves producing and distributing a variety of content types to attract, engage, and retain your target audience.

Content marketing that emphasizes search engine optimization (SEO) has been popular in SaaS for years now—and with good reason. It’s what propelled the success of companies like HubSpot and made them one of the most well-known brands in the SaaS space.

If you’ve ever done a Google search on any marketing- or sales-related topic, you’ve probably seen HubSpot’s content. And it’s no wonder—the company’s website ranks for more than 1.7 million keywords, in large part due to their blog.

Here’s how you can get started with content marketing:

Create a Content Strategy

Successful content marketing starts with creating a content strategy that outlines how you’re going to create and distribute content and use it to drive new business.

It should include information on your goals, target audience, messaging, content formats and topics, and content distribution channels. And define the approach you’ll take.

You’ve already researched your target audience, so now is a good time to focus on competitive analysis and keyword research.

Analyze Your Competitors

Doing a competitive analysis helps you understand what kinds of content your target audience is consuming, which means it’s the type of content you need to create.

Use Semrush’s Organic Research tool to get an in-depth look into any competitor’s content. 

Here’s how:

Start by typing in a competitor’s domain. Then, select a target market and click “Search.”

The tool will then generate a detailed report on that competitor’s organic search performance. 

You’ll be able to see how many keywords they’re ranking for and how much traffic they’re generating from organic search.

From here, you can navigate to the “Positions” tab to see a list of all the keywords their domain is ranking for.

Finally, visit the “Pages” tab to see a list of the competitor’s most popular pages. Along with information about how much traffic each page is generating and how many keywords they’re ranking for.

Perform Keyword Research

To create SEO content, you’ll need to perform keyword research to understand which keywords (terms your audience enters into search engines) you should target to get the best chance of attracting unpaid search engine traffic.

Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool can help you uncover potentially thousands of relevant keywords for your website.

Start by entering a seed keyword—a word or phrase that’s closely related to what your software does. Then, enter your domain, select a target market, and click “Search.”

The tool will then generate a list of relevant keyword ideas.

For each term, you can see the search volume (the average number of monthly searches the term gets), intent type (the motivation behind the search), and the Personal Keyword Difficulty score (a metric that indicates how difficult it would be for your specific domain to rank for that term).

Use the “Personal KD%” drop-down to filter the list to only show keywords with a low Keyword Difficulty (50% or less) to focus the list on terms you have the best chances of ranking for.

Start Creating and Distributing Content

Use the data from your competitive analysis and keyword research as well as your strategy document to make a calendar you can use to start creating and distributing content that’s likely to drive results.

Here, you’ll need to decide whether you’re going to outsource content production (to freelancers or an agency) or keep it in-house.

Whichever option you choose, you should make sure to create detailed editorial guidelines that will enable both in-house and external collaborators to create high-quality content for your brand consistently.

And decide on how you’re going to distribute your content (e.g., via the company blog, your email list, social media channels, etc.) Revisit the social media preferences you found using One2Target for some initial ideas.

7. Use SEO to Drive Long-Term Results

SEO is the process of improving a website’s visibility in search engine results to drive more visitors and ultimately convert them into customers.

And while it doesn’t typically provide immediate results, it can be incredibly beneficial in the long run. Especially considering B2B SaaS companies see an average ROI of 702% from SEO.

And there are a few main types of SEO to focus on:

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is primarily centered around optimizing your site in ways that make it easier for search engines to crawl (discover) and index (store in a database) your website’s pages.

Why do this?

Because if your website has a lot of technical issues, it’s unlikely that it’s going to rank high in search engine results.

You can use Semrush’s Site Audit tool to uncover and fix these issues. 

Here’s how:

Start by entering your domain and clicking “Start Audit.”

Follow the prompts to configure your audit.

Once the tool finishes analyzing your website, it will present you with a detailed report. 

From here, visit the “Issues” tab to see a list of all the uncovered issues.

And use the “Category” drop-down to filter for issues related to crawlability, indexability, and site performance.

For each issue, click on the blue linked number to see a list of all pages affected by that issue. And click the “Why and how to fix it” to learn more about the issue.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO involves optimizing webpages to increase their chances of ranking high in search engine results.

When performing on-page SEO, you should pay attention to the following page elements:

• Title tag: This HTML element tells browsers and search engines what the title of a webpage is. It should be short (less than 70 characters), descriptive, and include your target keyword.
• Meta description: This HTML summary describes the webpage and may appear under the title in Google’s search results. Try to make it enticing to searchers by including a call to action.
• URL: SEO-friendly page URLs help both search engines and users understand what a page is about at a glance. Ideally, use your target keyword in the URL slug (the last part of the URL that identifies the page).
• Links: They can be internal (pointing to other pages on your site) or external (pointing to pages on other websites). When it comes to internal links, prioritize linking to the most important pages on your site. As for external links, try to only link to authoritative websites.
• Images: Reducing the sizes of your images will help them load faster to improve your page speed (which is a known ranking factor). You can use tools like Kraken or Optimizilla to reduce image size without impacting quality. Or opt for a more web-friendly image format like WebP.

Off-Page SEO

For a SaaS website, off-page SEO will mostly revolve around link building—the process of getting other websites to link to your site.

The goal here is to help search engines understand that your website is relevant and authoritative when it comes to your industry and target topics.

How do you go about building links to your website? 

A good approach is tolook for websites that link to broken pages on your competitors’ sites. And reaching out to provide them with an alternative link (from your website) that they can link to.

Here’s how to do it with Semrush’s Backlink Analytics tool:

Type in a competitor’s domain and click the “Analyze” button.

Go to the “Indexed Pages” tab and check the checkbox next to “Broken Pages.”

