The key to growing a SaaS business is to find a scalable marketing channel that allows you to have a profitable CAC:LTV ratio. Your CAC (customer acquisition cost) to lifetime value of the customer (LTV) ratio should be 1:3. Meaning, you earn a two times or greater profit for the customer that you acquire than it takes you to spend to get that customer. Finding that extremely profitable channel or channels is what will ultimately turn your SaaS business into something highly successful.
Key Takeaways
- Tailor a SaaS growth strategy to your SaaS business: Identify your ideal customer persona (ICP) and choose marketing channels that directly align with your SaaS type (B2B, enterprise, etc.) and pricing strategy. Content marketing, SEO, and referral programs are common but must be tailored to your audience and goals.
- Invest in emerging and modern growth strategies: Combine modern strategies like podcasting, video marketing, and community building with proven approaches such as LinkedIn marketing and email newsletters to build trust and engagement over time.
- Prioritize people, process, and conversion rate optimization: Beyond just generating demand, focus on optimizing your SaaS product for the customer journey. Transparent pricing and seamless onboarding can create effective trial experiences and streamlined sign-up processes.
How to Grow a SaaS Business With Marketing
Growing a SaaS business is not a simple task. Ideally, before you’ve gotten to this point, you’ve reached some product-market-fit for your business. That means that your product successfully solves a paint point for an ideal customer persona (ICP) that can be defined into clear targeting criteria that can help you identify further channels to test and invest in.
Before we get into the best ways to grow your SaaS business, let’s cover some of the most common growth channels that SaaS businesses use:
Common Growth and Marketing Channels for SaaS
The most common growth and marketing channels for SaaS businesses include the following:
- Content marketing: Creating blog posts, whitepapers, eBooks, case studies, and SEO-driven articles to attract and engage customers in their buying journey.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Optimizing website content to rank higher in search engines and attract organic traffic.
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising: Using platforms like Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Facebook Ads to target specific customer segments or cohorts.
- Email marketing: Creating newsletters, drip campaigns, and promotional emails for lead nurturing and retention.
- Social media marketing: Finding a way to build an audience on platforms like LinkedIn, X, and Instagram to engage with users and naturally promote your brand.
- Referral programs: Incentivizing existing customers to refer new users through product-led growth strategies.
- Influencer and affiliate marketing: Partnering with industry influencers or affiliates to promote the software.
- Webinars and live demonstrations: Hosting online sessions to showcase features and provide value to potential customers.
- Partnerships and co-marketing: Collaborating with complementary SaaS companies and tools to reach a broader audience.
- Review and listing platforms: Using platforms like G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot for credibility and visibility.
Out of these channels, obviously not every single one is going to make sense for you. A lot of this can be dependent on whether you’re enterprise SaaS, B2B SaaS, and what type of model that you have for your SaaS pricing and business.
Your pricing models usually are: value-based, competition-based, cost-plus, and dynamic pricing. And these may have some influence on what and where you market your SaaS product.
Okay, so if you’re here, we’re getting into 2025, you probably know everything that people have talked about before. For example, affiliate programs for your SaaS business. Yeah, we’ve heard this before. I’m going to do my best to cover some unique channels and ideas for you that are more modern. Let’s give it a go.
1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Don’t quit reading! You might be saying, “Didn’t we just say that we’re going to cover new SaaS growth strategies?” Yes, we are! Here’s the thing: Google has changed a lot in the past three years.
In particular, there’s a big edge to go out and capture with SEO. And no matter if you’re B2B, enterprise, or consumer, your prospects still go into Google to learn about ways to solve their pain points. Search is still a fantastic way to generate demand and bring in free trial sign ups, MQLs, and SQLs.
BeamJobs, one of my favorite startups, used organic search to grow their audience to more than 500,000 people per month. As a result, the two brothers that founded the resume SaaS startup have become a highly profitable business.
Here’s what you need to know about Google going into 2025:
- It’s getting highly competitive: You can’t just simply say what everyone else is saying and hope it works. Google’s information gain patent (US20200349181A1) is getting used more. The helpful content processor gives us a strong indication of what Google is looking for. And topical authority is more important than ever.
- There’s an edge to capitalize on: Since so many people in the market don’t fully understand how and why Google is evolving the direction it’s going (toward User signals and quick answers to queries), there’s a lot of new opportunity in search.
Creating case studies and using your own software to solve customer problems through tutorials and reviewing software in your space, you can quickly gain the trust of Users who are doing their product research in Google. If you’re curious about our best strategies, read our guide right here.
Our top tips for this channel:
- Learn how to generate truly helpful content. And learn how Google is measuring and rewarding that. Or, hire us to help you do this.
- Create comprehensive service pages that target your ICP (ideal customer persona) and generate topical authority.
- Think about all levels of the journey, from top-of-funnel, middle-of-funnel, and bottom-of-funnel awareness development.
