B2B SAAS Marketing Strategies50+ B2B SAAS Marketing Strategies with Case studies
By: Hupport Appointment Scheduling Software
Tags: Saas Tools, Saas Hupport, Marketing Strategies, Saas Marketing, SaaS

Marketing is a demanding profession. After a decade of experience, I can safely conclude, without any fear of controversy, that customer acquisition, and on boarding is the toughest challenge faced even today. The pressure aggravates manifold especially when you are engaged in cloud wars. We design and adopt various strategies to retain our B2B customers.

Start-ups offer free products and services as a trial to build up a platform for seamless acquisition. This is a long-term strategy called SaaS marketing. The widely accepted strategic model emphasizes on the concept “free” in its offer of ‘free trial’, ‘free trial for premium service’, ’60 days free trial’, so on so forth. Unfortunately, the free trials do not always end up in client acquisition and we have seen business virtually losing out on their game. At the same time, many of the start-ups have flourished owing to their successful B2B SaaS marketing strategies. If you wish to unravel the secret to their success keep reading!

1. Adapt to the remarkably short sales cycle

Unlike the sluggish pace of non-software purchases, the constantly evolving SaaS buying is real quick.

There exist very little time between product or service comparison, seeking guidance from friends and buying. A SaaS product becomes extinct within a short span of time.

Owing to the constant up gradation of SaaS products, velocity of sales is the key to success.

Adapt to a fast changing environment and provide as much information possible to your potential customers.

Reliance JIO started offering “free” call service, “free” unlimited data service to its customers for a trial period of 90 days even before its launch.

The SaaS marketing strategy charged up the already competitive service provider environment and compelled customers queue up in front of Reliance stores to register themselves.

2. Developing a kickass content marketing

Identify your audience and know what triggers them. Develop a strategy to correlate your call to action with visible equity.

It’s a great digital strategy to compel your visitor to act the way you want without letting it dig deep into their conscience level.

Michael Aagard from Unbounce checked this out with a simple A/B test on payment page.

Two buttons with a free trial were made as per the B2B SaaS marketing strategy.

strategy. One button carried, “Start YOUR free trail for 30 days”, while the other had “Start MY free trail for 30 days,” written on them.

The latter saw a 90% increase in the click through rate as compared to the former.

This strategy established how it triggers the audience to act according to my wish as the latter correlates with the visible equity with their action level.

3. Build up a social strategy and third party publishing schedule

Invest your time to find out third party authoritative publications.

Publish your article, blog on their sites to reach out to a larger audience and generate more traffic.

James Clear invested much in identifying an email list of around 100000 with a constant traffic of 250000 unique visitors on the blog per month.

He republished his blog on Lifehacker only to experience an increased traffic of 99k views.

For a quick check on your performance and number of visitors sign on Google Analytics.

4. B2B SaaS marketing with monthly reporting

Use any of the available apps on the internet to create your editorial calendar. It helps scheduling your blog post in a timely fashion when you are associated with multiple writers.

A task management app Meistertask allows you drag and drop task for each participant.

New content scheduled each day attracts more traffic.

A study in Hubspot has suggested, business publishing more than 16 blogs a month, get 3.5 times more traffic than business that posts 0–4 blogs.

Lead generated through content marketing increases the average sales price by 20% as per content marketing institute.

In order to understand the engagement of audiences with SaaS, quantify the objective to measure the effectiveness of B2B SaaS marketing strategy in relation to content marketing.

5. Increase your visibility on review sites to raise your sales by 18%

Brightlocal, a local SEO tool and local citation building service conducted a study on purchasers.

The study revealed, 72% consumers get a positive vibe about a product if the reviews are positive. The trust factor increases with positive reviews.

A US based e-commerce business, Reevoo had a sale of $298.2 billion in 2014. The figures jumped to $341.7 billion in 2015 owing to positive reviews on site.

A 15% jump in sales is evident.

6. Close Range Marketing

Use Bluetooth or Wi-Fi to send across promotional messages to customers on their smart phones and tablets.

Provide as much information possible about your products and services.

Close range marketing is popularly termed as proximity marketing.

7. Invest in long-term relationship with your customers

Your customers are your assets. Gartner proposes, in future your business will receive 80% of the revenue from 20% of your customers.

