Marketing for SaaS Startups (6 Strategies for 2025)

SaaS marketing for startups is an extremely difficult challenge. In short, you’re most likely very limited in budget. And you want to get traction for your product (potentially product and market fit validation, as well). The question becomes: where’s the best place to put your strategy and focus? Marketing a new SaaS (software as a service) startup is about to get a little easier.

Key Takeaways

• Top marketing strategies for SaaS startups include SEO, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn marketing, YouTube marketing, and email newsletters.
• What makes marketing a new SaaS product very difficult is usually a lower marketing budget. And unknowns when it comes to product-market fit (PMF).
• The easiest method to start marketing your new SaaS startup is to invest in SEO. B2B/Enterprise/B2C still purchases software through Google searchers around pain points and the hunt for solutions.

Top SaaS Marketing Strategies for Startups

Here are my top SaaS marketing strategies and tips for startups that are looking to both get product-market fit (PMF) for their product. As well as get that initial traction from a customer base.

Before we get into the strategies, though, we need to establish whether you’re consumer, enterprise, B2B, and generally what your contract value goals are.

B2B, Enterprise, B2C SaaS Startups and CAC to LTV Ratio

As with any marketing channel for your SaaS startup, you’ll need to consider your overall value per customer. Or value per lead. If you’re a B2B or enterprise SaaS product, there’s a good chance that you’ll have a higher contract value for your software.

As a result, you may have to spend more to get that initial lead. On the contrary, if you’re a consumer (free trial sign up) type of SaaS product, there’s a good chance you have a lower price point per customer, as a result, a potentially lower customer acquisition cost that you’re targeting.

In both scenarios, you may not know your LTV (lifetime value of the customer), which would give you further insight into how much you can spend per customer (to acquire them).

A CAC (customer acquisition cost) to LTV ratio will help you achieve this. A ratio of 3:1 is usually considered pretty good. This means that a customer will bring in three times what it cost to acquire them. However, a good ratio can vary by industry or type of business.

Lastly, though, if you’re a startup, you might not be considering this metric as a driver, just yet.

Strategy 1: SEO

When I say SEO, I also mean content marketing, but content marketing for search. While we may be a little biased, what I can say is that acquiring customers through organic search can be very cheap. In fact, it may be one of the best channels in the early days.

Let me explain why this works really well:

• Startups often don’t have brand recognition or validation that they need to motivate customers to sign up for anything. SEO and content marketing for search can allow the SaaS startup to “stand behind” something. Meaning, particular pain points, problems, and thought leadership.
• It’s generally very cost-effective to perform SEO for highly niche industries. As a result, you can target a number of ideal customer personas for next to nothing (in terms of cost). You just need a sound SEO strategy and some idea that there might be product-market fit.

SEO is a highly underutilized channel for SaaS startups. Often because technology founders think to themselves, “Does SEO even work still?” However, they forget that they often discover products to sign up for using Google themselves (as a consumer).

One really great example of this is Beam Jobs. The two founders took very limited capital from the incubator they were in, went full into SEO, and today are running a profitable SaaS business without the need for paid advertising.

Here’s a few ideas:

• Create solutions pages for your ideal customer personas. Create multiple solutions pages that target highly specific use cases and people. For example, don’t just target attorneys or lawyers, target mass tort attorneys, personal injury, real estate, and more.
• Start writing content based on pain points that you know exist in the industry (as well as doing some keyword research). See if you can target open questions in the industry or pain points that might be highly specific. Write about your own solutions and lead customers to consider your software as part of that solution.

Questions we often get:

• Don’t you need to create a lot of backlinks to rank a new SaaS product? No, not from our experience. Using modern SEO tactics like topical authority can really help to rank a new website.
• Do people really still buy software from Google? Yes. I’d say specifically for SaaS businesses, this is an absolute yes. We’ve been able to take a SaaS product from $0 MRR to $30,000 MRR in less than 8-months through organic search.

Related: SaaS SEO Guide

Strategy 2: Facebook Ads

Somehow, even in 2024 and going into 2025, Facebook ads are extremely effective. I have to chalk this up to the way that Facebook does their targeting. It’s still one of the best platforms for paid advertising (in my opinion even over Google).

However, if you have a very specific B2B or enterprise business, this might not be the best place for you to put your money. You can certainly try it, however, LinkedIn ads might be more effective for you in the long run.

Here’s what you should do:

• Create a really great video advertisement that shows off the pain point and solution that your SaaS product solves for (don’t go cheap on the advertising creative, it really can make or break the entire campaign).
• Test your audience segmentation with small budgets. You don’t want to look for conversions, rather, use FullStory or another session playback tool to know that you’ve found your target customer.
• From there, scale up spend and see if you can get sign ups or conversions.

Strategy 3: LinkedIn Marketing

Somehow, over the years, Twitter/X and other social media tools became replaced (at least in the business world) with LinkedIn. And because LinkedIn has the power to reach a lot of business professionals (especially if you can use your existing network to help ‘go viral’ within LinkedIn), this can be a highly effective way to market your new SaaS product.

My recommendation is that you start posting unique insights, videos, podcasts from industry names in your space, and other material that would align with the industry or market that you’re going after.