Related: SaaS SEO KPIs to track
2. Podcasting and video marketing
This has been a surprisingly successful strategy for a lot of SaaS businesses in 2024. However, there are some challenges. Podcasting as a growth lever would usually include doing deep dives, guides, tutorials, and having industry guests on the podcast that attract your ideal customer persona (ICP).
Here’s the biggest challenge with podcasting: there’s a lot of new media out there. And unfortunately, there’s not enough time for your ideal customer persona (ICP) to absorb all of it. The answer is simple though, produce enough of a catalog to where you saturate into the market and create natural growth around your channel.
Podcasting should most likely be done through both audio (Spotify) and video (YouTube). Try to get guests on your show that have some industry name to them. As an example, Ahrefs, one of our favorite SEO tools, has done a fantastic job of creating a YouTube channel for themselves. With over 588,000 subscribers, we’re pretty sure this is driving quite a big of demand for them.
Here’s Ahrefs YouTube channel so you can reverse engineer everything they’ve done.
Our top tips for this channel:
- Generate highly entertaining videos that get Users to watch. YouTube relies on watch metrics to naturally promote your channel. Learn how to create entertaining videos for your target audience.
- Investigate names in your industry that “people look up.” If you can bring on guests to the show that people want to hear from, you’ll naturally capture the demand for that personality.
3. LinkedIn marketing
LinkedIn marketing works quite well. It worked in 2024 and it will work going into 2025. The reason is that LinkedIn started to adjust their platform back in 2021 to make it more social media like. As a result, more engagement appeared on the platform.
However, much like X (Twitter) and other social media platforms. You can’t simply promote your SaaS product and hope it works. Your goal would be to create a community around you, using thought leadership to your advantage. In addition, tutorials and interesting productivity hacks are also a great way to grow.
For many of the new AI startups that exist: this is a gold mine that’s been used in 2024. Showing videos of automating tasks in Google spreadsheets and their SaaS tool. Or showing the mass production of email marketing content. By intriguing the User, you can generate demand over time.
Our top tips for this channel:
- Generate a community around your LinkedIn profile before promoting your product.
- Use your product to show off unique case studies, workflows, and applications of the software that are highly applicable to lots of people.
- Avoid simply promoting your SaaS product over and over. Find alignment to a thought-leadership message and repeat this development over time (you’ll need 3-6 months before you experience any growth).
4. Email marketing
Email marketing has made quite the resurgence in 2024. While I expect some exhaustion of these strategies for SaaS companies to occur in 2025, it’s still worth investing into. There’s a good chance you’ve seen the newer email marketing tactics.
The goal is very similar to podcasting and LinkedIn marketing: generate an audience or a community before you start marketing to them. If you’re able to share your unique insights, tutorials, and generally align yourself to being valuable to your audience week-over-week—you can create quite a bit of engagement.
In short, your strategy is to develop an email newsletter list and develop trust with your audience. From there, selling your SaaS product or service becomes far easier. Want to know a simple hack? Many of the top email newsletter SaaS products use very basic Facebook ads to generate their email newsletter list. Then start their content marketing against it to grow the channel.
Our top tips for this channel:
- Be ruthlessly striving to create value and engagement. If you’re not able to generate unique value week-over-week, avoid this channel. Email marketing, due to how many people receive emails each day, is extremely challenging.
5. Community building
Community building is key. Whether you start a Facebook group or a Discord group, your goal is to connect like minded people. This is actually a lot easier than it might seem. If you’re investing in all of the channels above, this becomes your next progression.
For example, now that you have podcasts, now that you have LinkedIn demand, and email newsletter subscribers, your next best investment is bringing the community together. The value proposition for the community is that they can speak with each other, share tips, and generally help each other.
Communities of like minded people are way more important than you might think. For example, let’s say we had a SaaS product for gyms. Building a community of gym owners, who are helping each other, really shows alignment to our SaaS product. The goal is to help your customers. So, if your community helps them, then it’s perfect alignment to earn the trust of your customer and generate trial sign ups.
Related: Marketing for SaaS startups
Our top tips for this channel:
- Think of this as “layering” in your growth marketing strategies. Use other channels as your starting point, then capitalize on them using Discord, Facebook groups, or some other platform for your community.
- Avoid directly selling into the community. Think of this like an ongoing webinar or event that’s taking place. You want to connect the community first, then align your product to the community. Marketing will occur naturally.
How to Grow Your SaaS Business With Optimizations
Once you’ve generated demand for your business, potentially using some of the marketing channels above, you’ll have the next problem: conversion rate optimization (CRO). We can think of this as more than just simply “getting more people to click a button.” For example, is there someone helping you conduct software demonstrations? Is there a good playbook that you’re using to conduct those demonstrations? And that’s just two of the many questions that should get asked.
Let’s dig into a few of the things that you might want to look into presuming that your CAC:LTV ratio doesn’t improve after you’ve successfully executed on the above.
