How SaaS Marketing is Unique

SaaS marketing is not limited to selling a product. Marketing for SaaS is to advertise the subscription of a service. 
All the activities of SaaS marketing connect to the one purpose, convincing prospects to become your customers. 
It’s a subscription based digital service, where customers are pursued online. 

Unlike traditional marketing where customers buy products as a one time interaction, SaaS marketing is more about customer relationship cycle management. 
All the methods of SaaS marketing lead to

• Drawing prospects’ attention

• Turning them into customers

• Nurturing them to stay longer

You start the process with multiple steps simultaneously. You establish your product in the niche market and segment ICP for the service your product provides. Throughout the other steps, you generate the leads based on the ICP. 

Furthermore, you polish your product’s website through SEO and content marketing, so that people find you when they search for their needs. 
Finally, you maintain the customer lifecycle to avoid churn. What is avoiding churn? It is to keep the cycle going and prevent the customer from dropping out. 

10 Core Services of SaaS Marketing Explained  

For SaaS marketing agencies, the responsibility of conducting marketing for your SaaS product is huge. Each agency has a different approach, but they all should have some core services available for SaaS companies.

Content Marketing

Firstly, you attract people to your website by showing them that you have what they need. You create valuable content for getting people to click on your website, which will make your brand more recognizable to people. 

Properly done content marketing educates customers of what they need in SaaS. This also generates leads and nurtures leads through gate content, where you can find who is really interested in your product and who to nurture with further value. 

Lead Generation

Lead generation accumulates prospects. There are two types of leads. Marketing Qualified Leads that are interested in your product. Sales Qualified Leads are one step higher, they want to buy the product.

You generate leads through gated content that attain the contact details of visitors. Running outbound cold email campaigns is also a good idea for persuading prospects.
Webinar registration, google ads, and other paid methods are also good options for lead generation that SaaS marketing agencies help you with. 

Email Marketing

Email marketing can be a part of the lead generation process, but also more than that. Through email marketing, you can send cold emails to outbound leads and expect prospects to convert. 

But more than that, email marketing helps you manage the customer lifecycle in a personalized way. 

You can onboard customers through email marketing, continue connecting with them through emails. The customer's whole journey from trial to conversion can be conducted through email marketing. 

Search Engine Optimization

What SEO does is it optimizes, updates and improves the content of your website so that you rank higher in search engines. More importantly, SEO makes sure that your content reaches people who need it.

Keyword strategy, content writing, backlinking etc fall into activities of SEO. Keyword research in content writing is important to align with what people are searching, so that the content ranks and fulfills people’s needs. Overall, SEO is important to match the content with the audience’s intent. 

Backlinking/Linkbuilding 

When a website finds your content valuable, they link your website to themselves, which is a backlink. Backlinks are a declaration of trust that vouches for your quality, as a result, higher SEO ranking.  

Backlinks increase the readers’ value of your content, increasing your brand recognition, becoming an automatic marketing point. 

Pay-Per-Click

Pay-per-click, commonly known as PPC, is a monetary form of  marketing that can generate instant traffic to your website. In the PPC method, your website is advertised to the audience when they search something relevant, and with every click of the audience to your website, you pay. 

Through PPC advertising, your website and product’s information become easy to reach to people, bringing in a swarm of engaged traffic. Engaged, because the people are willingly clicking on your PPC advertisement. 

Social Media Marketing

Through social media marketing, your brand and product information get closer to people, building credibility and familiarity with your company. You don’t have to advertise or promote only your products’ services. On social media, you can build connections with your customers as an audience. 

Posting about useful topics, fun facts, tutorials, theory breakdowns, ‘how to’ guides etc can familiarize your brand as a credible source of information and service in the industry. 

Conversion Rate Optimization

With CRO, you make sure that the traffic coming to your website converts at the maximum rate. In this process, you decide which method of conversion works the best. 

CRO is complex and long term, depending on factors such as customer behavior with existing traffic. CRO service optimizes your website to make it more user friendly for conversion, for example, through

• Free signup

• Demo booking

• Paid plan upgrading   

Digital PR

Similar to social media marketing, Digital PR is also about establishing yourself as a credible figure, maintaining an online reputation. Backlinking, linkbuilding, and social media marketing fall under digital PR. 

You can reach out to bloggers and journalists for building links in articles. You can also establish yourself, especially your company’s CEO, as a thought leader for positioning your strength in the industry. 