Researcher Bain & Co echoed similar lines. They stated, you can raise your profit share by 75% simply by increasing your customer retention by 5%.

Customer retention is challenging for SaaS industry.

8. Take advantage of trends for generating more traffic

Check out Google Trend, a real-time search data to stay ahead of your competitors.

Analyze the marketing trend data to gauge consumer search behavior.

Video streaming, visual storytelling, native advertising, influencer marketing, and mobile marketing have dominated virtual internet market.

Fire Brands showed 90% of business has experienced increased profitability owing to video content.

9. Social media marketing as part of B2B SaaS marketing strategy

Build up a customized page in Facebook and engage with your fans. A personalized page will bring more fans to your page, promote upcoming events, contest etc.

Showcase customer reviews, create content library and offer coupons and discounts.

Post a well researched content on LinkedIn pulse.

Brian Lang, a professional blogger at Small Business Ideas conducted a research on 300 posts on Linkedin pulse.

He found articles related to careers, self-improvement, technology, current events and productivity.

Around 90% of the articles got more than 500 social shares.

Target to feature on the online communities having unique monthly visitors and raise your visibility.

Use Reddit to expand your business. It’s a community of people with similar interests.

News in the portal is categorized as ‘hot’, ‘controversial’, ‘wiki’, and ‘promoted’. Your customers can accordingly choose to follow them.

10. E-Mail marketing

This is age-old strategy of sending newsletters. Post-Up, an e-mail marketing platform conducted a study on their client to convert inactive subscribers.

They designed an automated reactivation campaign and was successful in boosting sales by 164%.

Personalised e-mails boost average sales by 19% as per a data from CMO.com.

Put a subject line to trigger curiosity among receivers, to ensure a growth in e-mail opening rate.

11. Scarcity marketing

Making your product accessible to a choice set of customers makes it scarce and increases its brand value.

This is done to control the use of high cost raw materials.

Apple IPhone6 got sold as quickly as it hit the market because of the brand value and scarcity value attached to it. People stood in queue from a night before to get hold of their status symbol.

12. Marketing Automation

Trigger the curiosity among your subscribers to increase the e-mail opening rate.

Design and introduce automated behavioral triggered e-mails to acquire 71% higher opening rates.

It’s a most effective SaaS marketing technique having 102% higher clicks.

having 102% higher clicks. Collect customer data through a transparent system and ensure 100% privacy to gain customer trust.

Informatica, conducted a search on 2000 UK adults who showed their concern in sharing their private data with start-ups.

Add cookies to the browsers of potential customers, who visit your site as a newcomer. Later on, you can track them and show him your advertisement to convert him as an active customer.

13. Undercover marketing

At times, maintain some secrecy about your product and service, just enough to raise the curiosity level of your customers.

Do not provide all all-round description of the product simply to excite the grey-cells of your seasoned customers.

They will flock to buy the product to unravel the mystery.

14. Develop online public relations

Build up a strong customer base. Today’s generation is brand-conscious and sometimes identify with the brand.

A good cause can make them pay a premium price for the brand. For example, shoe brand TOMS created a campaign, ‘One day without shoes’.

For every sale of a pair of shoes, the business was donating another pair to a needy child.

They managed to get endorsed by celebrities and got ample media support.

People across the world walked barefoot to support the cause.

Use digital marketing to reach out to customers. Avon’s ‘choose beautiful’ had a 5 million views on YouTube.

15. Start running affiliate marketing

There exist perks and pitfalls of running affiliate program in B2B SaaS marketing strategy. The perk is you can generate much higher revenue than your existing one and the pitfall is, it does not work for all business.

Shopify runs affiliate program. It rewards the affiliates with $2400 per sale. Bluehost toes the same line to expand its customer base.

Thomas Cook Airlines has mapped out its affiliates’ value to minimize cost per sale and increase number of long haul bookings. =

Implement a publisher campaign through an affiliate program as did Cost Plus World Market, a furniture store.

The result was evident after 90 days when the monthly traffic increased by 100.7%, and sales by 257%. The furniture store witnessed a growth in monthly revenue by 177%.

