When it comes to B2B SaaS marketing, there is no one size fits all strategy. Your price point, product marketing readiness, and target audience drastically affect your marketing. What works for a SaaS that sells a $10 per month subscription to small businesses won’t work for a SaaS selling $100,000 contracts to enterprises.
And yet, there are some similarities despite the differences.
In SaaS, features matter just as much as outcomes no matter what any cool copywriter says. While prospects and leads want to know the results of using your product, they also want to vet the feature set.
The B2B element also affects SaaS marketing. SaaS buyers are hungry for content, tools, and templates to help them succeed in their job or business.
In this post, we detail B2B SaaS marketing fundamentals, offer 26 examples, and 50 unique tips to help you round out your strategy with the right tactics.
B2B SaaS marketing fundamentals
Your SaaS marketing strategy ultimately consists of:
- Target audience(s)
- Marketing channel(s)
- Messaging
- Branding
- Alignment with sales
- Onboarding and retention
To be successful, you need to be very clear on your plan for all of the above factors. As you grow your business, you might have five target audiences, 13 different marketing channels, and four different onboarding and retention channels.
But in the early stages of your SaaS business, focus on simplicity. The fewer target audiences and marketing channels you use, the easier it will be to make them successful and scalable. Once you’ve exhausted or mastered one, add something else to your strategy.
SaaS marketing examples
Ready to learn from world-famous SaaS companies and small players alike? We’ve got over two dozen examples across multiple popular marketing channels to inspire you to level up your B2B SaaS marketing.
Website examples
DXPR’s home page
If you want an example of simple messaging and branding, check out DXPR. The website showcases how the product helps marketers build pages with Drupal, so they don’t have to wait for IT to help them.
Clickup’s home page
Clickup is taking the task management software world by storm. Their home page has a great hook: “one app to replace them all.” Plus, the features section is clickable to reduce the amount of scrolling necessary on the home page.
Tips for website home pages:
- Focus on the most straightforward message possible
- Use customer research to guide your SaaS copywriting approach
- Make your feature set clear while also focusing on the outcomes of the product
- Use simple design with a lot of whitespace
- Use only one colour for the CTA buttons
Check out our guide on building high-converting landing pages for more tips and inspiration.
Freemium examples
Loom’s freemium plan
Screensharing video app Loom is one of the best SaaS marketing examples in the world, because it succeeded in viral product marketing. Because the videos are shared with prospects, team members, clients, and customers, users organically spread the word about the product.
This virality is a key reason why it makes sense for Loom to offer a free forever plan. In follow up emails and inside the product, there are plenty of opportunities for users to upgrade.
Vectera’s freemium plan
Vectera is a platform for online client meetings that one-ups Zoom with shared whiteboards, document annotation, unique client meeting rooms, stored notes for later review, and private notes.
The company is smart to offer a freemium plan because when business owners use Vectera for online scheduling and meetings, their clients are introduced to it and can sign up for their own account right away.
Tips for freemium funnels:
- Only offer a freemium plan if your product has viral potential or if your market size is large (all small business owners, for example)
- Build in multiple ways for users to upgrade, both inside of the product and in onboarding emails
- Find ways to build in product virality even if the core output of your product isn’t shareable (create shareable link reports instead of just PDFs, for example)
Free trial examples
Freshbooks’s 30-day free trial
With a 30-day free trial, Freshbooks allows new users plenty of time to switch over from manual processes or accounting software that they aren’t pleased with. Offering a free trial instead of a free forever plan is a smart move because any small business with enough transactions to need accounting software can afford a small monthly fee.
Ahrefs’s 7-day free trial
Ahrefs has a much shorter free trial than Freshbooks. There are likely two reasons for this. For one thing, it doesn’t take as long to get value out of the platform. You can conduct keyphrase research or profile a domain in just a couple of minutes. Also, allowing a long free trial could encourage small businesses to use it just for new keyphrase research over the course of the month, and then churn.
