B2B SaaS Marketing Systematic Processes & Tactics

The individual issues that limit results for the B2B SaaS companies we work with vary widely.

For example, if it’s a search engine optimization (SEO) issue, companies experiencing similar outcomes can have entirely different things holding them back.

One might be experiencing technical issues like competing URLs. Another might be lacking comprehensiveness in their content. And another might simply need some link building to build authority.

The same goes with paid media. One company might be suffering from targeting and messaging issues. While another may have tracking and attribution errors. And yet another simply hasn’t found customer-channel fit.

However, while there are many individual errors and gaps that we help our clients solve, these are typically just symptoms of a deeper underlying problem. It’s the tendency for marketers to haphazardly string together a mix of outbound and inbound tactics, without intentionally syncing them together in a holistic strategy.

In short, their marketing is “tactics without strategy.” It’s like trying to navigate without a map. And it’s a sure fire way to hit a ceiling with your growth.

This is what led us to develop the Predictable Growth Methodology — our SaaS marketing strategy for increasing recurring revenue for demo and trial based B2B companies.

The SaaS Predictable Growth Methodology 1

Instead of thinking of each tactic as their own individual effort, Predictable Growth helps SaaS marketers coordinate their tactics to ensure they’re working together — which helps them breach the growth ceilings they otherwise tend to run into.

It’s designed so that any B2B SaaS business, no matter what stage or state they are in, can systematically pinpoint their marketing problems and opportunities, and implement changes to grow revenue in a strategic way.

The 8 steps to Our Predictable Growth Methodology are:

  • Step 1: Evaluating Your MRR Accelerators (So You Know Exactly What to Optimize for Growth)
  • Step 2: Understanding Your Customer’s Intent and Pain Points
  • Step 3: Pinpointing Why Your Visitors Aren’t Converting
  • Step 4: Educating and Motivating Ideal Prospects
  • Step 5: Driving Right Fit Traffic through Paid and Organic Channels
  • Step 6: Creating a Proof of Concept Pilot Project
  • Step 7: Measuring Results, Generating Insights and Compounding Results
  • Step 8: Creating Your MRR Acceleration Roadmap (Assigning What Will Happen When, and Who Will Be Responsible for Results)

We’ve written several detailed case studies demonstrating how we’ve applied Predictable Growth to help our clients. These are great places to start learning about our strategy and see how it has played out in practice:

  1. Paid Media Case Study: How We Grew TouchBistro’s SQL’s to over 130 Demos per month Through Facebook Ads
  2. SaaS SEO Case Study: Increasing Hurdlr’s Google Rankings 70% for 21 Strategic Keywords
  3. How We Grew Structure Studios’ Revenue from $8M to $12M in 2 Years

Below we have organized our top articles that detail the nuanced strategies and marketing tactics that make up our overarching strategy of Predictable Growth. Feel free to begin scrolling, or use these links to jump the the topic that interests you most:

Foundational SaaS Marketing Strategy: Positioning, Personas, Channels, and More

B2B SaaS Positioning Canvas: Clarify Positioning with This Tool (Before You Blame Product-Market Fit) 

Getting your positioning wrong leads to a whole slough of problems. This article discusses how SaaS businesses go wrong with positioning, and provides a SaaS Positioning Canvas that companies can use to refine their positioning (along with a detailed example of how to fill it out).

Our Process for Implementing B2B SaaS Buyer Personas That Actually Work 

It’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to appeal to each of the stakeholders in your target audience at once. When you do this, your messaging and content are diluted down such that they are less compelling for any one of the individual personas. Instead of really resonating with one of them, your content and messaging falls short with all of them. This piece covers a 4 step method to targeting multiple B2B SaaS buyer personas by scaling campaigns one persona at a time.

How to Identify Your Best Customers: A Systematic Process for B2B SaaS Companies

“Identifying your best SaaS customers” is often an ambiguous endeavor. At best, most will create SaaS buyer personas to base their marketing around — but there’s a lack of refinement that we believe can be the root cause of many marketing issues that companies struggle with. This article covers the process we use to identify ideal customers for our clients, including tactics like leveraging CRM data, surveying existing customers, and pooling knowledge from in-house departments (from customer success to sales teams).

Customer-Content Fit and Journey-Offer Fit Workshops: Examples of What It’s like to Work with Powered by Search

If you’re going to allocate a serious budget to an agency to handle your digital marketing, you should have a clear idea of what it would actually be like to work with them. This post shares 4 in depth examples of the workshops we do with our clients during our SaaS Pilot Program.