This will filter the list to only show broken pages on your competitor’s website. Look through the list to find a broken page with a decent number of backlinks (links on other sites pointing to it).

Click on the number in the “Backlinks” column to go to a list of all the links pointing to that page.

Next, use the “Active” and “Follow” filters to only see pages that contain live links that are intended to pass link authority.

You can then contact those domains to request that they replace the broken link with one that directs to your website.

8. Create a Referral Program

A referral program relies on rewarding existing customers for bringing new customers to your business and can lower your acquisition cost given prospects tend to trust word-of-mouth recommendations more than they do your own marketing materials.

Usually, users get a unique referral code or link that they can share with others. And once someone else signs up using that user’s code or link, the existing user gets some sort of reward.

You can use tools like Cello and Rewardful to set up a referral program for your SaaS product quickly.

Make sure to follow these tips to make your referral program as effective as possible:

• Decide on a reward structure: Decide between a single- and dual-incentive referral program. A single-incentive referral program only rewards the referrer. But a dual-incentive one rewards both parties.
• Make it easy: For best results, make it easy for customers to sign up for your referral program and share referral links in multiple ways (e.g., via email and social media). And include message templates they can send along with their links. 
• Choose the right incentive: Consider your customers when deciding on an incentive (e.g., discounts, cashback, or gift cards). For example, Dropbox offers extra storage.

Creating a community centered on your software can help you reach more target customers, allow you to build a relationship with them over time, and ultimately sell your product to them.

This is known as community-led growth, which involves creating a place where prospects can have discussions about your software and the larger industry. And it’s been used by companies like Lemlist and Notion to great success.

This is just a sampling of Notion’s communities:

To get started with community-led growth for your SaaS product, you’ll first need to decide where you’re going to host your community. Some options include social media networks (e.g., Facebook), messaging platforms (e.g., Slack), and dedicated community platforms (e.g., Circle). 

Reddit is also a good choice—it’s free, easy to use, and a large part of your audience is likely to already have an account.

Once you start a community, your first job will be to attract members. 

At the beginning, you can try inviting your top customers and promoting the community through your existing channels (e.g., social media pages and email list).

After a while, your community will start growing on its own, with existing members inviting new ones and others requesting to join.

But for this to happen, you’ll need to make sure to keep the conversation going by actively engaging your community. You can do this by starting conversations yourself and organizing regular events such as webinars and ask me anything (AMA) sessions.

10. Leverage Customer Reviews

Customer reviews are a great form of marketing because they act as social proof—once people see how others are satisfied with your software, they’ll feel more comfortable becoming customers themselves.

Reviews can also help you generate leads, gather valuable feedback, and increase your website’s conversion rate. 

Here’s how to use them effectively:

• Focus on the right review sites: There are a lot of review sites out there, but some are more relevant for SaaS businesses. These include G2, Capterra, and TrustRadius.
• Get more reviews: Having more reviews for your software will make potential customers more comfortable about signing up. Start by making it as easy as possible to leave reviews. Then, ask your top customers to leave reviews.
• Respond to every review: It’s crucial that you respond to every review, including negative ones. This will show that you care about your customers and their feedback.
• Feature top reviews on your website: Once you’ve generated more reviews, leverage them to add social proof to your website. Display reviews on strategic places, like how Figma does on their homepage. 

11. Seek Beneficial Partnerships

Partnerships can be a great way to expand your brand’s reach by tapping into partners’ existing customer pools and target audiences. 

For SaaS companies, the most common types of partners include:

• Value-added resellers: Companies offer additional services or features (customization, integration, etc.) on top of reselling your product
• Service partners: Companies that offer additional services related to your product, such as implementation or consulting
• Affiliate partners: This is probably the most common type of partnership arrangement in SaaS—it involves paying affiliates (individuals or companies) a fixed or percentage-based commission for certain actions like purchases
• Integration partners: Other SaaS companies whose products integrate with your software

If you’re looking to get started with partnerships for your SaaS business, the first step would be to identify potential partners. 

Here, you’ll want to look for companies that have similar target customers. Ideally, they should offer a product or service that complements your software but doesn’t compete with it directly.

Next, reach out to these companies and offer a mutually beneficial partnership. Outline how you envision the partnership working and highlight the benefits of partnering up.

Once a company agrees to partner with you, it would also be a good idea to draft and sign a partnership agreement to protect both parties.

12. Conduct A/B Tests

A/B testing involves comparing two versions of something (often a webpage) to determine which one performs better, so you can apply what you learned to drive better results.

If you have the traffic to support it, you should be running A/B tests on your SaaS website regularly. Especially on your landing pages.

Here’s how to do it:

• Start with research: You shouldn’t A/B test random ideas. Effective A/B testing is based on data gathered from research. A few research methods you can start with include usability testing, heatmap analysis, and website surveys.
• Form hypotheses: Once you’ve gathered some initial data, form hypotheses about which changes might result in an improvement in metrics like conversion rate (e.g., “by making our copy clearer and thoroughly explaining our features and benefits, we’ll get more visitors to sign up for a free trial”).
• Develop and run A/B tests: Turn your hypotheses into A/B tests. You can use tools like VWO and Convert to develop and run your tests.
• Implement winning tests: Once you’ve developed an A/B test and made sure both page variants work properly, you can launch the test. Your A/B test should run until you reach an adequate sample size and aim to have one variant perform better than the other at a statistical significance of 95% or higher.

Choose the Right SaaS Marketing Tactics

Now that you’ve reached the end of this guide, it’s time to determine which of the above marketing activities make the most sense for your SaaS company.

No matter which ones you choose, Semrush can help you streamline your efforts. Because it can simplify keyword research, competitive analysis, and much more.

Sign up to try it today.