15 SaaS Marketing Strategies That Work in 2025

SaaS marketing involves promoting software-as-a-service products to build awareness, create demand, showcase competitive differentiation, and retain customers.

Marketing your SaaS product is crucial to building awareness and creating demand within your customer base. 

That’s the obvious part, but SaaS marketing can promote recall and showcase competitive differentiation, effectively also helping you attract investors. SaaS marketing also includes customer retention.

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Goal: User acquisition

Image source: Shopify builds confidence in its capabilities with a variety of free tools. 

Why it works: 

Free tools give potential customers a quick solution to immediate problems. 

As they utilize your platform, these prospects get a hands-on experience of your capabilities. You build trust and gain a highly engaged base of potential customers. 

It should not be a challenge to monetize a section of this market because prospects who have used your product are much more likely to convert into customers. Free tools also attract users to your website, helping you improve search rankings.

Free tools generate heavy organic traffic for Shopify’s website. 

When to use this strategy: 

Always launch a free product only when you have a product you can charge for, available alongside. If users are truly interested in eventually paying for your product, they would need to try a product with a cost in mind. 

(They need to be able to ask themselves, “Would I find this product ROI-viable at US$15 per user per month,” or “Is this convenience worth US$15 per user per month,” for instance.)  

Hubspot shows us how to play the free vs premium card. The Chat Now option is an added opener for potential sales conversations. 

Key pointers to optimize this move: 

• Use free-tool-based marketing alongside other forms of customer outreach
• Be sure to remarket paid versions to your free tool user-base. That’s the whole point 
• How you build a page says a lot about your technical skills. You can literally mini-demo your abilities here. 

For example, if your product collects and analyzes first-party data, why not show prospects what data you collected at the end of their browsing session? 

Look at how Hubspot shows a visitor exactly how its own CRM would gather leads and communicate with them: 

After a few minutes on the Hubspot page, the chat feature launches a Book Meeting option. 

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Consider free user feedback as you build out your product roadmap and fix bugs by all means. However, remember that free users may have very distinct feedback from paid users. 

Weigh and prioritize feedback and fixes accordingly— your roadmap should focus on impressing revenue-generating customers.

PRO TIP: Take a cue from B2C platforms like Spotify and fix free version problems in paid versions 

Goal: Increase demo rate

When to try this strategy: 

If you cannot afford a free-forever pricing tier, offering a free trial can be your best bet to get users to experience your product. 

Key pointers to optimize this move:

• Consider eliminating credit card sign-ups to reduce friction. As tempting as it may be, the credit card sign-up often repels users. On the contrary, it might prevent hands-on users (who may or may not be -decision-makers) from trying your product and making a case for purchase

Tella uses “No Credit Card Required” to reduce friction related to their 7-day free trial. 

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• Be sure to list the price and benefits—business users need to consider products with ROI in mind, they should be able to ask themselves if they’re willing to pay US$139 per month for a given service. 

  

A good rule of thumb: Semrush offers a free trial for two of three versions of its tool, but not the most premium version (see above, how Tella uses a similar strategy). 

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Goal: Customer acquisition 

When to use this strategy: 

A referral strategy is most likely to work when you have a sufficiently large loyal customer base, that loves your product so much that they’re willing to talk about it and advocate for it to their network.

Key pointers to optimize this move: 

• Score your customers (you should be doing this anyway): NPS Scores, CSAT, Usage data, and any other data into a system so you can identify your happiest customers 

Be sure to make your request (and the customer form) short and easy—the pre-draft can appear in the next window. Circulate your referral form via email or host it on your website. 

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• Consistently ask (the right customers) for referrals—a lot of companies forget to ask or are afraid/ shy to ask 
• Offer an incentive - non-monetary might also work, like loyalty points, early access, or promotional merchandise swag 

Dropbox incentivizes referrals using its own product—also notice that they incentivize the referrer but also the referral recipient. 

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• Pre-draft the email, include a landing page link, and link to calendar apps for fixing a meeting with your sales team. (Remember our example above about how Hubspot does the same on their pricing page?)