Stop Blaming Product-Market Fit for Your SaaS Growth Problems

Founders of B2B SaaS companies are uniformly concerned with optimizing product-market fit. This article covers six other types of fit that B2B Saas companies commonly have issues with that get mistaken for issues related to product-market fit.

Customer-Channel Fit: How to Identify the Right B2B SaaS Marketing Channels 

Many B2B SaaS companies abandon their paid media channels too early, without fully exploring all the options available to them, and based on hunches instead of data. This post walks through our process for testing channels for optimal fit (striking a balance between what drives leads and is also cost-effective).

How PPC and SEO Work Together: Specific Use Cases and Examples for B2B SaaS

There’s a lot of talk in the digital marketing world about the importance of better collaboration between paid advertising and SEO teams, but in the B2B SaaS industry, that talk often fails to turn into action. In this article, we share specific examples of client insights and decisions that have come as a result of our SEO and PPC teams collaborating on client projects — as a way to demonstrate the tangible benefits of actually implementing this collaboration.

SaaS Websites and Landing Pages

The Anatomy of the Ideal SaaS Website: Best Practices from Our Authority Architecture Framework 

Many SaaS websites are built without a customer journey strategy, content strategy, or an appreciation for the needs of people at different stages of the funnel. This article details our strategic approach to creating SaaS websites that solves that, including how we think about the overall flow of a site, to how we approach must-have pages like pricing pages and feature pages.

SaaS Website Redesign: How We Used the Authority Architecture Framework to Rebuild This POS Software Company’s Website

This is an in-depth case study of applying our SaaS website framework to IQ Interactive’s restaurant POS product. In it, we describe the specifics of what we did, including the way we structured their new site, the on page elements we implemented to increase conversions, and preliminary results.

Creating the Perfect SaaS Landing Page Isn’t Enough. Here’s How to Map Your Pages to Your Sales Funnel. 

What often goes missing from this conversation (and from the landing pages of SaaS companies we speak with) is how to tailor your landing pages to your target user’s stage in the buyer’s journey. This piece covers our approach to that and includes visuals that map out our different landing page flows, as well as finer details on core elements like call-to-actions (CTAs) and proof points (eg. testimonials, badges, etc.).

Competitor Comparison Landing Pages: A Strategic Approach for B2B SaaS 

Competitor comparison pages are valuable assets for customer acquisition, yet many SaaS companies get these wrong. They’ll either create thin pages that don’t make a true comparison, they’ll bash their competitor, or sometimes they won’t even create the pages at all. This post provides high level thoughts on our process for creating comparison pages, and a detailed breakdown of a page we made for a client.

SaaS PPC Campaigns Falling Flat? Here’s Our Exact PPC Optimization Process 

We’ve noticed that many SaaS companies make changes to their PPC marketing campaigns too soon, and without ever having established a baseline to measure performance. This post discusses how to establish a baseline, the problems with overly narrow targeting and choosing the wrong conversion goals, and our 5 areas of focus when optimizing PPC campaigns for our clients.

B2B Paid Search Strategy: Critiquing Keywords and Landing Pages of 2 Top SaaS Companies 

In this article, we provide an analysis of the paid search strategies of two best-in-class SaaS companies. We discuss what each company did well throughout their funnel, where we found mistakes and missed opportunities, and what we’d do differently if they were our client (including mocked up examples of how we’d update their landing page copy).

Our 7 Step Account Based Marketing Strategy for B2B SaaS (Plus 10 Mistakes to Avoid) 

In this article, you’ll get our 7-step account based marketing (ABM) strategy for B2B SaaS, including how to segment your target account lists based on your customer personas, and how to break your list down into quartiles based on the value of prospects so you can allocate more budget to high value accounts than lower value accounts. This strategy is based on what we have seen our top B2B SaaS clients and other leading B2B SaaS companies do.

The “Boomerang Method” Remarketing Strategy for SaaS 

Many SaaS companies use a one-size-fits-all approach to remarketing that completely disregards the fact that their audiences are made up of people who have engaged with them in different ways, and thus need to see different messages in order to convert. This post covers our remarketing strategy and how our process fixes that.