UX Optimization

User Experience or UX optimization can define the ripple effect of conversion for SaaS. How the value proposition is conveyed through the website, how comfortable the user is with the landing page and the product page, these are the factors you deal with for UX optimization. 

A SaaS marketing agency covers all these services for your SaaS product and company. 

The Research Criteria 

For researching this blog, I’ve selected 7 SaaS marketing agencies ranking them in no particular order, evaluating them based on the services of SaaS marketing. The agencies are analyzed considering how many services of SaaS marketing they provide. The services are:

1. Content marketing,

2. Lead Generation

3. Email marketing

4. SEO

5. Backlinking/Linkbuilding 

6. Pay-per-click advertising 

7. Social media marketing 

8. Conversion Rate Optimization

9. Digital PR

10. UX Optimization

The analysis of the selected SaaS marketing agencies include how many services they provide from this checklist of services.

Best 7 Marketing Agencies for SaaS and What They Do the Best

Let’s look at the 7 best selected SaaS marketing agencies and what services of SaaS marketing they provide. 

NinjaPromo

Founded in 2017, NinjaPromo is located all around the world including London, New York, Dubai, Toronto, Sydney and Hongkong. They claim to be an all in one digital marketing agency for SaaS. They provide subscription based marketing services where SaaS you can get a bundle of services in one subscription. 

Their services include: 

• Social Media Marketing, where they conduct paid advertising campaigns for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Linkedin and TikTok. 

• Search Engine Optimization that includes website audits

• Link building that includes influencer marketing

• PR and outreach enhancing your company’s online reputation

• For content marketing, they conduct video production and video marketing

• They provide B2B and Linkedin lead generation, with outbound and inbound marketing and demand generation,  including LinkedIn outreach and content creation. 

• They provide branding strategies and guides

Along with web design and UX optimization, NinjaPromo covers a wide range of services that makes them a competent marketing agency for SaaS. 

Kalungi

Kalungi was founded in 2018 in Seattle, Washington, providing growth as a service for B2B SaaS products. With their account based marketing service, Kalungi’s full stack marketing team conducts targeted and personalized marketing campaigns. Their design team crafts the brand identity for you, contributing in UX optimization through web design.

Content marketing is one the significant services of Kalungi. Going beyond just writing articles, Kalungi’s team educates your customers with valuable and well-articulated content creation. They provide SEO services to drive revenue along with ranking. 

Kalungi does provide a range of services for SaaS marketing, however, according to their website, they miss out on some services as well, such as lead generation, email marketing, PPC and social media marketing. 

Bay Leaf Digital Service 

Founded in 2013 in Texas, Bay Lead Digital matches almost all the services of a marketing agency for SaaS. They claim to be a full service SaaS marketing agency providing growth for SaaS companies. Their services include: 

• Marketing strategy aiming to nurture leads and close deals

• ICP targeted PPC campaigns

• Content marketing that attracts prospects

• Brand awareness growth with thought leadership 

• Providing SEO strategies for increased visibility and boosting brand awareness

• With marketing automation and CRM integration, they 

  • Streamline buyer’s journey  

  • Optimize and segment contacts

  • Turn qualified leads into winning prospects

• Social media marketing for various channels 

• Marketing analytics to monitor results

• Optimizing UX and CRO

According to the services elaborately broken down in their website, they cover most of the services of SaaS marketing agencies. 

Powered by Search

Based in Toronto, Powered by Search was founded in 2009, specializing in B2B SaaS marketing. Paid-per-click advertising is one of their services. They provide SEO services by understanding customers’ pain points with the aim to convert leads into prospects for search optimized content. Powered by Search provide account based marketing approach that includes:

• Full funnel content strategy and analytics

• ABM list building based on ICP and personal mapping

• Researching social networks and directories for list enrichment

• Paid media campaign for traffic acquisition and segmented prospecting

• Content creation and copywriting

• Implementing marketing automation for turning cold leads into warm ones

Their content marketing service aims to increase engagement and lower bounce rate by growing demos and trials. They provide the service of data driven SaaS digital PR, along with linkbuilding for backlinks. As part of their Demand Generation service, they conduct lifecycle email marketing as well to nurture leads. They also have SaaS website design that falls under UX optimization.  

