7 Best SaaS Marketing Strategy Examples to Inspire You

The digital marketing industry was revamped when the concept of SaaS businesses was introduced. A business model based on cloud architecture, marketing automation, and niche target audiences was bound to shake the business world. This has created a need for SaaS marketing, since typical marketing approaches aren’t good enough for SaaS products.

According to Statista, the global SaaS industry will be valued at $157 billion in 2020. The success of the SaaS model and effective SaaS marketing has made it one of the fastest-growing industries. In 2018 alone, 16 major SaaS players went public with massive IPOs, including Dropbox, Spotify, and SurveyMonkey.

According to McKinsey, any SaaS company with a growth rate of 20% or less has a 92% chance of not existing in a few years. This goes to show that most SaaS companies, successful ones that is, have growth rates that average around 40-50%. This trend can be seen in both B2B and B2C SaaS companies, given that companies like HubSpot, Salesforce, and Netflix have seen massive growth rates over the years.

Considering the success of SaaS businesses, many SaaS marketing teams have come up with genius marketing plans over the years. Their marketing efforts have exponentially driven the growth of their businesses.

With that being said, the following case studies are some examples of genius SaaS marketing campaigns to inspire you.

1.      Squibler – SaaS Company Built and Scaled in 1 Year

Squibler is a SaaS company that was built to help writers practice and connect with other writers. It also doubles as a novel writing software that helps novelists and screenwriters by making the writing process easier, convenient, and faster.

My co-founder Dhaval Bhatt and I saw an opportunity, and wanted to bring all prompt practitioners under one roof.

In just over 8 months, we were able to get the website to a point where it was receiving 4,500 new users every month – along with more than 200,000 monthly visitors.

We found that most of the visitors were more interested in actual tools that would help them write. Considering that, we developed several writing tools and templates for different writing categories. Each of these had their dedicated landing pages and soon enough, we started receiving qualified leads.

The next step was to get a lot of backlinks, so we published over 100 high-level articles on the blog.

To further grow Squibler, we acquired a viral writing app and incorporated it with Squibler. The traffic and backlinks from that app came over to Squibler.

Using a simple SEO technique of adding a 301 redirect to the app, Squibler’s domain rating went from 18 to 66. With increased customer acquisition and a good conversion rate, we were able to sustain and improve Squibler even more.

Key Takeaways

Here’s what you can learn and apply from this SaaS marketing strategy.

1. It’s imperative to get backlinks to grow your SaaS company and you can only get those with high-quality content.
2. Try to create a SaaS company around a solution, rather than a service. It will save time, effort, and resources and will make inbound marketing a lot easier.
3. It’s a smart move to acquire other SaaS companies and apps that can complement your SaaS business. Just always make sure that the business in question can help your SaaS company grow exponentially.

2.      Moosend – 10x Organic Traffic in a Year Compared to Other Email SaaS Companies

Moosend is an all-in-one marketing platform that specializes in email marketing.

Moosend received modest organic traffic and leads, but it was nowhere near their goals. As a result, they conducted a thorough SEO and content audit and started to see which content was effective and valuable, and which content wasn’t necessary anymore.

This helped them weed out information gaps and gave them insights into what was missing. They revamped their content marketing efforts, developed a new keyword strategy, and optimized their promotional strategy.

Furthermore, they introduced a new value proposition. They came up with a great product/service called Refine after identifying pain points from their audits.

Refine is a free subject line tester that provides subject line suggestions with the help of an advanced self-learning algorithm.

Combining these two efforts, Moosend successfully increased their organic traffic by 10 times. Meanwhile, their free tool was also being mentioned on review sites.

Key Takeaways

Here’s what you can learn and apply from this SaaS marketing strategy.

1. At times, doing a proper content and SEO audit helps realize what you’re lacking, pointing you to new opportunities for growth.
2. Introducing a freemium model always helps, and the best way to do so is by bringing in potential customers by offering a free tool.
3. If you provide a solution through a free tool, you will eventually get free recognition on platforms like review sites and LinkedIn, and may even receive positive testimonials and mentions in webinars and podcasts.

3.      Lumen5 – 100,000 Monthly Visitors with 8 Months of Content Marketing

Lumen5 is a dedicated social media marketing tool for video creation. It’s powered by A.I. and helps people create high-level video content within minutes – without needing any past experience or training.

I worked with Lumen5 to increase their monthly traffic from a mere 25,000 visits to over 500,000 in just over 11 months. They had the marketing budget to invest in content for both their blog and webpages. This allowed us to publish 30 extremely high-level blog posts to increase organic traffic, while creating 27 engaging landing pages to get more leads.

These efforts helped them garner over 200 natural backlinks, while increasing organic traffic by 75,000 monthly visitors.

That’s not all, Lumen5 also partnered with Canva by publishing blog posts about them, helping them rank for keywords like ‘Canva Pro,’ ‘Canva pricing,’ and ‘Canva for work.’

One of the blog posts snagged the featured snippet for the keyword ‘Canva Pro’ and started driving more than 2,000 monthly organic visitors. This helped them get that partnership with Canva, helping them expand into the image category.

After the partnership, Lumen5 added multiple CTAs that link back to Canva.

Key Takeaways

Here’s what you can learn and apply from this SaaS marketing strategy.

1. Good content isn’t necessarily limited to blogs, developing engaging landing pages will also drive traffic and get you backlinks.
2. The quality of blogs posts always trumps quantity. Lumen5 drove their traffic to six-figures with only 30 posts, and that’s evidence enough.
3. Partnerships will always drive growth and traffic, and you don’t need to develop complex business plans to get one. All you need are good marketing campaigns and an influencer.

