For anyone working in SaaS, time and resources are in short supply. As you roll out a new business strategy, a well thought-through SaaS marketing plan will save time and money, maximizing the value of your efforts and making the most of your budget. Every company is unique, and there’s no one-size-fits-all template, but our framework will get you headed in the right direction.
What is a SaaS Marketing Plan?
A B2B SaaS marketing plan is an expert strategy to promote and sell a SaaS product.
Pre-sale, a Saas marketing plan typically involves using a combination of tactics including social media, SEO optimization, content marketing, free offers, and direct communication to create awareness, generate leads, and acquire customers. Post-conversion, a successful SaaS marketing plan retains customers and maximizes lifetime value.
What Are the Parts of Every Great SaaS Marketing Plan?
Let’s take a look at the components that should be in every SaaS marketing plan:
1. Executive Summary
Set the stage for the strategies and actions that will follow. Include 3 core sections:
About the Product
Describe your product, who uses it, how long it’s been on the market, is it considered a cheap/expensive option compared to your competitors? This brief overview of your product will be an effective way to convey your offerings.
Vision and Mission
Determine the vision and mission statements of your SaaS. Your vision statement should focus on the future while the mission statement is about what you’re doing today to achieve your goals.
Objective of Plan
Summarize how marketing contributes to the growth of your business. This statement should reflect your overall strategy outlined in the pages that follow.
2. Objectives and Goals
Clearly articulate financial targets, conversion metrics, and the strategic aims of your business and marketing efforts.
Set clear, measurable, SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) targets to help determine sprint workflows and make tracking ROI easier. Some examples of SMART goals could be:
- Generate 50 sales qualified leads over the next quarter
- Increase organic traffic to website by 25% over the next six months
- Convert 100 new users from marketing campaigns by end-of-year
3. Market Analysis
Conduct a thorough market analysis to fully understand your industry. Make your SaaS marketing plan as impactful as possible by tailoring each section with the data and insights you uncover.
SWOT
A SWOT analysis assesses your position in the market and highlights any significant factors that could potentially impact the overall success of your SaaS. A SWOT analysis consists of 4 parts:
- Strengths
- Weaknesses
- Opportunities
- Threats
Strengths and weaknesses are internal factors that affect the ability of your business to grow and succeed. Opportunities and threats are external forces that you have no control over.
Unique Selling Proposition
Your USP sets you apart from the competition and is an important aspect of your SaaS marketing plan. It’s what your customers will love about your software. While it helps to have a USP like a feature that competitors are lacking, it can also be something that may not be able to be measured. “User-friendly”, “time saving”, or “intuitive UX” are all valid USPs.
Competition
Identify your direct and indirect competitors and take note of their online presence. Who are they? How many are there? Are they running ads on channels that you’re thinking about running a campaign? How do their websites rank for keywords you might be targeting? These exercises will give you a better idea of who your close competitors are so you can keep an eye on what they’re doing.
Product-Market Fit
SaaS product market fit is the degree to which a product satisfies a demand in the market. It’s one of the key indicators that investors use when judging the scalability of your SaaS. Here are some questions to ask yourself to determine whether or not you have achieved product-market fit:
- Does your target market genuinely need your product?
- Is the demand for your product fully articulated?
- Are there gaps in your competitors’ products that you can fill?
4. Target Market and Personas
Detailing the target market and customer personas will align your SaaS marketing plan with the needs and behaviors of your ideal customers.
Your ideal customer profile, or ICP, is a description of the type of company that is a good fit for your SaaS. Determining your ICP is especially helpful if you decide to use account-based marketing, or SaaS ABM strategy, to focus on marketing your product to these targeted companies.
SaaS personas also refer to your target market and are sometimes confused with ICPs. The difference is that while an ICP refers to the type of company you’re marketing to, a buyer persona refers to the actual people of those organizations. Determining a buyer persona involves defining their seniority level or job title, what type of company they work at (your ICP), how long they’ve been there, what their challenges and goals are, etc. Your SaaS may have a few different buyer personas, each should be a decision-maker.
5. Messaging Framework
Ensure consistency and clarity across all marketing and sales communications by laying out the core messages that will resonate with your target audience.
Your framework will typically contain your value proposition or tagline, messaging pillars to set your brand apart, proof points to add credibility, and use cases so that prospective customers can understand how your product will solve their problems. Highlight the particular advantages of choosing your product over the competition’s such as ease of use, proprietary features, or outstanding customer support.
6. Marketing Mix/Channel Plan
Once you’ve narrowed down your target market, how do you plan to connect? Map out the channels you’ll utilize to educate customers, generate leads, and build brand awareness, along with setting clear objectives, goals, and key performance indicators (KPIs) for each channel.
Paid search, social media advertising, email marketing, and SEO are just a few of the common advertising channels. Each channel has different costs and timeframes associated with them, along with various pros and cons of using each one.
7. Sales Enablement/Conversion
This section of your SaaS marketing plan is crucial for aligning sales and marketing efforts. It will ensure that your sales team is well-supported and can efficiently convert leads into paying customers. Tailor the specifics of the tools, content, and processes to match your product’s unique selling points and the common challenges faced by your sales team.