NoGood

Headquartered in New York, NoGood was founded in 2016, claiming to exceed expectations with the new goodness for SaaS marketing. Their SEO service includes keyword research, content creation and technical SEO. Leveraging AI and comprehensive audits, they analyze your SaaS market to help you gain authority and leadership in the area. 

NoGood takes the responsibility of content marketing with audience engagement. From awareness to conversion, their content marketing approach covers it from the start with their dedicated team of creators, writers and audit specialists. 

They have the service of Conversion Rate Optimization by eliminating friction points and turning traffic into revenue. With email marketing campaigns, NoGood maintains the lifecycle marketing for clients’ customers. 

They also provide the service of PPC marketing and paid social advertising. NoGood is one of the agencies that covers the maximum of the services of marketing for SaaS. 

Growthrocks

Founded in 2014 in London, GrowthRocks is an agency that promises growth for SaaS companies and products. Their services focus on creating growth for companies, that are: 

• Growth Hacking, which is a holistic approach towards marketing that aims to get faster and more users with less money, improving user experience.  

• Product led growth, where the focus is on the users of the SaaS product

• Assisting companies with AI consulting

• UX optimization for growth

• Measurement of visitors’ journey, traffic analysis, measuring page views and users with analytics

• Building tools and resources reaching more people, with engineering and marketing

• Raising brand awareness with social media strategy

• Inbound marketing for exciting or acquired customers

• SEO strategy, audit and copywriting, including link building 

• Performance marketing and PPC advertisement

• Outreaching audience

• Nurturing prospects by providing valuable answers, sharing relevant content on social media, the process being called social selling. 

• Content preparation and copywriting, along with distribution and promotion

Growthrocks not only follows the process of SaaS marketing, but also provides extra steps for growth as well. 

Directive

Directive was founded in 2014 in California. Among their services, they provide content marketing for B2B SaaS, crafting content powered by data. Their SEO friendly content is crafted in a way that aligns with your ICP. With their SEO service, Directive provides technical audits, SEO content creation, keyword research, along with link building and authority development. 

Going beyond traditional SEO where the company ranks in search engines, Directive conducts Generative Engine Optimization or GEO for ranking in LLMs. Their ABM strategies not only focus on ICP or buyer personas, but also focus on real buyers based on buyers’ behavior. They conduct paid social marketing campaigns for brand awareness and revenue generation. 

Directive’s CRO service optimizes conversion funnels and landing pages. Directive provides the services lead generation and lead nurturing. Their go-to-market strategy service helps SaaS companies in messaging, product positioning according to ICP analysis. Directive does demand generation as well. 

Just like Growthrocks, along with the common services of SaaS marketing, Directive goes above and beyond in their services as a SaaS marketing agency. 

Comparison at a Glance 

Here’s a comparison between the selected SaaS marketing agencies at a glance. 

Traditional Digital Marketing Agency vs SaaS Marketing Agency: What’s the Difference? 

Traditional digital marketing and SaaS digital marketing differ in strategy, focus and purpose. Though both forms of marketing emphasize the product, for SaaS marketing, it is more about the customer’s relationship with the product’s service than selling the product. 

The buying cycle for traditional digital marketing is often short, being a one time sale for the product. For SaaS marketing, the buyers’ cycle is much longer, as it starts from awareness and continues, with the aim of recurring customers.

Though, like traditional digital marketing, SaaS marketing does care about traffic and impression, SaaS marketing cares more about actual sign-ups and building leads that will convert for the long term relationship that will continue. 

Unlike traditional digital marketing, SaaS marketing works with various stages of the sales funnel needing different types of approaches for each stage of the funnel. Traditional digital agencies can be generalists that can work across agencies, SaaS marketing agencies, even if they cover other industries, must specialize in SaaS marketing.    

Final Thoughts 

In your SaaS company, the goodness of your SaaS product is not enough for it to reach customers and work well in the market. It needs to be promoted to be recognized by people, for which SaaS marketing is important. From making awareness to lead generation and content creation, SaaS marketing follows a wide range of processes. 

The agencies selected in this blog provide the maximum of the services needed for SaaS marketing. Some agencies merge their service despite missing out on some steps of the process. 

Out of all the services of SaaS marketing, SEO covers a wide range of benefits for your SaaS company. If you’re looking for a company that specializes in SaaS SEO and content marketing, consider checking out Rank Wizards.