Goal: Increase awareness 

Shopify, BigCommerce and Mailchimp have successfully utilized SEO-led product marketing to appear on this SERP (Search Engine Results Page). 

Why this strategy works: 

This move helps you position your product organically. You publish content pegged on solving a problem. Satisfied with the information received, this audience (that is also designed to be the right target audience for your product because you’ve made the right SEO choices) is more receptive to considering your product. 

This is a form of positivity bias: They feel positive about trying your product because you display topical expertise. 

This signals to them that since the information is helpful and shows expertise, the brand (where the information is coming from) clearly has the expertise to solve similar and related business challenges in real life.

Key pointers to optimize this move: 

• Develop a metrics system that allows you to score and prioritize topics based on how organically your SaaS product can be positioned within the content
• Invest in SEO best practices, right from how you identify keywords to the way content is presented
• Don’t forget to keep track of these pages, and keep building on them. Revisit blog pages every few months to perform interlinking, and refresh content 
• Attempt to capture customer information through chat sidebars, newsletter subscriptions, or gated assets. See the Salesforce example below: 

Even if you post a purely knowledge-focused blog, and don’t talk about your product, you can use the page to capture customer data. 

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Goal: Increase awareness + conversions 

Why use this strategy: 

Video marketing is an extension of your product-led SEO strategy. It works great for your busy target audience because they can listen and multitask. Videos also lend a voice and personality to your brand and make it more relatable. 

Notion showcases its platform and enables easier navigation with this video. It works as a tutorial but also showcases ease-of-use for prospects who are still sitting on the fence. 

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How-to tutorials about your product can also nudge prospects, who are currently in the Consideration stage, to the Conversion stage of your sales funnel because they visualize features and ease of use. 

Video marketing works like a product demo— your videos back up what prospects read in ads or hear from your sales team. 

They might also educate existing customers on new features, and enable improved customer success, which contributes to lower churn and greater retention.

As your brand matures, you can also try starting a podcast that offers personal advice—this is how you position yourself as a market leader. 

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Key pointers to optimize this move: 

• Invest in creating high-quality content over time, but get started somewhere. You can begin by repurposing blog pieces with AI voiceover tools
• The first order of business is to put out relevant content that’s easily digestible. For instance, notice the clear chapter markers and detailed video title in our Notion example above
• Video-based commentary on high-traffic topics can also contribute to improved search rankings—don’t forget the SEO component when creating video content
• You can host videos on YouTube for free—you can also upload podcasts to platforms like Spotify, free of charge. 

This product roadmapping SaaS company uses strategy discussions to position themselves as experts on developing winning products. 

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Goal: Increase awareness 

Hubspot has truly aced the certifications-for-marketing strategy. This move also positions them as an authority on all things sales, marketing and CRM. 

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When to use this strategy: 

Use this strategy only if you have certifiable material that will genuinely help potential customers do their jobs better. A cybersecurity SaaS company, for instance, may not have the resources to offer cybersecurity training. 

For a number of SaaS products, however, an online certification should be easy enough to design. 

Key pointers to optimize this move: 

• Similar to what we discussed in product-led SEO strategy, ensure that the solution to the problem addressed by the training, either directly or indirectly points to your product
• Invest in camera-trained speakers and equipment (or creative partners) that will help you deliver output that you’re proud to associate with your brand—sloppy, amateur videos may do more harm than good

Pro tip: Notice how Hubspot calls out the course audience, that is also the right TG for its product, effectively directing the course to its ICP. 

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Goal: User acquisition 

When to use this strategy: 

As early as possible in the game. Even free users work, but you need to get social proof out there. 

ClickUp has managed to showcase different use cases, and eliminate a potential sales objection, through the power of customer reviews. 

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Key pointers to optimize this move:

• Sign up for peer reviews easily on platforms like Gartner and G2
• Encourage, incentivize, appeal—do whatever works, but rake in those reviews
• Ratings are even quicker (to add and to view) than reviews, be sure to ask for them 

Don’t feel bad about the occasional bad review. It points to honest reviews and even ClickUp got a couple of 2-star ratings. The main idea is to get more (largely positive) reviews and ratings. 