You’ve seen this already, most likely. However, based on my knowledge of the strategy, it’s still highly effective in 2024 and will continue to be in 2025.

Related: B2B SaaS SEO Guide

Here’s what I would say to do:

• For at least 6-months, start posting highly impactful content of any kind. Status updates, blog posts in LinkedIn, videos, podcasts, anything that shows you’re interested in the space. If you’re a SaaS product for attorneys, then talk to attorneys on your podcast! Other attorneys will clearly want to listen in.
• If you need to, use small amounts of paid advertising to get your name out there more in the space. The good news about LinkedIn advertising is that you can really easily target specific ideal customer personas, industries, professions, geographies, and more.

Strategy 4: YouTube Marketing

Hear me out, YouTube isn’t really dead, yet! The thing about YouTube is that it’s turning into every other marketing channel or platform—everyone saying the same thing! To get it to work you really have to lean into saying something unique and different.

Try to help people solve real problems. Develop case studies around your target problem set, solve them, then talk about those case studies on YouTube. This is a very effective way of promoting your abilities and solutions.

This is not a new strategy. However, it’s one that requires a lot of thinking and some unique concepts to be put out there in order to truly work. From there, if you don’t acquire direct customers, you can still send them to sign up for a newsletter, try out your product, and then put them into a complete flywheel of marketing and drip campaigns.

Here’s what I would do:

• Browse YouTube for your industry or niche. See what’s on there. Take note of what videos did well. And take note of what no one is talking about.
• Cross analyze subjects on Google Trends or Google to get an idea of what people are looking for. Or maybe having issues with. Use Twitter/X for additional ideas.
• Start creating very BOLD YouTube videos. Use hashtags within YouTube to try and get some immediate distribution.
• Send those visitors to an email newsletter and start the flywheel process of trying to get them to listen to pain points, solutions, case studies, and all your other content marketing ideas.

Strategy 5: Email Newsletters

I sometimes feel like when I bring up email newsletters, I’m back in 2001. However, they’ve really started to work quite well. Greg Isenberg and the Late Checkout folks have really shown that growing a newsletter can be a great way to market a variety of different startups.

Much like YouTube, it’s really important that your newsletter says something unique, different, impactful, and truly worthy of opening up. Considering we all get hundreds of emails per day, if it’s not something that your audience actually looks forward to reading, then it’s going to fall completely short.

Strategy 6: Email Prospects

Is this more marketing or is this sales? It’s hard to say. However, in the early days, you can get referrals for your SaaS product by just connecting with people in your network and asking them to try it. As a result, they might refer to another friend or person who shares the problem.

You can, of course, reach out to people you don’t know, who you think you can help. And then ask them to give the product a try. I’ve seen this work wonders for a variety of SaaS startups. If you were to ask most founders how they got their first customer, this is the way they did it.

What SaaS Marketing Strategies for Startups Doesn’t Work

Here are some tactics that I could just never get to work (meaning, couldn’t get customers to convert).

1. Google ads

I don’t know if it was just me. However, I’ve heard from multiple people that Google really only gives you “the good audience” when you pay really high sums of money. Facebook, on the other hand, doesn’t care.

From FullStory playback sessions, it always looks like Google ads aren’t even sending real visitors. If you can get this to work for you, I commend you. However, I’ve never been able to.

Note: This could be because some SaaS startups simply don’t have G2 reviews or other mentions on other websites to make the retargeting that you might be doing downstream truly connect. It’s unclear to me.

2. G2 reviews, ProductHunt, and other review sites

I’ve promoted newer startups and gotten them #1 on G2 lists. I was always shocked at how few people actually click through from these lists. In general, I think what G2 and other review sites (like ProductHunt) do is bring in people who are interested in “checking it out.” But not really customers.

ProductHunt definitely allows you to bring in Users depending on how you market your SaaS product. But, how long they stay, that’s another question.

3. Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing definitely works. However, much like most CMO’s (chief marketing officers) will tell you, this is usually a channel that’s used down the line. Or in the overall marketing blend, it’s lower on the list.

The reason is that most customers are going to need to know your brand in order for them to be motivated by some affiliate marketing campaign. Whether they go to Facebook, Google, or the various places they can advertise, it’s only going to work if they have some predisposed idea of what your software solution does, what the price point is, and more.

Affiliate marketing works, just probably not as a starting point for your SaaS startup.

4. TikTok ads

TikTok has incredible reach! However, it’s really more suited for CPG (consumer product goods). And not really for SaaS companies. If you’re marketing a book. Or maybe a new gadget of some kind, TikTok might be right for you.

However, I’ve rarely been able to get SaaS leads (sign ups, free trials, customers) through TikTok.

Conclusion: Marketing a SaaS Startup

These are the top channels that I’ve seen work in 2024 and going into 2025, I expect them to stay the same. That’s just because new platforms aren’t coming out like they used to (back in 2010 and so on). In addition, there’s a lot out there that people test. As an example, Reddit marketing and trying to talk about SaaS products all across specific Reddit communities.

If you’ve got a unique and new idea, don’t hesitate to reach out to us and tell us about it. Everything above is simply based on our own experience trying to help SaaS companies get off the ground and what we’ve seen work and not work.