There’s this belief among SaaS founders that “a great product will market itself”, but in reality, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Having a great product is half the battle won. Anyone can build a great product but few can build a great product and get it into the hands of paying customers.
If you’re anything like me, coming from a technical background, marketing can seem pretty intimidating. After all, the skills you gained from computer science don’t naturally align with marketing. They almost feel like complete opposites.
But here’s the thing, marketing isn’t as hard as it looks. I was able to learn it to market my business TrustUGC. In this blog post, I’m going to teach you everything I learned about marketing, so you successfully market your SaaS business.
Before going into depth on all the different marketing channels, I want to write a brief disclaimer that every business is different. What worked for my business, won’t necessarily work for yours.
You need to market based on your ideal customer. If you’re a B2C SaaS, you might find TikTok marketing very effective, whereas if you’re a B2B SaaS perhaps LinkedIn is better.
Another factor you’ll need to consider is your pricing model. If your product is only $10/m, you won’t be able to use certain marketing channels such as Paid Advertising or Cold Outreach (the cost is simply too high).
Let’s get into the different marketing channels now 👇
I’m going to cover the 4 marketing channels I believe every SaaS founder should start with. I used all 4 of these channels when marketing my SaaS, so I have direct experience with them. As my experience in marketing grows, I plan on updating this blog post with my new findings.
Search Engine Optimization is a tried and tested marketing channel for SaaS companies. When people have questions they go to Google. You want your company to rank when potential customers search for solutions you offer. For example, my company is a testimonial collection tool, so we aim to rank on the search term “Testimonial Collection Tool”.
SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. It can take months to see results with SEO. As Google starts trusting your domain more, you will start ranking higher.
Our SEO Strategy:
Our approach to SEO includes:
SEO Tips:
Further Learning:
If you want a full guide on SEO, check out: Ahrefs SEO Guide.
Organic social media marketing is where you post content on social media to provide value for your target audience, eventually directing them to your service. We used social media marketing to grow our business. We specifically used Twitter to engage & connect with our users.
Our Approach:
You can get a sense of how we utilized Twitter in our early days by checking out our account: @trustugc. Our focus was on engaging content that resonated with our audience, encouraging them to explore our service further. We also used TikTok & Instagram, but our results there weren’t as good as Twitter.
The “Build In Public” Trend
A popular form of organic social media marketing is the “build in public” trend you’ve probably seen. This is where SaaS founders share their journey on social media, to drive traffic to their service. There are a lot of great accounts that do this. Check out: @levelsio & @timb03.
If you’re just starting out, direct outreach is one of the best ways to acquire your first few customers. The direct outreach strategy is simple: find potential customers in your niche and reach out to them with a tailored pitch of your software. This is also a great way to get validation that the problem you’re solving is actually a problem.
Our Outreach Approach:
Outreach was the very first thing we did when we launched TrustUGC. We emailed our ideal customer, got on a call, and showed them a demo of what we were building. This hands-on approach got us paying customers before we even had the payment processing fully set up on our website!
As our business grew we eventually stopped doing direct outreach. Product demos are very time-consuming, and given our price of $10/month, it wasn't feasible for us to hire a sales team. This led us to pivot to other marketing channels that I mentioned in this post.
Paid advertising is an expensive way to drive traffic to your website quickly. This method works great for SaaS companies with a pricing model of $50/m+. However, even if your product is priced lower, paid advertising can still offer value, particularly in terms of product validation and gathering early user feedback.
Our Paid Advertising Approach:
We primarily used paid ads on Twitter and TikTok to target our ideal customer base. While we found that running the ads was too high to continue with, these campaigns provided us with the initial user base that we needed. The users helped give us feedback and shaped our product development.
Tips for Paid Advertising:
There’s only one way to find out which channel is best for you, and that’s by experimenting! Here’s an approach you can use:
Marketing isn’t easy, but if you work on it every day you’ll eventually find what works for your SaaS. Every successful SaaS you see, once stood exactly where you are right now.
If you found this blog post useful, feel free to share it with others. I’m going to continue to update it over time with any new findings. In the meantime, I wish you the best with your SaaS!
My name is Ben and I’m the co-founder of TrustUGC, a tool that helps businesses collect and share testimonials. You can find my personal Twitter here: @ugcben.