Proven SaaS Marketing Strategies And How To Create Your Own

When it comes to SaaS SEO we all like to think that we have the best take on our keywords possible. But the truth is that most marketers get caught up with keyword tools and search volume data when crafting their organic content strategies. As helpful as the guiding tools can be, that’s exactly what they are – guides.

Instead of targeting the largest keyword volumes in your related industry, it’s high time we all consider a more “quality over quantity” approach.

By reverse-engineering your keyword research based on use-case-driven queries and Jobs To Be Done of your ICP, you can create far more valuable and targeted content. Content that will impress your actual end-buyers instead of just impressing the Google bots.

“It’s truly amazing what can be achieved when you look at SEO and Content in a holistic manner that caters to the actual customer as opposed to search engines”
– Brian Glassman | Account Director, Directive

And if you think that lopping off the majority of your keyword volume is too big of a risk to take, think again. When Directive pivoted ZEROFox’s keyword strategy and SEO silos to target user-driven search queries they saw some truly award-winning results:

1. 20% Increase In Organic Traffic
2. 101% Increase In Leads
3. 2 New Pages Ranking in Top 5

If we’re talking about staple SEO strategies we can’t forget the skyscraper technique. If you’re new to the game and don’t know what it refers to, the skyscraper technique is an SEO and content marketing strategy intended to create high-quality, linkable content that ranks fast.

The basics of the strategy are as straightforward as you can get:

1. Step 1: Find link-worthy content
2. Step 2: Make something even better
3. Step 3: Reach out to the right people

The “skyscraper” in the name comes from the old metaphor that if you want to build the tallest building (best ranking piece of content) then take the blueprint of the current tallest building, slap on 20 more floors, and go from there! In a space like SEO where we are constantly trying to find out what our audience is engaging with, working with what’s most popular currently is always a good place to start.

Speaking of linking, SaaS SEO includes far more than just your content’s external discoverability. Just because someone finds your brand’s blog via Google doesn’t mean they’ve necessarily found the right piece of content for them.

This is where your internal linking strategy needs to be more elaborate than simply linking to whatever relevant anchor text you might end up typing.

Customer-aligned cornerstone content allows you to target both high-volume keywords as well as targeted user-driven search queries all ways facilitating user navigation of your site.

Creating large, in-depth, “premier pieces” on high-volume primary keywords creates evergreen assets that Google loves to crawl and rank. At the same time, these large pieces serve as great internal linking hubs for you to subtly promote your more targeted and nuanced pieces of content.

This way, as practitioners read through your cornerstone piece to beef up their knowledge base and the inevitable executive question pops up, you can have a helpful internal piece of content ready to answer that question already linked.

This not only helps your reader and potential customer but also increases their on-site time and post engagement while increasing the views of your smaller pieces – which boosts SEO across the board.

I’m sure you knew this already, but there are quite a lot of advanced tools out there for SaaS marketers to use. One of our favorite software strategies is reverse-IP tracking for customized on-site messaging.

Using tools like Clearbit and Mutiny together, you can track the IPs of the visitors of your site and cross-reference them with your existing account list. If the IP matches with one of the brands on your list, you can customize the messaging of your banners and chatbots to say “Hello [Company X] – how can we help you?”

A personal greeting upon arrival can make all the difference, especially in the overlay enterprise world of B2B SaaS. Remember, we’re trying to connect with brands and people at the end of the day, not just email accounts.

It may seem like an obvious move, but investing in the strength of your brand pays off. Maybe not immediately. But in the world of Silicon Valley where high value leaders hop from company to company, maintaining a strong brand reputation can make all the difference for your retention and your growth.

And to be clear – brand advertising goes far beyond just bidding on your own domain name as a primary keyword!

Your brand is an investment. And just like any advertising agency would tell any client, you need to invest significant budget and time in any growth campaign in order to see statistically significant growth. You can’t put your brand budget on the back burner and expect to grow simply by word of mouth. It’s a competitive space these days, and maintaining top of mind presence is vital if you want to keep your pipeline active throughout the year.

Contrary to what your product team might be telling you, your software isn’t for everyone. But here’s the kicker to that hard truth: operating on the assumption that you can help everyone on Google is actually burning the majority of your budget.

Instead of focusing on third party data and click-based campaigns that burn budget on unqualified engagements, focus on the end customer you’re trying to reach from the get go.

