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B2B SaaS Marketing: 6 Cost-Effective Strategies

Learn strategies to effectively and cost-effectively market your B2B SaaS product and brand. Learn how to reach more of your target audience with engagement.


Aryan Jalan

5 minute read

B2B SaaS marketing on a bu

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B2B marketing on a budget requires careful planning to ensure that every communication counts. Clear and concise messaging can help you reach more of your target audience and maximize the impact of your marketing efforts .

By utilizing strategic planning and budget-friendly tactics like content marketing, social media advertising, email campaigns, and webinars, B2B SaaS companies can achieve effective marketing strategies without breaking the bank.

So, let's dive into the main 6 strategies you can implement in your SaaS company!

1. Invest in marketing automation software

What if you could market your SaaS using software that captures, nurtures, and qualifies leads, automates repetitive tasks like email marketing and ad campaigns, tracks metrics, and even helps close customer deals?

Sounds like a great idea, right? Boosting marketing with marketing automation tools not only increases efficiency but also saves costs.

Still on the fence about switching to an automated marketing platform?

Well, you should know that most SaaS companies are adopting marketing automation tools, with adoption rates increasing at a steady pace of 14% per year.

Marketing automation software should fit your business needs and budget. Whether you're a small organization looking for simple and economical solutions or a larger enterprise in need of complex and feature-rich platforms, there are marketing automation tools for everyone.

While businesses strive to increase their market share, it doesn't necessarily mean they have to increase their marketing costs. Marketing automation software like Hubspot, Acoustic, and Active Campaign offer great marketing assistance for B2B companies.

Don’t be shy about dipping into software solutions that are adapted according to the needs of your business and the unique challenges you face in your particular industry. Many times one-shoe-fits-all solutions won’t be ideal for your specific type of business and challenges. There is specialized software you could look into, such as SEO platforms, small businesses marketing platforms, marketing platforms for dentists or social media platforms.

2. Create buyer persona

Why do most B2B SaaS companies target a specific audience?

Because B2B software services are niche-specific, and niche audiences prefer this kind of specificity. For example, Grammarly for Business (SaaS) corrects content and in-house marketing initiatives for enterprises.

SaaS-based companies cannot sell a lifetime subscription to their customers. To maintain a profitable business model, they must provide a periodic subscription service for their software (e.g. Netflix subscription, Grammarly Premium).

Besides hosting the software, B2B companies must also maintain and update their services to retain subscribers and members. They also need to manage customer activity and pricing, which can be done using subscription management software.

To run subscriber-acquiring and retaining models, B2B companies need a clear picture of their target customers. This clear picture of the ideal customer is known as the buyer persona.

It is a fictional representation of your ideal customer based on actual data and insights and a necessary step in identifying ICPs. It will help you understand your target audience's pain points, motivations, and goals, enabling you to create targeted and effective marketing campaigns.


Creating a buyer persona involves 3 steps:

  1. Identify the critical characteristics of your ideal customer, such as their industry, company size, job title, and location.
  2. Understand their challenges, pain points, and goals, and consider how your product or service can help solve and achieve their problems.
  3. Collect data on your target audience through customer surveys, interviews, and website analytics.


Creating buyer personas is an ongoing process, and you should review and update them regularly to ensure they remain relevant and accurate. As you gather more data and insights, you may discover new trends and patterns that require adjustments to your buyer persona.


For more information on creating your buyer personas, check out our article on 12 ways to use content marketing for e-commerce.

3. Use content marketing to attract leads

Content marketing is a profitable and cost-effective inbound marketing strategy. For SaaS-based B2B enterprises, attracting new and returning customers is essential. Quality, niche-related content keeps customers on your site, rather than relying on adverts and social media efforts alone.

Content marketing can help attract new leads, address their concerns, guide them, and build long-term relationships. Content marketing channels such as blogs work best for this purpose.

To make content marketing work for you, it's crucial to understand your audience's interests. Delve into social media analytics, and consumer feedback to identify your audience's preferences, and then generate content that meets their demands.