4.      Atlassian – Complete SEO Strategy Helped Double Organic Traffic

Atlassian provides complete tools to help with project management, software development, collaboration, and code quality.

It was already an established company with almost 700,000 organic visitors per month. However, that doesn’t mean that it was at its zenith.

The company hadn’t paid attention to SEO in a while, which severely limited any future organic growth. For the first time, the company started a complete content and SEO audit on existing assets, while revamping their objectives and identifying relevant KPIs to track.

Meanwhile, a technical SEO team was tasked with identifying potential technical SEO upgrades.

With this holistic SEO strategy, the company’s organic traffic doubled in three years to approximately 1.4 million organic visitors per month.

Atlassian is now valued at almost $30 billion.

Key Takeaways

Here’s what you can learn and apply from this SaaS marketing strategy.

1. Without proper SEO, you will eventually stunt your growth. You need to focus on both content and technical optimization for the best results.
2. Having a freemium sign-up model helps with onboarding and leads to a high(er) conversion rate.
3. While you may have customer retention with existing customers, getting it with new users is more important, something that requires good content assets.

5.      FutureFuel – Using SEO to Get 100,000 Monthly Visitors in 9 Months

FutureFuel is a debt management SaaS platform that helps people organize their student loan debt.

Using a complete SEO strategy and lead generation marketing tactics, I helped increase FutureFuel’s monthly traffic to 40,000 after just 3 months, and in 6 months, that number went up to 100,000 monthly visitors.

The idea was to publish good quality content, based on user intent, to drive organic traffic. Keeping that in mind, an employee benefits directory was created that had benefits-related information on hundreds of companies.

This helped draw in more than 60,000 organic visitors from Google and also helped get more than 500 high-level backlinks. The directory content ranked for highly competitive keywords like ‘employee benefits,’ ‘HCM software,’ ‘student loan grants,’ etc.

If the current trend continues and the growth continues, FutureFuel will have more than 200,000 monthly organic visitors by the end of the year.

Key Takeaways

Here’s what you can learn and apply from this SaaS marketing strategy.

1. A good mixture of SEO and a detailed content marketing strategy is bound to help rank in search engines, while exacerbating the influx of new customers and potential customers.
2. The natural backlinks you receive by publishing good content acts as the perfect growth catalyst.
3. With the right approach, you can genuinely reach 6-figures in organic traffic for highly competitive keywords.

6.      Postfity – Doubling the MRR in 8 Months with Outreach and Content Marketing

Postfity is a social media automation platform that schedules your posts so they’re faster and easier to analyze.

Postfity’s MRR growth had gone completely flat for over two years and their sales cycle was declining because they didn’t have a specific marketing strategy.

They hired a growth hacker, Emilia, who decided to deconstruct existing assets and build new ones. Emilia set up goals to improve SEO efforts, content quality, and increase asset output tenfold.

After that, they started creating 12-week content sprints based on a niche with low keyword difficulty. They did this for several niches like how to promote a language school. Then, they used social media and email marketing funnels to promote that content.

Meanwhile, they also started link building and guest posting to gather more backlinks. In 8 months, Postfity’s MRR doubled, and so did their organic traffic.

Key Takeaways

Here’s what you can learn and apply from this SaaS marketing strategy.

1. Rather than using PPC or referral programs, Postfity used the power of content marketing and outreach to build reach and increase conversions, which led to more MRR.
2. It’s not necessary to focus on one niche, you can focus on several niches and develop different kinds of content assets such as blogs, white papers, etc. However, it’s best to focus on one niche at any given time.
3. When your company’s marketing department and sales teams aren’t working out, it’s best to hire a growth marketer.

7.      Zendesk – Revamped Branding with Research and a Fake Band

Zendesk is a cloud-based CRM software that helps with sales, customer engagement, and helps build better customer relationships.

Zendesk had almost 125,000 users worldwide, but still had room for massive growth. Their social monitoring team noticed that a lot of people were searching ‘Zendesk alternative’ on search engines while they were also noticing a lot of churn.

Zendesk didn’t take it as a negative thing, but as an opportunity. They created a fake band with the name, ‘Zendesk Alternative.’ They built content around it including a band website, a funny band video, and social media profiles. To further solidify it, they joined music sites like Reverbnation and Bandcamp.

The band website ended up getting 95% more conversions than Zendesk’s own website. This helped revamp Zendesk’s branding, which subsequently helped increase traffic and conversions on their website, as well.

Key Takeaways

Here’s what you can learn and apply from this SaaS marketing strategy.

1. Customer dissatisfaction and negative publicity can be (and should be) taken as an opportunity to revamp your processes.
2. Social listening is one of the most important activities you can do to find potential problems and potential growth opportunities.
3. Coming up with a unique marketing strategy will always work as long as you have data to back it up.

Making Your Own SaaS Marketing Strategy

The aforementioned case studies are proof that you don’t need complexity to succeed. Instead, you need simplicity, clear goals, a good understanding of SEO and content, and potentially, the best product managers. They must have in-depth industry knowledge whether you’re working on a work order software or CMMS software.

You need to check your website, your content, your SEO efforts and see whether you’re doing your absolute best.

There’s a good chance that you’ll realize that something is lacking. That will help you understand what you can do to make sure you’re back on track.

The thing about SaaS marketing is that it’s never hit or miss. You will always help your brand and website in some way. It’s up to you and your efforts on how much impact you want to make.  

Josh Fechter

Josh is the founder of The Product Company.