The content of your ads should be determined based on your earlier competitive analysis, goals for the campaign, and how you’ve defined your target audience. What are your competitors offering in their ads? Is your goal to generate MQLs or SQLs? What are your buyers’ pain points? Your ad content should include an offer your target audience will want in exchange for providing their contact information. For example, this could be a SaaS demo, a free trial, access to a case study, or a helpful template that provides value to their business.
If your goal is to generate leads, then having a solid lead nurture strategy is critical in turning those MQLs into SQLs. Effective lead nurturing starts with engaging your leads and demonstrating value with the content you share with them. Leverage a marketing automation tool like HubSpot to support your efforts.
8. Marketing Technology Stack
Outline the tools and technologies that will enable your team to execute your strategy efficiently and effectively. At a minimum, your martech stack should include tools for:
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Manage customer interactions, track leads, and maintain customer data with a CRM system like Salesforce or HubSpot CRM. These platforms will help you organize and leverage customer information to improve relationships and sales processes.
Marketing Automation
Platforms like Marketo and HubSpot Marketing Hub automate marketing campaigns, email marketing, and lead nurturing. They streamline marketing efforts, ensuring consistent and personalized communication with leads and customers.
Analytics and Reporting
Use tools like Google Analytics to track and analyze website traffic, user behavior, and campaign performance. You’ll gain valuable insights to inform data-driven decision-making and optimize marketing strategies.
Content Management
With a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, you’ll be ready to create, manage, and optimize digital content for websites and blogs, maintaining an engaging online presence that supports content marketing efforts.
Email Marketing
Platforms like Constant Contact and Mailchimp are used to design, send, and track email campaigns and newsletters. Leverage their capabilities to nurture leads, engage customers, and improve conversion rates.
The options for a B2B martech stack are virtually unlimited. You can also incorporate tools for social media management, SEO optimization, customer feedback and survey collection, webinar hosting, and so much more. Determine your most pressing needs, research platforms that can meet them effectively while staying within your budget, then prioritize accordingly.
9. Budget/Resource Allocation
List all of the marketing-related costs you can think of. Compare them to your assets to determine the viability of your plan and convince stakeholders of its value.
Document everything you’re going to need to reach your goals. Your budget should include staffing costs and other expenses associated with content creation, SEO, audience modeling, and other needs, as well as costs for distribution via the channel or channels you’ve decided to use. Compare those expenses to the amount you’ve been given to work with.
For example, if your goal is to get 50 leads from a Google Ads campaign and your forecast shows a fully envisioned average cost per lead (CPL) of $500, then your overall campaign budget should be around $25K. Do you have that much to work with, or do you need to make changes to your SaaS marketing plan?
10. Execution Plan/Implementation Timeline
Provide a clear roadmap for a phased rollout of your marketing strategy. This timeline should include key milestones, deliverables, and activities for the next 12 months.
The start and stop date of any given effort will depend on several factors, as will its duration. Take variables such as traffic volume, budget limitations, audience size into consideration, along with the relevance of your messaging if the campaign is focused on an event like a tradeshow or conference. Allow time for your campaigns to be fully optimized and for you to implement SaaS market segmentation, but don’t let them run for so long that your content becomes stale.
11. Performance Measurement, Analytics, and Optimization
Include a structured approach to measuring marketing performance in your SaaS marketing plan. Set clear expectations for what success looks like and how decisions will be informed by data. Ensure efficiency and effectiveness by tailoring the selection of tools and the frequency of reporting to your organization’s needs. Share data with stakeholders via regular reports.
Define KPIs
Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are SaaS marketing metrics for determining how well a campaign is performing. The metrics you choose as your KPIs depend on the goal of your campaign.
- If your goal is to increase brand awareness, your KPIs might include the amount of website visits or new social media followers from a campaign.
- If your goal is to generate leads, then the total number of leads generated would be your top KPI. You might also want to include conversion rate and cost per conversion so you can measure how efficiently your campaign is running.
Monitoring and Tracking
Monitoring and tracking metrics are critical to the success of any marketing project and should never be deprioritized. Without these steps, you won’t have the data that lets you know if your efforts are performing as expected. Sending emails or launching a newsletter? Make sure that links in your marketing emails are trackable so that you know what communication is driving traffic to your website.
Every advertising channel has its own ways for you to set up tracking. For example, if you’re running ads on Facebook you’ll want to make sure that you’ve installed the Facebook tracking pixel on your website. Similarly, LinkedIn provides its Insight Tag to help you measure the impact of your campaigns on the platform. For Google Ads, use conversion tracking to understand how effectively your ads are driving desired actions on your site.
Optimization
Even though you’ve spent a lot of time getting your messaging and target audience just right, you can’t just launch a campaign and let it run itself. Ongoing optimization is necessary. Once a campaign has been running, analyzing new data will help you improve its performance. For example, imagine you’re running a LinkedIn campaign targeting senior level employees and you notice in your demographics report that some of the job titles are irrelevant to your SaaS. You’ll want to exclude those so you don’t waste your marketing budget showing your ad to the wrong audience.
12. Conclusion and Next Steps
Help readers understand what you’ve shared. Highlight the key takeaways and outline the actionable steps to move forward.
You know what you want to accomplish and how you’re going to do it. Summarize your plan and share one more high-level view of your vision to get the buy-in you need to proceed.
Now that you have an idea of all the moving parts involved in a SaaS marketing plan, it’s time to build your own! Download our free SaaS marketing plan template and use it as a framework to reach your goals in your next marketing campaign. It’s our gift to you.