4. Host webinars and podcasts

SaaS partners estimate that by 2025, 80% of all B2B software and SaaS sales interactions will take place online. According to a survey, at least 18% of the top SaaS app businesses use podcasts as a marketing tool.

Webinars provide a platform to communicate with your audience and a great space to demonstrate your products/services, clear any apprehensions surrounding them, and enhance brand awareness.

SaaS companies account for 25% of all webinars taking place online, as most B2B companies believe that webinars generate 75% of a sales lead.

With such a vast market online, you can choose the path of real-time, dynamic communication with your customers through podcasts and webinars. Something as simple as recording a Zoom meeting as a podcast can work.

When hosting a webinar or podcast, it's essential to choose a topic relevant to your target audience and showcase your brand's unique value proposition.

You can use customer feedback, industry trends, and competitor analysis to identify the most pressing topics for your audience.

Here’s our list of the only 6 sales podcasts you will ever need for some inspiration.

5. Participate in social media

According to a recent study by SaaS Partners, YouTube is the biggest contributor to social traffic, with 98% of the top 50 SaaS companies using it.

Similarly, Facebook accounts for 96% of the social traffic, followed by LinkedIn and Twitter, which account for 78% and 72%, respectively.

Social media is essential for B2B SaaS companies looking to build brand awareness, engage with their target audience, and drive revenue growth.

By participating in social media, you can increase your brand's visibility and reach and establish meaningful connections with your potential customers. And while posting fequnetly can seem like a daunting and time consuming task, there are tools that to stremline this process too. Consider using tools to handle your social media calendar or generate Facebook captions.

To maximize the impact of your social media efforts, measuring your results and optimizing your strategy is essential.

This can be done by tracking key metrics, such as engagement rate, reach, and conversions, and making data-driven decisions to improve your content, targeting, and messaging.

For example, the Facebook Business Manager offers an efficient way to manage these tasks. It allows you to centralize all your Facebook marketing activities, manage multiple pages and ad accounts, track performance metrics, collaborate with team members, and make informed decisions to refine your social media strategy.

6. Measure results and optimize campaigns accordingly

Investing in marketing only reaps half of the results; the other half needs to be obtained by measuring the effectiveness of marketing strategies and optimizing them accordingly.


Here are some metrics that can help you analyze and later optimize your marketing strategies:

  • Organic traffic: Monitoring your website's traffic can provide clear insights into SEO optimization and effective marketing strategies.
  • Conversion rate: The conversion rate calculates the number of people who took the desired call to action out of the total number of people exposed to an ad, message, or post. It can give clear statistics on the number of new customers generated due to marketing efforts.
  • Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): You can calculate CAC for a SaaS business by dividing the money spent on marketing and sales by the number of new customers acquired during that period.
  • Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): For B2B SaaS companies running on a subscription model, LTV can be a great metric to measure the total value a customer can bring into a business. It can be compared against CAC to determine if new customers can bring in a higher LTV than the acquisition costs spent on them.
  • Customer churn: The customer churn rate calculates the number of customers dropping out of a subscription/membership to a service during a period. A higher customer churn rate can act as an alarm to SaaS companies to rethink their marketing strategies.

Takeaway

SaaS-based businesses typically invest 80-120% of their annual revenue on sales and marketing during the first 3 years.

Although marketing efforts are essential for any SaaS-based B2B, adopting and implementing cost-effective marketing strategies can be advantageous. During the formative years, the focus is on finding new customers and building a loyal customer base.

Instead of solely focusing on costs, it's important to consider the methods and returns of your marketing efforts. When creating your marketing plan, consider these cost-effective marketing tactics that provide high returns on investment.

Aryan Jalan

Aryan Jalan, a professional SEO consultant boasting five years of expertise, is dedicated to driving marketing success for businesses. An avid learner, he blends work with leisure, exploring books and new destinations.

Table of contents
1. Invest in marketing automation software 2. Create buyer persona 3. Use content marketing to attract leads 4. Host webinars and podcasts 5. Participate in social media 6. Measure results and optimize campaigns accordingly
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