Crafting a clean, qualified, and verified account list or list of your Total Addressable Market (TAM) to isolate your advertising guarantees that every dime you spend is dedicated towards a potential customer. This is one of the strongest first steps you can take towards cleaning up your financial modeling.

When you know that every scent you spend is dedicated towards potential revenue instead of a blind marketing engagement, scaling that budget with confidence comes much easier.

Because we’re talking about customer-led SaaS marketing strategies and we’ve hopped into the shoes of our customers, why not take it one step further? Let’s take a moment to consider how specific SaaS sub industries can really get when you know your customers.

For example, certain government-contract based companies that focus on specific market segments have found that government employees and contracts tend to lean on Microsoft products over Apple. If you know that you’re going to be targeting this TAM, why would you even bother with Google Ads?

When you can customize your platform of choice (like Bing) or even the device your ads are targeting (like Microsoft tablets), you can actually further eliminate budget burn to make your campaigns even more targeted and effective.

When you look at what Directive was able to do for Pelican with a similar strategy, the reason behind device-specific targeting becomes quite clear.

Directive’ dedicated landing page strategy and sophisticated audience segment increased Pelican’s conversion rates by 170% while also decreasing their CPL by 34% for Microsoft Ads (Bing).

More importantly, we were able to boost Pelican’s lead generation output by 210% for their government-focused market segment that was reliant on Microsoft Tablet devices. 

It may go against the gated grain, but ungating some of your most valuable content assets can do wonders for your customer engagement. For example, when you know that scheduling is such a pain point for most modern day business executives, eliminating the friction of time juggling can create huge conversion lifts.

Instead of using “Schedule a Demo” as your CTA and linking to your Calendly (even though it is an industry favorite), try recording a demo video for your leads to download and view at their own leisure. We took all the psychological and logical assumptions that create friction within the scheduling cycle and tested two call to actions:

• “Schedule a Demo”
• “Watch a 5-Min Demo Video Now”

The results of the CTA test were extreme (1.71% Conversion Rate VS. 15.33% Conversion Rate).

Have you ever had this thought?

Why are we wasting time paying the platform instead of just paying the prospect themselves to schedule a meeting?

If you have, then you might be ahead of the game. We took this same mentality to our LinkedIn Giftcard ad campaign early in 2021. The results were…impressive to say the least.

Offering a $100 giftcard to schedule a 30 minute intro meeting and advertising this offer directly to our layered LinkedIn audience built on our self curated TAM was able to radically transform Directive’s entire business model in under a year.

If you don’t have a closed-loop tracking system to correlate your different marketing conversions back to actual sales and revenue, you’re essentially flying blind. This is where the cardinal sin of SaaS marketing starts to rear its ugly head: blind optimization.

Blind optimization is when you get caught up with vanity metrics and platform-based goal setting. By prioritizing platform performance and product marketing strategies you can fool yourself into thinking that you’re doing well when you’re actually burning your budget.

Closed-loop tracking lets you get a closer 1:1 ratio between your conversion value in your analytics tools and the actual value you’re closing (on average) for each sale. This is how you can set accurate goals for your campaigns that will actually move the revenue needle. Otherwise, you’re bound to end up optimizing for clicks or conversions when none of these so-called “marketing qualified leads” are actually making you any money.

If you’ve truly adopted a customer-led mindset and have crafted a scalable SaaS marketing strategy, you’re off to a good start. But that doesn’t mean you can kick your legs up and call it a day just yet. Maximizing each marketing engagement and each touchpoint is how the best marketers truly grow the channel-specific LTV (lifetime value) of the customer they generate.

By leveraging sophisticated tech stacks and integration tools like Segment, Clearbit, Salesforce, and Outreach (what a fearsome foursome, right?) you can create some truly impressive marketing automation.

First, use Clearbit to reverse-IP track incoming track and cross-reference it against your Salesforce TAM data. Then, using Segment integrations, create an automated follow-up sequence within Outreach. If you set up the triggers and integrations properly, you’ll have an automated sales sequence that triggers whenever someone from your TAM lands on your site. Then it’s just a matter of waiting, tracking, and optimizing until you have a fully automated sales system fueled by your incoming traffic alone.

With all the sophisticated tracking and marketing automation available these days, we as SaaS marketers are truly standing on the precipice of AI marketing.

But that’s a topic for another day.