To grow a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business, it is critical for B2B companies to market their services effectively. Although there are many challenges that could present themselves along the way – scalability is likely achievable and very possible. The B2B SaaS Marketing Strategies used for any mass audience need to apply various growth techniques.

Therefore, some of these techniques have been around for only a few years, have proven to be critical to the growth of modern businesses.

Let’s dive in and uncover the best growth strategies for B2B SaaS marketing.

Strong B2B SaaS Marketing Strategies for Scalable Growth

The Software-as-a-Service business model is an extremely effective approach, but it’s heavily reliant on steady lead growth to maintain profitability.

For example, music streaming platforms such as Spotify have far outperformed physical sales, and the impact of this type of technology has dramatically modified the music industry entirely.

There’s no doubt that SaaS has taken the world by storm, and to make your SaaS offering successful, you need to have your marketing strategies dialed in.

Content Marketing

First, what is SaaS? To put it simply, it’s a business model that generally operates on a subscription basis. It’s important to keep as many recurring customers as possible to increase revenues and profits. To boost retention and avoid churn, you need to be constantly delivering value.

In addition, content marketing is a way to do just that. It also helps build your brand’s reputation, while generating traffic to your website, and bringing in new leads.

Once you’ve written a piece of great content, it lives on your site and will continue to do its job over time. It’s also a key component to inbound marketing by boosting search ranks and it has the advantage of influencing while offering value to potential customers. You may occasionally need to update the copy to keep it current and relevant, but by and large it drives leads on its own without further investment.

The flip side of the coin is that content marketing might be little-to-no cost investment, but it takes a lot before you start to see a return. The working components of it only work when you stay consistent and put out high-quality content regularly.

This means you’re spending a chunk of your time stoking a slow-burning fire because content marketing isn’t a very rapid lead driver. It’s all about slowly nurturing and warming your visitors into leads.

Don’t just focus your time on creating great content – but consider how people are seeing it. That means SEO, but it also means other distribution channels by ensuring as many eyeballs reach your content as possible.

Test Drives

Nothing convinces a lead that this product is right for them more effectively than using it.

This is especially true if your target audience already understands what their goal is and how your product supposedly helps them achieve it. This should be accomplished by your content on your website, which got them to convert.

Your marketing can make as many awesome claims as you like – if your product can back them up, it can clinch the deal without the lead ever having to be sold to by the rep.

I’m personally a whole lot more inclined to purchase a piece of software if I can give it a go beforehand and make sure it gets the job done. More than anything else, a solid free trial version has led me to buy software I wouldn’t have otherwise.

A trial is valuable for potential customers, and it’s an extremely useful tool for you as well; it’s a great way to gauge possible buying intent.

But not all software you’re able to run a test with beforehand. Simple applications for more consumer-based buying and therefore it’s easier to provide a trial or demo offering. In the B2B space, the landscape or end goal is much more complex. There are multiple layers that a business or company may need a piece of software to accomplish and therefore a trial of it isn’t always possible.

For example, if you are looking for a CRM to help your team better manage their contacts: a 7-day trial will not be enough time to get onboarded, set up your workflows and get started.

In fact, larger SaaS solutions could take up to a month or longer before you’re fully setup, configured, integrated, and trained. After investing that much into a solution, you likely don’t want to swap for another one.

For those who are interested enough in your product to spend time actively using it and testing it out, are qualifying themselves for you. Therefore, you should treat these leads as valuable and high-potential.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This bit sort of overlaps with content marketing. SEO is what enables your content marketing to actively work. Your content is what convinces people, but SEO is what gets those people to your content in the first place.

If your content is buried in the depths of Google, you won’t have much luck with generating leads from it. It’s worth investing time in proper SEO to maximize your reach. The SEO prep should be done before content investment.

For instance, you should have a list of keywords you know your audience searches for. After that you can start strategizing and building your content plan to accomplish your end goal. In this case website traffic increase and lead conversion.

You can split SEO into two broad categories: on-page and off-page.

On-page SEO is all the factors that are under your control, and that you can perform on your pages manually. However, things like keyword strategy, metadata, alt tags and headings. Or internal linking, page load times and even the general UI/UX all play a role.

SEO is a big topic that’s worth doing a deep dive into.

Off-page SEO, then, is logically the factors that impact a page’s rank that aren’t on the page itself. This mostly means external linking – that is, when other people link back to your page. Google sees it as more valuable and engaging content.

Link-building for B2B SaaS Marketing Strategies aren’t as hard to implement as many people think. But, they do have to be credible and white-hat. Meaning, you genuinely are linking to a page because you like the content. And not because you’ve been paid or endorsed to do so.

Having authoritative, respected websites linking back to your pages is incredibly valuable from an SEO point of view.

And that tracks back to writing high-quality, engaging content. If your articles are  well-written and thoroughly researched, you’re halfway to success already.

Google Ads

SaaS is a fiercely competitive industry, and even if your SEO is on point and you’ve got your content ranking number one within Google’s searches, your competitors can still swipe traffic from you with Google Ads.

When you search for … well, anything, you’ll see a few text blurbs at the top of the page before the results. Those are Google Ads, and they’re always above the top results.

Even if you get a featured snippet, where Google displays a bit of your content on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) itself, their ads are still on top. So, your competitors’ ads will probably be showing up there.

The solution? Get in on it yourself and outbid them, putting your ads above theirs. The great thing about Google Ads is that you can put as much or as little budget into it as you want. You can toss in a tiny bit of spend and see how it goes and scale up slowly.

If you do it wrong, though, you can blow your entire budget without any kind of return or results. Here’s an article that will help you to do it right.

Email Lead Generation

If you’re looking for a cost-effective way to scale up your B2B leads, you can’t do much better than cold email campaigns.

Email Lead Generation is exceptionally good for SaaS growth, especially in combination with the other strategies on this list. That’s because it drastically broadens your reach. This will allow you to get your marketing in front of your target audience in a unique way.

First, you purchase a nice, large list of cold B2B contacts that match your target audience from a reputable data provider. This is important – if your data source isn’t great, your list will be full of useless data.

The bigger your purchased list, the bigger your results will be. The true power of cold B2B email is in scale is that you’ll generate a lot more leads with a list of 100,000 contacts than with just one thousand.

Next, you upload your list into Clickback’s ELG platform, when you do, every contact is run through a series of in-depth, rigorous hygiene checks that cleans out bad data, spam traps and hard bounces from your list.

Now you can successfully send marketing campaigns to that freshly-cleaned list. The trick here is not to try any lower-funnel tactics. Your contacts are totally cold, and that means they’re not even top-of-funnel. They haven’t even gotten near your funnel.

Your goal should be to drive your contacts to a landing page. So they can fill out a form to opt in, entering your funnel. In conclusion, don’t try and hard-sell them on anything at all yet. In the beginning all you want is their permission to drop them into your funnel.

From there, you can push them into your marketing automation. Or you can also use a CRM software and nurture them just like any other lead.

It’s easy, and cost-effective. See it in action for yourself with a free 1:1 software demo.