How to Market to Software Developers: The Channels We’re Betting On (and How We’ll Approach Each) 

Marketing to the developer community is a notoriously difficult task for B2B SaaS companies. Choosing the right channels, offers, and messaging is key. This article offers practical advice for marketing to the development community, the channels we’re betting on, and specifics about how we plan to approach each.

Google Ads

Having Trouble Scaling Your Google Ads Campaigns for SaaS? Here’s What You’re Likely Missing

Google Display Network (GDN) reaches around 90% of internet users, and yet we continue to find that many SaaS companies choose not to leverage it. This is just one of several opportunities being missed that’s leading companies to hit a ceiling with their Google Ads spending. This article covers these and the 5 core tactics of our Google Ads strategy for marketing SaaS products.

Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads for B2B SaaS: Creating Advanced Audiences and the 80/20 of Messaging That Works 

There is an occasional tendency among B2B SaaS companies to write off Facebook as a viable channel for reaching potential customers. Often, they’ve either tried using Facebook ads that haven’t worked or they’ve opted not to try them at all. This piece covers how we think about messaging and offers for Facebook Ads, how we leverage them for remarketing, and how we create advanced audiences.

LinkedIn Ads

Why Your B2B LinkedIn Ads for SaaS Aren’t Working and What to Do About It

In our work with B2B SaaS clients, we find that about 50% of the time LinkedIn is the most effective channel for lead generation. And yet many companies come to us who either haven’t tried it because it’s too expensive, or have tried it in a limited capacity and seen subpar results. This piece shares our step by step approach to LinkedIn Ads for B2B SaaS.

SaaS SEO Strategy

SEO Strategy for B2B SaaS: Tying KPI’s to Revenue and Prioritizing Actions That Drive Results

Prioritizing actions that drive results is one of the key elements of our SEO strategy. In this article, we cover the things that make our approach to SEO different from most agencies out there, our SEO workflow (to give you a sense of timelines and what it’s like to work with us), and our 3 pillars of focus.

SaaS SEO Mistakes: 9 Areas Where B2B Companies Can Fumble without Knowing It

In the world of SEO, we think learning about what not to do is particularly useful for achieving better results. This is because even if you’re following the majority of SEO best practices (eg. writing great meta descriptions, optimizing title tags, etc.), your SEO marketing efforts can still underperform if you get certain fundamental things wrong. In this article, we cover common and lesser known mistakes, including things like neglecting long tail keywords and or missing branded keyword opportunities (letting review sites like Capterra siphon away organic traffic from you).

The Crucial Step Often Missed in B2B SaaS Keyword Research (Plus Our 5-Step Research Process)

Between Moz, Backlinko, and Ahrefs, there are many great resources that explain the process for doing SaaS keyword research, but we’ve noticed that the majority of them skip what we see as the first crucial step. The first step is to talk to the people in your company who talk to customers (sales and customer success teams). This post covers how we do that and the rest of our keyword research process.

Backlink Strategy: A Focused Guide for B2B SaaS Companies

While there’s a fair amount of understanding that backlinks are useful assets for improving SEO metrics, many SaaS companies opt not to focus on them — instead working on content creation or on-page SEO. But backlinks are often what help get the rankings increases you need to reach page 1 of Google search results. This article covers how we approach link building for our clients.

Technical SEO Services for B2B SaaS: Our Process and #1 Learning

Technical SEO errors are super common among the SaaS businesses we’ve worked with. Whether they’re experiencing duplicate content issues, missing canonical tags or redirects, slow site speed, or any other number of issues, failing to address them holds back their SEO. This post covers our process for improving the technical SEO health of our clients’ websites.

How to Defend Your #1 SEO Rankings When You Outrank Your Competitors

Most of the conversation in SEO is about how to get to the top, not about how to stay there. But for SaaS companies that do reach position one for their bottom of the funnel keywords, very often they’ll shift their focus away from those terms to tackle other terms higher in the funnel. As a result, their competitors end up taking over top spots for keywords they previously owned. This post gives marketing teams a process to make regular updates and defend their top rankings.

SaaS Content Marketing Strategy

B2B SaaS Content Marketing: 10 Principles to Generate Leads Through SEO

Many SaaS companies that produce content have trouble getting it to rank, leaving the door open for their competitors to win in organic search results. In this article, we lay out 10 underlying principles for SaaS SEO content that will help ensure the effort you’re putting into your content will be well received by both search engines and your target audience.