Tips for free trials:
- Offer a free trial instead of a freemium plan if your product is only used by businesses and doesn’t have market potential within schools or other B2C organizations
- Make the free trial as short or as long as the user needs to reach the aha moment
- Improve your trial to paid conversion rate with a multichannel approach including emails and retargeting ads
Demo request examples
Pitchbox’s demo request page
Pitchbox does a great job of keeping their demo request form short and simple. Gone are the days of long forms. The longer the form, the lower the completion rate. Reducing the number of fields is the top way to improve your form conversion rate.
Instead of expecting the customer to give you tons of information, your sales team will need to enrich the lead with additional data.
PressPage’s demo request page
PressPage offers another great example of a demo request page. They don’t even ask for the business’s name or website URL. The sales team can get this information from the business email alone.
Outreach’s demo request page
Outreach takes a different approach. Their demo request page includes information about the product, results and outcomes, testimonials, and a 2-minute demo video for those who want to understand the product better.
Tips for demo request pages:
- Reduce the number of form fields
- Include social proof such as logos and/or testimonials
- Use a clear headline so that the lead knows the purpose of the form
- Describe the value of the product in a subheading or short body copy
- Consider adding a short video demo
SEO blog post examples
StoryChief’s post on digital publishing platforms
The most successful SEO blog posts solve a problem for your target audience’s needs and convert into a free trial or a lead. This post by StoryChief compares different digital publishing platforms, ranks #1 for the target keyphrase, and offers a free trial to the platform.
Hubspot’s post on digital marketing
It’s tough to talk about SEO content without mentioning Hubspot. The company is world-renowned for producing content that ranks and converts. This post is #1 for the term “digital marketing” (which gets half a million monthly searches by the way). To capture all of that traffic the post includes a downloadable guide as a content upgrade.
Tips for SEO blog posts:
- Produce content regularly (once per week is a great starting point for most businesses)
- Choose target keyphrases that your ideal audience searches for and that are related to the problems your product solves
- Select a mix of competitiveness with your keyphrase targeting
- Aim for quality over quantity
- Build backlinks to your posts with guest posting, podcast pitching, and backlink outreach
Brand journalism examples
TravelPerk’s profile of a startup that helps breastfeeding moms who travel for business
Lots of companies talk about telling stories, but few actually do it. While much of your content will be SEO-focused, it’s also smart to tell journalism-style stories that raise your company’s brand awareness, establish industry connections, and build trust. This example from TravelPerk does all of that.
Gong’s post on the best time to talk about pricing
One of the smartest ways to do brand journalism as a SaaS company is to analyze your own product data in a way that provides proprietary statistics that everyone in your industry (not just your customers) can benefit from. Gong does this well.
Tips for brand journalism:
- Tell your customers’ stories
- Tell the stories of influencers or well-known companies that you want to partner with
- Tell stories that establish trust with your audience
- Use your own product data and release your own studies
Ebook examples
Hootsuite’s organic and paid social marketing playbook
In one of their many ebooks, Hootsuite presents survey findings as well as insights into what strategies are working the best right now for brands and enterprises.
Reply’s guide on email outreach
Reply’s ebook on sales outreach campaigns is the perfect example of a B2B SaaS marketing ebook because it is closely related to the product. When your ebook’s promise is similar to your product’s outcome, you have the highest chance of collecting leads from the downloads. If your ebook isn’t related to your product but is something your target audience wants, you might generate lukewarm leads, instead of hot ones.
Tips for SaaS ebooks:
- Use ebooks to release proprietary studies and survey results
- Keep ebooks as tactical as possible (as opposed to long, pointless content)
- Interview guest experts in your ebooks to increase the authority of the content and get shares from influencers
- Make sure the content is not just relevant to your target audience, but is as closely related to your product as possible to collect the right leads
Email marketing
Grammarly’s sales emails
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: we’re big fans of Grammarly’s approach to email marketing. In this example, they do a great job of clearly spelling out why a new user might want to upgrade to their paid plan. They showcase how these features can help people who write as part of their business or profession.
SurveyMonkey’s welcome email
SurveyMonkey has a super-smart welcome email for new users. It offers three categories of templates (for getting feedback from customers, employees, and consumers) to encourage users to start sending their first survey as quickly as possible.
