Exploring a few real-life SaaS marketing examples is a terrific way of learning how to build brand awareness in the B2B subscription software space.
There’s plenty of theory available on how to leverage SEO and content strategies for all kinds of businesses. But looking at the experience of other companies can help when it comes to developing an effective strategy that works in practice.
As we’ll see, that’s particularly important for SaaS businesses, since they operate on a very specific business model – and that has implications for choosing the right marketing strategy.
What’s different about marketing for SaaS businesses?
To build an effective marketing and SEO strategy for SaaS products, there are a few aspects of the SaaS field you need to take into consideration. Since subscription-based software companies have a business model that relies on client retention, the principal objective is to foster a long-term relationship with customers.
Sales cycles in SaaS tend to be longer than they are for consumer goods because the potential buyers are B2B companies. They’re generally slow to commit to a purchase since they prefer to weigh up their options carefully. In addition, the final decision is usually a joint one made by a number of executives rather than one individual.
This means that simply finding high-quality leads and converting them isn’t enough. Once a new client comes on board, the emphasis switches to engaging and retaining them – and, hopefully, identifying opportunities for cross-selling or advocacy that will lead to attracting other potential customers. In other words, client communication is key.
How does this affect SaaS marketing strategies?
For B2C brands, a marketing manager might focus on a combination of consumer-friendly strategies like influencer marketing campaigns and social media posts to reach a wider audience and increase brand awareness.
But for subscription software products, increasing brand awareness is all about building authority over the long term. That’s because it’s a highly competitive area, and it takes time to establish a loyal user base.
Successful marketing campaigns in the SaaS space begin with developing a dedicated strategy. Using a SaaS marketing plan template, you’ll define specific KPIs and metrics to measure as you work toward reaching your marketing goals.
SaaS-focused search engine optimization focuses on proving your worth as an expert in your field rather than simply listing out product features and hoping for the best.
To make it work, there are a number of best practices to follow. Let’s take a look at what those are, along with some examples of companies that have managed to implement them successfully.
5 SaaS marketing examples and success stories
Harnessing the power of modern search engines to drive organic traffic to your website is a terrific way of reaching out to your target audience. The humble blog post can be an incredibly effective conversion tool if you use it correctly. Here are five areas to focus on to optimize your SaaS marketing efforts.
Focus on keywords
To begin with, we’re going to talk about keywords. Selecting appropriate keywords is about much more than just aiming at the high-volume ones. In the SaaS space, many companies inhabit a very specialized niche, so their potential users are likely to be searching using quite specific queries.
That means the first step is to conduct keyword research to find appropriate long-tail keywords and lower-volume keywords that are directly relevant to the business. Aiming to hit those keywords maximizes the relevant traffic to your site, which is much more important than reaching a larger audience that isn’t as interested in what you have to sell.
Freshworks
Freshworks markets its product Freshsales as a sales CRM solution, and indeed, sales CRM is a keyword the managers there chose to put a heavy focus on when they were revamping their SEO strategy. They did this because:
- Sales CRM is a perfect description of the product, so it was highly relevant.
- Competitors were ranking for this keyword.
- At the same time, it had a relatively low volume, so ranking for it would be easier.
They decided to optimize their website based on this one keyword. And it worked. In the ten months immediately after it implemented this and other SEO-friendly changes, Freshsales saw their organic leads growing at an average of 9.7% month-on-month.
Creating authoritative content
Of course, keywords alone do not a digital marketing strategy make. Producing high-quality content on a regular basis is fundamental to building trust with prospective customers and current customers alike. There are a number of content collaboration tools that can help with content creation in a practical way, but the most important thing is to focus on creating an effective strategy.
SaaS operators need a blog content strategy that’s based on their unique expertise. The aim is to cultivate a reputation that marks them out as industry experts in their niche. The content should be useful, informative, and engaging to read. Over time, this helps attract more qualified leads and boost customer acquisition rates.
UpLead
UpLead’s core product is a platform for bringing B2B sales professionals together with potential buyers. As well as maintaining a very informative and helpful blog, it also leverages its core expertise by publishing in-depth case studies. These feature stories from UpLead clients who have had great success using the product.
This makes for an excellent combination of engaging content with social proof. It’s valuable content because it showcases how effective the product is and explains exactly how UpLead delivers for its clients.
Optimizing structured data
Your content marketing strategy doesn’t just depend on content quality to be successful. There are also certain things you can do on the technical side to boost your rankings. One of these is to make sure you’re making the most of structured data on your website.
Without getting too deep into the technicalities, structured data is a way of presenting information on a page that helps Google understand what the content on it is about. Google also uses this data to populate features like direct answers, knowledge panels, and news carousels. So, optimizing your structured data helps the search engine put your brand in front of more potential users.
Zapier
As part of an SEO strategy overhaul, the automation software provider Zapier reviewed the way it was using structured data on its site. The overall effect was to make Zapier’s core product features and functionality more visible to search engines.
Zapier must be doing something right. According to Ahrefs, its blog alone attracts around 1.6 million organic hits every month.
Developing a solid link-building strategy
Building authority in the SEO sense isn’t just about having superior expertise. It’s also about how much other people trust that expertise.
This is where having a robust link-building strategy comes in. For SaaS companies aiming to cultivate their reputation, fostering partnerships that encourage reputable sites to link to their content gives a great boost to any awareness campaign.
Because inbound marketing for SaaS operators is so crucial to the business model, putting a strategic approach to link building in place can make a massive difference to user growth.
Canva
The design creation powerhouse Canva had 135 million active users in over 190 countries as of Q4 2023. When you consider that the equivalent figure was just 30 million in 2019, that’s stunning growth.
A number of factors contributed to driving this rapid expansion, but one of them was a heavy focus on building backlinks. Canva pushed hard to develop a link strategy that increased its domain authority over time. This included creating partnership and affiliate programs that helped grow its visibility fast among the creator community.
Boosting technical SEO
We’ve already mentioned unstructured data, but there are other technical aspects to optimizing performance that matter because of the way organic searches work. These factors all come under the heading technical SEO and can make a big difference in how well a page ranks. They include:
- Organizing the structure of the website to assist the search engine e.g. by using a sitemap.
- Optimizing content for viewing on a mobile device.
- Keeping page loading speeds to a minimum.
- Ensuring adequate site security.
Any SaaS marketing team worth their salt will put a priority on making sure not to drop the ball on technical SEO. The small details all add up to create a better user experience and a more search engine-friendly site.
Salesforce
So, it’s no surprise that one of the biggest names in business software seems to pay very close attention to optimizing its technical SEO. Salesforce’s website speed test shows a load time of around 600ms. Given that anything under two seconds is generally acceptable, this is pretty good going.
Final thoughts on these SaaS marketing examples
The main point to remember is that the SaaS space has certain characteristics that mean prioritizing building brand and domain authority is vital. In particular, the subscription-based business model means a focus on customer retention is essential for long-term success. SaaS marketing software play a crucial role in this process.
Building brand awareness for SaaS products takes time. But as the examples included in this article show, it’s the best way of increasing client trust and securing long-term, sustainable business growth.
Nick Brown is the founder & CEO of accelerate agency, the SaaS SEO growth agency. Nick has launched several successful online businesses, writes for Forbes, published a book and has grown accelerate from a UK-based agency to a company that now operates across US, APAC and EMEA.