B2B SaaS Content Strategy: How to Map Your Content to Each Phase of the Funnel

For SaaS companies that have been doing content marketing for 6 or more months and haven’t seen meaningful increases in traffic or marketing qualified leads (MQLs), it’s often a result of not having mapped their content to the funnel. In this article, we’ll show you a simple way for you to develop a SaaS content marketing plan to do that.

The Buyer Awareness Matrix: A Content Strategy Tool for B2B SaaS

This article is for companies that want content strategy to be a part of their SaaS marketing plan, but don’t have a framework to design this. In it, we break down our Buyer Awareness Matrix that maps out the content types we’ve found work well in each stage of the funnel. Then, we describe how SaaS companies can think about using it based on their market type. Finally, we wrap up with our recommendations for putting this tool to actual use.

Why B2B SaaS Companies Should Stop Ignoring Lead Magnets

This post describes the common mistakes we see being made in the marketplace when it comes to lead magnets — the ones B2B SaaS companies can learn from and avoid. Then we walk through what makes an effective lead magnet, the specific types we’ve found work best for B2B SaaS (beyond the traditional webinars and white papers), and a detailed example of a calculator we created for our client CartHook.

4 Strategic Content Ideas to Speed Up Enterprise SaaS Deals

During long sales cycles, there is all this time and opportunity where SaaS companies can use marketing to support and speed up the sales process, but they often don’t. In this piece, we share specific content ideas we’ve been testing or thinking about trying with our clients, and then wrap up with our thoughts on how to implement these tactics yourself.

Analytics and Attribution

B2B Marketing Attribution: A Practical Guide for SaaS Companies

Many SaaS companies do not have proper tracking and attribution set up, and therefore can’t properly evaluate and optimize their conversion paths for acquiring new customers. In this post, we discuss the difference between attribution before and after a demo or trial signup, and how the latter requires the use of HubSpot or Salesforce data (or whichever CRM you use) whereas the former is looked at through analytics. Then we walk through our favorite Google Analytics report for attribution and show you how to access it yourself.

SaaS Email Marketing

How to Increase Conversions in B2B SaaS Trials: 6 Must-Have Customer Lifecycle Emails

Often we’ll speak with SaaS companies who say they experience lower than ideal conversion rates during trial periods. This article discusses why we think that is, and covers how to use email marketing to set up a great trial and onboarding experience for new users. We share the exact customer lifecycle email campaigns we use to increase retention and conversions with trial users, and turn more of them into paying subscribers.

SaaS Marketing Budgets

What Most SaaS Companies Get Wrong About Marketing Budgets ⁠— and the Data-Based Method for Finding the Right One

SaaS startup founders and executives commonly underinvest in marketing. Whether due to uncertainty about which channels to invest in, a narrowly product-centric approach to business, or bewilderment about how to calculate their LTV-to-CAC ratio (lifetime value to customer acquisition cost), they tend to get their marketing budgets wrong. This post covers our simplified equation for calculating LTV (Monthly Recurring Revenue / Monthly Churn) — and explains how to work backward from your target MRR to get to the right budget.

How to Budget for SEO: Our Thoughts on Budget Allocation for B2B SaaS Companies

Unlike paid advertising, SEO often takes six months to a year of investment to begin producing ROI. But when you’re doing it well, the overall money you spend to get page one rankings can continue to produce ROI for as long as you’re able to stay there. In contrast, as soon as you switch off investment in paid ads, ROI stops. So how do you factor this in when you’re trying to figure out how much to budget for SEO? This article shares our thoughts on this.

The Business of SaaS

Marketing Agency vs. Marketing Consultant: Common Misconceptions and Specific Use Cases for One or the Other

In this article, we debunk some of the myths about working with agencies and consultants, compare and contrast agencies and consultants to explain their key differences, and lay out specific use cases where it makes sense to hire either a marketing consultant or an agency.

Marketing Agency vs In-House: The Biggest Difference That No One Talks About

When companies are deciding whether to hire an in-house marketer (or in-house marketing team) versus an agency, they often struggle with the decision. There are advantages and tradeoffs with both decisions, and this piece gives our take on the biggest difference that no one talks about.

You Don’t Need an All-Star Marketer to Achieve Your SaaS Growth Goals. You Need Talent-Trajectory Fit.

Hiring great marketers is almost always one of the top challenges our prospects and clients bring up in conversations with us. Talent-Trajectory Fit is the framework we’ve used to solve this problem for ourselves. Its function is to make a clear and direct connection between your growth goal, and the people you choose to hire to achieve it.