16. Mass marketing or positioning oneself on the market

In order to grow, big corporations drive their sales big time with a lot of expenditure on advertisement and promotion of the brand.

Walmart is a mass market retailer who has effectively positioned it as the number one retailer.

Spending on self promotion and advertisement helps business do a data crunching and effectively position them in the market with more than one competitor.

17. Seasonal marketing

Connect with your customers through seasonal marketing.

Hallmark promotes its business around Valentine’s Day and experiences an increase in sales.

Similarly, Woolmark brand does well by reaching out to people before and during winter.

18. Evangelism marketing to protect you against online trolls

Encourage your brand lovers. They will gladly don the hat of brand advocates and fight against any negative tweet or hate mails on your behalf.

One negative tweet or few hate mails are enough to ruin your online reputation thus making your sale graph go southward.

Brand lovers are valuable asset for the business who fights to protect the reputation of the brand without asking for any perks in return.

An American retailer, Old Navy posted an interracial couple picture on social media and got trolled nastily.

The brand lovers of Old Navy came to the rescue by posting their own picture with interracial couples within their family to counter the social trolls and made a strong statement.

19. Allow your SaaS sell itself

For a moment, forget about all hefty business jargons like client acquisition, customer retention, statistical algorithm, and linear attribution models, so on and so forth.

Reasons why your SaaS will sell itself is superior quality product and a strong customer support team.

Ramp up the features of your product and build up a pro-active customer support.

20. Integrate offline marketing with new technologies to announce your presence both in real as well as virtual world

Most of your target customers are glued to their virtual world.

Design some innovative technology to get best of both worlds. Coca Cola has devised a vending machine that would hug their customers and remind them of happy times.

Customers can experience the product offline as well as connect online with the brand through social media.

21. Buy traffic through pay per click (PPC) advertising

Google Adwords are the best tool to divert traffic of your target customer to your website. They follow pay per click advertising.

Get access to a larger customer base by paying for social media advertisement in Facebook, LinkedIN, Pintrest and Instagram.

22. Drive your sales northward by 185% by promoting superior quality case studies

Superior quality case studies are effective in conversion optimization rates.

A survey conducted by The Content Marketing Institute revealed how 63% of the respondents believe case studies are an effective SaaS marketing tool.

It generates higher traffic, has better conversion rates than traditional marketing tactics and leads to higher revenue.

Case studies rank as one of the most popular tactic along with social media postings, newsletters and blog posts.

23. Information drives SaaS marketing

SaaS provider is the gold mine of information. Their blog posts, rich content, equip the customer with more than necessary information about the product, its competitor, and substitute.

For example, Buffer, have famous blog posts to support their social media promotion.

Engage with your customers continuously, however, it should not be interrupting or intruding.

Flow of information through customized Facebook page, tweet, blog posts and social media posts are always intriguing and has high conversion rates.

24. Publish lead magnets

Invest time in meticulously building e-mail contacts, create e-books and white papers.

These are prominent B2B SaaS marketing strategy easily catching the attention of the target customers.

25. Create a vertical content market

Identify the vertical market you cater to by investing in some data crunching.

Promote market-specific report or make sure your customers are able to access some insight based on certain report available in your website.

This will ensure your trustworthiness and raise your conversion rates to a great extent.

This is another way of engaging with your target audience and customers.

26. Create presentation with PPT slides to generate higher traffic

This method is more popular with B2B marketing.

An US based advertising agency, Didit Marketing conducted a research with slide share.

The outcome was whopping 500% more B2B traffic.

Slide shares work wonders with business owners as compared to Facebook and Youtube.

27. Use AMP to divert 40% of the traffic from the total site traffic and get an edge over your competitor

AMP loads faster in mobile devices owing to its light weight web page with static content.

A page having an AMP version, experiences more clicks and witnesses an average growth of 2% in CTR.

It diverts the 40% of total site traffic thus facilitating the business owners.

28. Develop partner websites to create an impact on Search engine optimization

The movers and shakers of the cloud wars wisely choose their keyword phrases and influence SEO.

Start-ups tie up with content writers and digital marketing team to divert traffic to their site.

They publish blog posts, education websites, web directory, and forums

OutReach Mama tied up with big house business like Forbes and Huffington Post only to experience 350 backlinks from over 100 domains within 60 days time.

