Business-to-Business SaaS Marketing Approaches

Diving into the implementation details of marketing approaches is beyond the scope of this book (I’ll leave that to books like Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown). But I want to include a list of the 20 most common business-to-business (B2B) SaaS marketing approaches so you have an idea of where to start.

Then in the next section, we’ll dive into my framework for filtering and prioritizing marketing approaches to find the best options for your particular situation.

I call these the big 5 because they are the most common marketing approaches that work for B2B SaaS companies.

SEO. SEO is not just about Google. Even though it’s the largest search engine in the world, there are many more search engines people use and which might be best suited to your product.

For example, YouTube is number two, and Amazon is in the top five. There’s the iOS App Store, the WordPress Plugin Repository, the Shopify App Store, the Adobe App Store, and hundreds of other places worth learning how to get your product to rank. Some of these in particular might be where your ideal customer is searching for your solution and have the benefit of being fairly easy to rank.

With Drip, we built a couple of WordPress plugins and ranked well for email marketing-related terms in the WordPress Plugin Repository.

I’ve seen founders build Chrome plugins to rank in the Chrome Web Store. Or write a Kindle book using the expertise they developed running their company to rank in Amazon’s search.

PPC Advertising. PPC advertising is the tried-and-true, usually expensive way to drive traffic quickly. This is where you buy traffic through keywords on Google (AdWords) or in platform-specific marketplaces like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Amazon, Capterra, LinkedIn, and many others.

Cold Outreach. This is outreach to prospective customers directly via email, phone, LinkedIn, or DMs on social media. This works best when you can get a list of businesses that need what you’ve built and can find a signal that they’re at a point in time where they need your product.

For example, at Drip we knew Infusionsoft customers would be looking at new options as their one-year contract came up, so we got a list and pinged them about eight months after their contract started to see if they were interested in exploring other options.

Integration Marketing. This is one of the only marketing approaches that also serves your current customers because it improves your product by adding more features through integration with a partner.

To come up with ideas, think about what steps happen before or after your product. Contact a potential partner and outline what you can offer them by integrating with their platform. Don’t build the integration unless you both agree to promote it. Promotion can include:

• Publishing a blog post
• Emailing both partners’ email lists
• Posting a tweet
• Writing a knowledge base article
• Mentioning your company in-app
• Hosting a webinar
• Listing products in an add-on marketplace

Approach this in an agile way. Start by building a minimum viable integration. Maybe the first version of the integration doesn’t have gold-plated authentication, and instead users have to paste in their keys. However, the first version should be enough to launch the integration and promote it to see if it brings in new leads.

Then, determine which integrations your users are using the most and circle back to release another version that maybe adds OAuth or a simpler integration.

The results of these integration marketing efforts can be long-lasting because many times the articles, forum posts, and other assets produced by the company you are partnering with will be high-converting and produce leads for years.

A related marketing approach is pursuing partnerships. These are similar to integrations, but you can execute them without writing code. Many partnerships are simply a reciprocated promotion of the other product to your audience using one or more of the promotional pieces we discussed.

Content Marketing. Although it is often coupled with SEO, content marketing relies solely on virality or on building an audience slowly over time, without the long-term benefit of organic search.

This includes writing blog posts you hope will make it to the top of social news sites like Hacker News and Reddit and building a media brand alongside your product (something I recommend only for very well-funded companies). It also includes producing content to educate people at different steps in their funnel whom you already have permission to contact.

Most people think of blog posts when you mention content marketing. However, content can include books, ebooks, audio (think podcasts), video (think YouTube), or even in-person courses that are given away to bring links, traffic, and leads and build credibility.

Most founders start by producing the content themselves, then hire people to help with production later.

Amazing companies have been built on these approaches, but your ability to use each one depends on the availability in your niche and the cost to execute compared to your ACVs.

Affiliate Marketing. Affiliate marketing is a common way to tap into established audiences in your industry. You’ll typically pay between 10% and 30% commission to the affiliate. If you’re selling to large companies, affiliates are usually replaced with resellers.

This is almost more of a business development approach than a marketing one because you typically have to build or have a relationship with the influencers who have an audience. Setting up an affiliate account and posting a link isn’t enough to get your affiliate marketing program up and running.

The danger of affiliate marketing is how much affiliate payouts can eat into your revenue.

At scale, most SaaS companies have net margins between 30% and 50%, where a 50% margin is impressive. If you’re giving away 30% of your top line to affiliates, you can have an incredible revenue graph but have the least profitable SaaS application on the block.

One way to be cautious with your commission rates is, for example, to give 20% to most affiliates and provide higher rates (say, 30%) to premium affiliates who have large audiences.

In-Person Events and Trade Shows. Events and trade shows can be a fantastic marketing approach, depending on your industry.

Maybe your product serves an industry where the majority of business is still done in person at conferences and trade shows. To earn buyer trust, you need to meet them where they are. One company I know of is marketing to city governments, and the founder has had success meeting prospective clients at in-person events.

Attending an event may also be a brand-building exercise where you immerse yourself in the community and establish strong relationships with your customers.

Whatever the reason, take a hard look at your ROI. Will landing one enterprise deal give you a return on the cost (in money and time) of attending the event? Then it could be worth it. But if you have to sign up 20 new customers to make your money back, you either need to raise your prices or in-person events are not a fit for your business.

Free Tools (i.e., Engineering as Marketing). Usually tied in with SEO, this approach involves building a software tool you give away for free to generate traffic to whom you pitch your main product. Examples include HubSpot’s famous website grader and SignWell’s e-signature creator.

Hangouts. These are gathering places like online forums, private Slack groups, Facebook groups, and subreddits.

Q&A Sites. This approach focuses on answering questions on Quora, Stack Exchange, and other relevant Q&A sites.

Virality. Make sharing your product with other potential users part of your product’s experience. (We discuss virality in the metrics chapter when we look at my 3 High/3 Low Framework.)

Other People’s Audiences. This involves putting yourself in front of established audiences through guest posts, podcast tours, and YouTube tours.

Daily Deal Sites. These sites promote SaaS products and other software tools at deep discounts. For example, AppSumo and PitchGround.

Launch Sites. These sites curate and showcase new SaaS and software products for clients to discover. They rate them by a voting system. For example, Product Hunt and BetaList.

These are tactics used by such a small percentage of mostly bootstrapped B2B SaaS companies that we won’t focus on them in subsequent sections (but I want to list them here because they might be valuable in certain situations).

Building an Audience/Community/Movement. Five percent of companies funded by my SaaS accelerator, TinySeed, built an audience before they launched. And only a handful more, at most, build one as they scale.

Display Ads. This is buying ads based on a cost per impression rather than cost per click.

Viral/Stunt Marketing. Stunt marketing works for Red Bull, but it’s expensive, and the brand-building that results doesn’t have a measurable ROI.

Speaking Engagements. Although it is not a very scalable marketing approach, putting yourself on stage as an expert in front of 200 or 2,000 potential customers can provide solid ROI and will inevitably strengthen your brand.

PR. PR can help build buzz about your product in the media (either mainstream press or news sites specific to your industry).

Offline Ads. These include billboards, bus stop benches, and radio ads.