5 Creative SaaS Digital Marketing Strategies to Accelerate Growth

What do a football team and your SaaS digital marketing team have in common?

Without a solid playbook, they’re going home empty-handed.

Even the most junior football coach knows they need to call and execute plays to have a chance at winning the big game. Similarly, your digital marketing team needs to be armed with tried and true strategies to guide and align their efforts and set your business up for success. But what strategies should your organization pursue to crush the competition?

This article covers five creative SaaS digital marketing strategies you can explore to accelerate growth in your business.

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SaaS Digital Marketing: The Basics

Before we get into our discussion of SaaS digital marketing strategies, let’s look at two often-conflated styles of marketing: Digital marketing and growth marketing. What is the difference?

Digital marketing simply refers to any form of online marketing. Email marketing, content marketing, and social media marketing all fall under this umbrella. That doesn’t mean that these approaches aren’t also key in growth marketing, however.

The difference between digital marketing and growth marketing is that growth marketing is inherently data-driven and strategic. Growth marketing, by nature, takes a full-funnel approach, avoiding “random acts of marketing” and focusing on driving business growth.

You can use all the SaaS digital marketing strategies discussed in this post as part of a larger growth marketing strategy.

When you work in tech and SaaS, you must account for some unique marketing challenges not found in other industries. Some of the challenges for which you must prepare include:

Lack of Physical Product: SaaS products live on the cloud. There is no physical product to photograph, no free sample you can send to a customer, and no unboxing videos to post on TikTok.

Technical Language: Your SaaS solution involves some complex technology. You must transform that language into verbiage your customers understand to break through. It’s not “250 gigabytes of storage”, but rather “1000 songs in your pocket”.

Niche Audience: Your audience might be small, and the competition is fierce.
Change Resistance: Often, a SaaS product replaces an internal role or vendor, which may complicate adoption.

5 High-Impact SaaS Digital Marketing Strategies

Create a High-Converting Website
Utilize an Integrated Content Strategy
Become a Thought Leader on Social Media
Explore Free Trials or Freemium Models
Show Social Proof through Testimonials

1. Create a High-Converting Website

You know you need a great website to succeed in the SaaS digital marketing world. But what does it mean to have a “great website?”

Let’s start with the basics: The brochure website is dead. The structure of a brochure website is inefficient at best for converting visitors into leads because it doesn’t give them a clear journey to follow.

A great website also doesn’t necessarily just mean an attractive website. The prettiest website on the internet isn’t going to help win new customers if you don’t have your messaging dialed. Of course, you want your site to be professional and aesthetic, but your focus should be on the following:

Structured based on the buyers’ journey
Built in a modular format, allowing for flexibility and iterations as needed
Launched and measured with a data-driven approach
Build around irresistible lead magnets designed to provide value to your ideal customers

Once your site is live, your work is far from over. Next, you’ll need to take steps to continuously optimize the site through growth-driven design efforts, making incremental changes and measuring the results to consistently improve conversion rates and acquire more customers.

2. Utilize an Integrated Content Strategy

Content marketing is one of the cornerstones of digital marketing. The key to making content marketing work for your business is to use it in the form of an integrated strategy. What does an integrated content strategy look like?

Essentially, to do content marketing right, you need to be targeting keywords strategically. Target keywords related to the core of what your business does. Ensure that you pick keywords with enough search volume to be worth targeting, but not so much competition that your brand will have too much of an upward battle to rank.

Use tools like Moz or SEMRush to find the best keywords to target. Then, compare the current SERP for those keywords. What kind of content is currently out there? What gaps exist? How can you create content that deserves to rank?

Don’t just limit yourself to blog posts, either! You can explore content in the form of:

Short-form video
Long-form video
Podcasting
Webinars
& more!

Remember: Once you’ve created content in one format, you can reuse that information in a different form. Take a top-performing blog post and make a video verson, or convert your best long-form video into a series of YouTube shorts. For more on this, check out the Content Repurposing Toolkit.

3. Become a Thought Leader on Social Media

It’s the mid-2020s. Brands engage on social media all the time… in B2C. Is social media really relevant in B2B marketing?

It is, but only when done correctly. It’s easy to burn up an unnecessary amount of time on social media while achieving nothing of note. What does it mean to use social media effectively for B2B marketing?

Be strategic.

You don’t need to be posting across all channels. Pick one or two and really focus on carving out a space for yourself. LinkedIn is an excellent option for a social platform for B2B brands.

Use your social media presence to provide valuable information to prospective customers, but also simply to build relationships with other professionals.

Remember that social media efforts might not directly get you more leads, but you can use these platforms to build credibility and enhance your relationships. For example, you may get invited to appear on another thought leader’s podcast and get the chance to expose their audience to your business.

4. Explore Free Trials or Freemium Models

If you’re not exploring freemium options in SaaS today, it may be time to rethink that position. As we discussed above, SaaS can be a challenging field because there is no physical product to show to potential customers.

Or is there?

By offering a free trial or running your software on a freemium model, you allow potential customers to engage with your product the way a shopping mall customer might try on a shirt. The only way they’ll know for sure if they want to buy is to make sure it’s a good fit.

Offering a free trial can also help build trust because you offer your leads something of value without asking for anything in return. If you run your product on a freemium model, you can also get a larger user base quickly and easily. That larger user base can help you identify issues and refine the product more easily than a smaller user base can.

One word of caution for those exploring freemium: make sure you strike the right balance. Strip away too many features and users won’t get any value from your free product. Leave too many features in and they won’t be compelled to convert to the paid version.

5. Show Social Proof through Testimonials

If you’re about to make an expensive, important purchase, what’s the first thing you do? If you said “check reviews,” you’re not alone. Reviews, referrals, and testimonials are crucial in helping potential customers see that your product will actually do what your marketing copy promises.

Customers will always trust another customer more than they trust your marketing copy. Why? Because they assume that—unlike you—the other customer doesn’t have a motive to sing the praises of your product or service.

Ask your existing customers to provide a testimonial. Consider including these on your site in the form of pull quotes, video testimonials, and case studies to give visitors options to vet your business as they see fit.

Beyond the Strategy: Crush Your SaaS Digital Marketing Goals

Embracing strong SaaS digital marketing strategies can set you and your team up for success. However, a strong strategy is nothing without equally strong execution.

This is just the beginning of your journey.

If you want to crush your marketing goals and KPIs this year, you need a blueprint for success.

Our free resource, the Growth Playbook, can help you identify the current stage in your growth journey. Once you know your current growth stage, you can use the playbook to plan for growth, budget for growth, and accelerate results to scale profitably.

Access the Growth Playbook for free today!

Mallory is a Growth Marketer at Lean Labs, working with brands to ignite their growth engine through conceptualizing, implementing, and optimizing growth marketing strategies.

7 Min Read

Growth Marketing

Apr 12, 2023