29. Explore your social influence to rank higher on social media rankings

According to some strategist, social media rankings are correlated with social shares while others refute this claim.

Google, for example, do not count on social share and incorporate it in their direct algorithm.

However, a survey reveals, increase of 100 Google Plus followers lead to a 15% in rankings.

Facebook lifts up rankings by 6.89% with 70 shares and 50 likes.

Twitter elevates social media rankings by a meager 2.88%.

30. Apply segmentation as B2B SaaS marketing strategy and raise your deliverables

Classify your customer based on their behavioral preference, location, income group, lifestyle, keyword search, and several other factors.

This is an effective tool that leads to 40% email opening rate, increases deliverability and thus results in greater revenue generation.

Johnny Cupcakes emailing campaign is worth mentioning here. They have classified their customers in terms of gender, preferences, and buying habits.

The campaign sent across separate emails to each of their categories.

Data crunching revealed each campaign had 42% increase in CTR, 123% increase in conversion rate and a revenue growth of 141%.

31. Create buzz in social media to promote your business

Tie up with specialists and experts from your industry and pay them to talk positively online about your product and service. This is different from mainstream advertising.

Neil Patel, a marketing consultant, spent $57000 to carry out such innovative campaign.

He paid models to pose with placards, ‘who is neil patel’ written on them. The pictures went viral and arouse immense inquisitiveness amongst viewers.

The campaign ended up earning $332.6 in three months, 5 times more than the investment.

Take a cue from the campaign to create similar buzz in social media.

32. Promoted tweets, promoted twitter trends will give you a 2% return on investment

Twitter followers are all too well acquainted with jargons like trends, promoted tweets etc.

These promoted tweets, trends, facilitate lead generation, interact with existing followers and increase the conversion rate.

The B2B SaaS marketing strategy focused on deliverable by incorporating a ‘call to action’ with each promoted tweets.

Hubspot, a US based inbound marketing pioneer, carried out such prolonged twitter campaign.

The outcome of the campaign was a 32% increase in return on investment and 150% increase in sales.

33. Event marketing

All lovely ladies out there need a reason to shop and de-stress themselves.

If you can give reason to people, who remain hooked on to the internet, to come by and enjoy shopping out in the open, they will oblige you by driving up your sales.

Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in US has become a cult in bridging the two concepts of thanksgiving and shopping.

We witness similar trend in India where sales drive up during the Diwali season.

34. Offer discounts and coupons as B2B SaaS marketing strategy

SaaS marketing was developed based on the idea of giving out freebies. SaaS business gives away the SaaS product as free to experience a trial for 30 days or more.

was developed based on the idea of giving out freebies. SaaS business gives away the SaaS product as free to experience a trial for 30 days or more. You cannot afford to give away SaaS every time to promote your business. Instead, you can explore giving away various discounts and coupons.

Social media Facebook page can be a great option to announce the freebies, if mainstream advertising causes a hole in your pocket.

Promoted tweets can be used to reach out to a larger audience who can then be converted to potential customers.

35. Develop a lead scoring system to generate more sales at half the cost

Assign a lead scoring system i.e a quantifiable value to social media interactions based on the engagement of the visitor.

Most business use lead scoring system to generate more leads in marketing automated systems.

Based on the value of the leads, sales representative of your business can get in touch with the visitor and convert him/her to a customer.

Without the lead generation, many contacts get lost and it’s an opportunity lost for the SaaS business.

A recent study reported successful marketing personnel has followed lead scoring system to increase 50% sales at 33% cost.

Lead scoring is an effective B2B SaaS marketing strategy in a cut-throat competitive business.

36. Create a narrative through engaging video content and see for yourself the rise in conversion rate

Video content is catching up fast with 1 billion unique monthly visitors in You Tube and is more fascinating to watch.

Other video streaming sites, Vimeo, DailyMotion, LiveLeak and Vine have their shares of million viewers, not to forget the daily video content shared on social media sites.

According to a study by Hyperfine media, video watching helps in the decision making for 90% viewers.

Your conversion rate will increase by 80%, if you have an engaging video content on your home page.