SaaS email marketing tips:
- Have only one purpose for each email, even if you have multiple links
- Use HTML emails to establish credibility and brand presence, and use plain-text emails for one-to-one emails with a personal touch
- Use welcome and onboarding emails to get new customers to the Aha moment as quickly possible
- Rely on marketing automation based on real user behaviour to help you tailor your emails to individual customers and leads
Free tool examples
Shopify’s tools for ecommerce store owners
Shopify’s logo maker, business name generator, pay stub generator, and many other tools are what some like to call “side project marketing.” The company is essentially making free software, templates, or other high-value resources to attract their ideal audience.
QuickBooks’s free invoice generator
QuickBooks offers a free invoice generator that’s easy to use. It’s essentially a downloadable Microsoft Word template. The landing page for the freebie helps position QuickBooks as a better solution than making invoices in Word.
Tips for free tools:
- Make tools that fit within your budget—if you can’t create a separate software tool, try making templates instead
- Brainstorm 3 or 4 ideas and survey your audience on which one they want most before you invest resources in creating it
- Tell industry influencers about your free tool and consider influencer marketing as a channel to help spread the word
Podcast examples
Flatfile’s Customer Success Leader podcast
Flatfile’s target audience is customer success leaders. So, guess what they named their podcast? Customer Success Leader! With their podcast, they interview target customers and industry influencers about their top CS tips and strategies.
Privy’s Ecommerce Marketing Show
Privy’s Ecommerce Marketing Show interviews successful ecommerce entrepreneurs such as the founders of Native Deodorant, Outer Aisle, and KinkyCurlyYaki. The podcast also includes deep dives into topics like whether or not to sell on Amazon.
Tips for SaaS podcasts:
- Use a podcast agency to help you produce the episodes affordably
- Interview your target audience and industry influencers
- Repurpose podcasts into blog posts, social media posts, and YouTube videos
- Keep the name and concept of your podcast simple and clearly intended for your target audience
Social media examples
Buffer’s customer spotlight posts on Instagram
Buffer has one of the best Instagram accounts of any SaaS product. One of the things they do well is profiling customers in their posts. They use their Instagram posts to drive traffic to their Instagram stories and blog posts that profile customers, so their audience can learn what’s working at companies they admire.
Monday.com’s clever response to a Tweeter’s question
The best way to sell your business on social media is to not sell at all. On social, you need to act social, not like a salesperson. With this response to a Tweeter’s question, Monday.com gives their customers a chance to share their experiences rather than try to sell the product themselves.
Make sure your social media manager understands that the point of social media is to build relationships and establish credibility, not push the product.
Tips for social media management:
- Be social, not salesy
- Build and leverage connections
- Use social media to promote other pieces of content, but make sure the social post is complete and makes sense unto itself
- Engage with and profile customers on your social media accounts
Social media ad examples
SEMrush’s Facebook ad with customer results
SEMrush runs a lot of different ads on Facebook. They advertise their free tools, courses, Marketplace, as well as their core software. In this example, they include a case study video that features customer results.
SAP’s new YouTube ad
In just a couple of months, SAP has already bought 26 millions views of its YouTube ad. While you might not have the same budget as one of the world’s biggest SaaS companies, you can see success with YouTube ads. Because you can place your ads only on select channels, you have a very high chance of reaching your target audience.
Depending on your pricing strategy, you can offer ebooks, free tools, a free trial, or a free forever plan as the CTA.
Tips for social media ads:
- Use social proof in your ads
- Reduce costs by continuously testing your advertising and your creative work
- Test the ROI of running ads to different types of landing pages (free trial versus downloadable template, for example)
B2B SaaS marketing is complex.
The point isn’t to get overwhelmed by all of the tactics you could be doing, but instead to take these sources of inspiration and apply them to your own marketing strategy.
Always remember that it’s better to do two channels really well than to spread your marketing team too thin over ten different channels and not get results from any of them.
The most important thing isn’t having flashy campaigns. It’s all about reaching your target market, getting their attention, and converting them into customers.
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