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Goal: Improve conversion rate 

Why use this strategy: 

Sure, this might extend your web development budget and timelines but allows you to rank for multiple commercial intent keywords (or keywords that users input when they intend to buy something). 

Look at the Doorloop example below.

Doorlop.com improves its chances in appearing for property management SaaS for accounting, leasing, product, and more by having multiple product pages

Key pointers to optimize this move: 

• Product pages need to be optimized with SEO keywords, and appropriate meta tags and descriptions 
• Be sure to add your product or service pages in a user-friendly way to the header bar of your homepage—users should be able to view your entire service suite from a single tab. Here’s a look at how AWS does it: 

Like Amazon AWS, get as detailed as you need to. The point is to offer an overview and easy navigation. Your prospect needs to reach their product of interest in the fewest clicks possible. 

• If you have one product and multiple features, this strategy translates to: create dedicated feature landing pages

Sprinto, a cybersecurity company, has displayed all the various features and modules that security professionals can utilize on its platform. 

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Goal: Increase awareness 

Why use this strategy:  
Your entrepreneurship journey and business learnings will typically be interesting to others in your sector. 

Your customers will most likely stop to hear what you’ve noticed and learned from working with many like them. 

An engaged audience is automatically likely to place more confidence and value in your product— they see value in your views and thought process, and transfer that positivity to your product.

Key pointers to optimize this move: 

• Build genuinely useful content like Ubersuggest’s Neil Patel and Hubspot’s Dharmesh Shah (follow them to learn from the best) and play for the long game—notice that both parties have been working on building their brands for many years 
• Talk organically about your brands in your bio, and resources. Draw a thread between how your learnings fuel your brand and vice versa. The primary goal is to be interesting. Opportunities for your brand will follow.

Dharmesh Shah has always interspersed praise and promotion of Hubspot with general personal views.

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• Use your personal brand’s pages to gather and analyze customer data, including zero party data

   

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Neil Patel talks about what Ubersuggest can do for his readers on his widely read personal blog. He also uses a marketing/ Contact Me sidebar.

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Pro tip: Work with a ghostwriter (or several) if you need help putting your thoughts into words 

Goal: Increase conversions 

When and why to use this strategy: 

PPC (Pay-per-click) campaigns thrive on targeting and can get your product in front of the right people. 

But that means you need to have charted out buyer personas and ICPs to clearly define your audience on paid ad platforms like LinkedIn and Google. 

Key pointers to optimize this move:

• Know your audience’s geographies, job titles, average organization size and other key details in order to fine-tune targeting filters and maximize ROI. You don’t want to be spending on showing the ad to the wrong audience 
• Start your PPC campaign when you have a minimum $5000 budget, some marketers even recommend $10,000 as a baseline budget 

• Account for time and other resources to develop creative assets and analyze performance data 

   

Besides an ad budget, you will need to invest resources in interesting captions and post content like Salesforce has done with a series of posts like this one. Get ideas from the LinkedIn Ads Library.

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Goal: Increase customer retention 

Why this strategy works: 

A richly populated help center will reduce customer support tickets and allow customers to resolve queries quickly and efficiently. 

The bonus? 

It can also become a high-traffic page that improves overall site rankings. 

While you do want to reduce customer service tickets through your Help Center, a Contact Us for More Help section (like we see in the Google Analytics Help page) is crucial to maintain trust. 

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How to optimize this SaaS marketing strategy: 

• Let data around key call center queries, community discussions and most-used content guide how you populate your help center 
• The page needs to be easily findable—invest in SEO best practices 
• Your Help Center will need constant monitoring for customer satisfaction. You’ll also need to keep refreshing and adding content, especially when you add new features, and as customer queries evolve 

• You can also host the video tutorials we covered under Video Marketing earlier in this blog in your Help Center 

   

Add a Request A Feature button to your Help Center to invite customer insights on what features to include in your product roadmap 

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Goal: User acquisition 

Why and when to use this strategy: 

Anytime (seriously, grab every opportunity) you can get industry leaders to advocate for your brand, is a good time to start influencer marketing.  