Most B2B company rely much on video content as a part of their SaaS marketing strategy.

37. Bring in visitors through Webinars

Organize Webinars using a microphone and a PC. Connect with your viewers through any Webinar platform.

You can exchange ideas, receive some information and insight worth pondering into.

Conducting Webinars is part of effective and successful B2B SaaS marketing ideas to help bringing in more visitors and convert them.

to help bringing in more visitors and convert them. A rise in conversion level would automatically end up generating higher revenues.

38. Manage expectation and keep your customer well-informed

Keep your customer informed about the offer. Do not shy away from informing your customer that post a 30 days free trial, they have to pay up front for the SaaS.

Most of the time, the SaaS selling team do not inform the customer hoping they will themselves start paying for the service after the trial period.

It never happens and the business loses a prospective customer owing to mismanagement of the flow of information.

Well, honesty is still the best policy.

39. Remove barriers for customer even before they sign up for SaaS

Reduce sign up fields to minimal.

Qualification details, credit card number are unnecessary frictions that keep out the potential customers.

People often take a liking for business that has reduced their first step sign up field to few data points or even single field.

40. Referral bonus, an effective SaaS idea

‘Invite a friend, collect your referral point’ — This marketing strategy can work wonders.

You can practice it even within the organization, as well as outside it.

Make sure the referral point can be redeemed against any of your product and service.

Conversion rate is much higher with the lucrative bonus.

The SaaS product thus sells itself.

41. Direct marketing

Open up all channels of communication.

Communicate with your customers through fliers, text messages and e-mails.

Some companies assist business sending mass texts to customers against a small fee.

Explore the option to connect with people. Conversion rate might not be that great but then every option is worth trying.

42. Inbound marketing

You can take the opportunity to sell SaaS when your customers call you for several other reasons.

It’s a great opportunity to make your customers aware of your products and services on a business call.

43. Optimize your website to maximize conversion rate

Your homepage must have links to the features, pricing, sign up page, and free trial option.

Customer sign up for free trial, payment page and call to action must be interlinked seamlessly.

A flawless navigation to reviews, social media sites and back to trial or login page raises conversion rate.

44. Positioning yourself as an authority is an effective B2B SaaS marketing strategy

Boost your reputation in the industry.

Accept invite for interviews, podcast, conferences and talk at length about your product and services.

45. It pays off to be ‘up close and personal’

It’s a very simple yet effective tool to connect to customers.

Make sure all your departments have a face. A customer feels more comfortable dealing with a human than with an e-mail id.

Put out the names of all department heads in your website.

46. Be vigilant to protect your reputation

You have taken years to build up your reputation; spent billion on developing a successful B2B SaaS strategy.

This can be at stake, if you do not monitor your reputation. You have to be a close guard in protecting it from hate mongers.

Keep a vigil offline and online and address the grievances immediately.

Make sure you are able to give a successful resolute to every grievance and customers are happy to come back to you.

47. Monitor your competitors to stay on top of the list

Keep a close watch on your competitors’ behavior and market responses.

Look out for the discounts they are offering, responses they are receiving on their social platforms.

You can a leaf out of their successful strategy and incorporate them according to your deliverables.

48. Diversify online lead generation

Diversify your tactic and spin a healthy marketing ecosystem containing SEO, SEM, content marketing, blog posting, advertising and sales development.

With a remarkably high turnover time, it’s in your best interest that you do not depend on one tactic.

49. Publish E-books for the niche market

It usually caters to the niche clients and the most cost effective B2B SaaS marketing technique to make prospective customer aware of your product and service.

Exchange ideas and learn more about the preferences of your target customers.

Dish out e-books to pamper their choices.

50. Offer a freemium that comes with a twist

A free trial gives unrestricted access to the system.

A freemium comes with a twist where it provides restricted access. All tools do not open up unless the subscription is paid for.

It acts as an incentive for the customer to upgrade the subscription to be able to get access to the valuable tools.

There exist several choices of B2B SaaS marketing ideas. The owner of a start-up can follow different approach from among the ones mentioned, to suit his needs and objective. Creativity is the key to unlock success and ensure higher conversion. Incorporate the ideas that are most suitable for your business and the ones you can afford in order to make a difference.

Good luck!