Related: Enterprise SaaS SEO strategies
1. Evaluate your sales funnel
Start by mapping out each stage of your sales funnel. Those are usually defined as the Awareness → Consideration → Decision → Retention stages. Using tools like GA4, HotJar, FullStory, and other session replay tools, you should be able to determine which part of your sales funnel is experiencing drop offs.
Generally, there's missing language or key points that your prospects are expecting to see and aren’t seeing. For example, if you’re hiding your pricing, yet all of your competitors are not hiding their pricing. This would potentially be a mistake. As your prospects are getting more transparency from your SaaS competitors than you’re providing.
Performing User research can also be a great way to determine if something is “off” in the sales funnel. Conduct surveys against existing customers or against your ideal customer personas to see how closely your customers expectations align with your website.
2. Review your trial or demo performance
If you have a contract-based SaaS business, your software demonstrations are going to be the most important part of the process. Once you’ve captured the demand, is the sales team taking that MQL and turning it into a true SQL? A robust SaaS demonstration playbook is usually required to close contracts.
You should have a few things in your SaaS software demonstration:
- The pain points you’re solving.
- The unique abilities that you have against your competitors.
- A snapshot of the prospects' problems.
- A demonstration of solving your prospects' problems.
- A clear outcome from the demonstration that leads to a “contract sent” stage.
3. Analyze your pricing strategy
Your pricing strategy could be disconnected from your competitors. As an extreme example, let’s say that you require your customers to sign a 12-month contract to be in business with you. However, your competitors are offering free trials and the ability to pay for the product through self-service options.
This disconnect could be causing a lot of problems. For example, why would your SaaS customer want to go through a software demonstration with you versus just simply signing up for a free trial from your competitors?
Conducting A/B testing against your pricing strategy might be a worthwhile initiative.
4. Check for product-market-fit (PMF) problems
Product-market-fit is one of the keys to success with any technology and SaaS business. Let’s say that you have your first customer. And you’re thinking to yourself, product-market-fit achieved! Unfortunately, that’s wrong.
Product-market-fit is something that evolves with the growth of your business. As you scale, you should always be determining which part of your product needs to evolve with your customer base. For example, if all of your customers are desiring a particular feature that your competitors offer and you fail to develop that feature—then there’s really only one outcome that you could expect. And that outcome would be customer churn.
Customer churn and your customer churn rate will directly impact your LTV (lifetime value) numbers. As well as ultimately impact your CAC:LTV ratio.
5. Optimize your checkout process
Is signing up for your SaaS product complicated? You’d be surprised. This is a very common problem. Over complicating something that doesn’t need to be complicated. Review the information that you’re collecting from your User to determine if you can make the process easier.
For example, do you need their full name and business name for them to sign up for a free trial? Or can they just simply put in their email address, try out the product, and add those details later? You can minimize the steps required to sign up and become a customer.
Or if you’re generating MQLs/SQLs, are you making it easy to understand the value that the customer is going to receive if they get a software demonstration? Consider your customers time, effort, and the opportunity-cost of them meeting with you.
6. Test and iterate using A/B testing
A/B testing can do two things: clarify and confuse. We like to say that A/B testing can be very useful in helping to prove assumptions and hunches that you might have. Use A/B testing to refine thighs like messaging, offers, and general user flows. Or use A/B testing to experiment with personalization based on user data (e.g., targeted email campaigns).
Common Questions About Growing SaaS
Common questions about growing a SaaS business:
How long does it take to grow a SaaS business?
Realistically, 12 to 14 months is a good number to target for “fast growth.” Anyone who says otherwise may have accidentally stumbled into a marketing channel that’s uniquely providing them more demand than others. However, it’s more common to see slow and steady growth over 12 to 14 months.
This can make funding these efforts more complicated.
What’s the best marketing channel to use to grow a SaaS business?
If you were to ask us, we like SEO and community building. That usually takes place by utilizing digital assets that get created. This would be videos, podcasts, written tutorials, and anything that can display the value of both the team behind the SaaS product and the product itself.
What’s the worst marketing channel to invest in for a SaaS business?
Paid advertising is complicated. It can be a gold mine. However, it can also be a complicated beast to tame. Often, paying for ads is not the secret to generating customers. While it’s not the worst channel, it can be the most confusing. Since you can create advertisements, see clicks, then review session playbacks from tools like HotJar or FullStory and get awfully confused about why the channel isn’t working.
What are important metrics to track with SaaS SEO?
- LTV:CAC ratio to give true "customer acquisition cost"
- Activations or integrated closed-won contracts
- Signup to paid conversion (6-month and 12-month period)
- Churn rate
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Retention rate
- Annual contract value
- Marketing sourced revenue (MSR)
- Top of the funnel leads generated by organic search
- Number of active trials or trials from organic search
- Lead velocity rate (LVR) from organic search
Other SaaS resources
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🕵️ Fact checked
This article was fact-checked for the accuracy of the information it disclosed on:
November 17, 2024
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