B2B SaaS influencers can be anyone from the sector whose voice holds weight. 

We talked about Hubspot’s Dharmesh Shah as a key voice in the space in our Personal Brands section— look at how his voice adds credibility to DeepSeek AI: 

This may not have been a planned partnership, but the point is this: any popular voice in the B2B SaaS space can influence the market in your brand’s favor. 

Similarly, look at how brands work with this influencer to start positive conversations about their products:

The posts get an engagement of about 500: That’s 500 of the right people (you also get their names for sales outreach), hearing the right things about your brand. 

Key pointers to optimize this move: 

• Cold-call and cold-email if you need to, but start talking to people about brand advocacy. You can try offering exclusive product or new feature access for free, or make them part of a beta test. If there’s a fit, they might just agree! (cold outreach can be frustrating, but try hard enough and it might just work!) 

• Get creative with how you use influencers. SAP, for instance, not only used influencers on its Tech Unknown podcast; their Better Together podcast host Tamara McCleary is also a popular influencer.

   

SAP uses an influencer as a podcast host, therefore riding on her virality and popularity on LinkedIn to reach a wider audience 

Goal: Increase awareness + improve customer retention 

Why use this strategy:  

Have you noticed that Reddit threads rank high on SERPs for almost any query you key in? 

You could piggyback Reddit’s organic traffic and find your product mentioned in a thread that appears on page 1 of Google. 

Organic search traffic for the forum surpasses 1.3 billion (according to Semrush); look at the screenshot below: 

Key pointers to optimize this move: 

• Get started right away. Identify relevant threads and start talking about your product (in a real and relatable way). Develop a process or workflow for this to happen at least once weekly
• Rope in employees and customers to keep a positive conversation going
• Don’t be swayed by news about Reddit’s recent rankings dip. They’re still making it to page 1. You may also want to try Quora

Goal: Brand awareness 

When to try this strategy: 

Event marketing should typically follow marketing must-haves like product-led SEO, video marketing, influencer collaborations and Reddit promotion. 

Key pointers to optimize this move:

• Logo-based sponsorship at these events enables brand recall, but speaker opportunities (when they fit within your budget) allow you to make a more personal connection with the audience 

• These events are about networking—practice your conversation-openers. If nothing, ask questions about other people’s brands; understanding their business is a great place to start thinking about how your product can help them

   

B2B SaaS event marketing is about forging connections and understanding businesses (as seen here at SaaStock). You can always identify product fit and define value propositions later. 

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Goal: Customer retention + Grow revenue 

Why and when to use this strategy: 

Your audience is ready for an exclusive community as soon as you have a solid customer base that wants to talk to other customers about your product. However, your own readiness should be calculated based on whether you have the resources to manage and grow the community. 

Shopify has a thriving community, as one might expect because developing an e-commerce store calls for hacks, suggestions and best practices from peers. 

Key pointers to optimize this move: 

• Be clear about the value proposition of your community: Is it for networking, or for discussions about hacks and best practices 

Canva’s Facebook community is clearly about helping users identify best practices and get more out of the product, but also promotes exchange of creative ideas. 

 

• You can also use your community to build a feedback loop for continuous improvement—rope your product team into listening and responding

Zendesk’s community has a dedicated product feedback section amidst a variety of dedicated sections for best practices and product queries.

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👉 Find 50+ interesting SaaS market statistics to shape your marketing strategy

The answer is simple: Choose strategies that align with your growth stage. Early-stage startups should prioritize awareness and feedback while scaling companies can invest in retention and referrals (check the goal section under all 15 strategies).

However, the best advice we can offer you is this: Test, analyze, iterate, and double down on what works. 

Tenet can help you choose the right strategy with our SaaS marketing services.

We’ve sharpened our expertise on projects with Fortune 1000 companies, where we’ve generated over $1.5 billion worth of revenue. 

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