B2B SaaS Marketing Strategy

What is growth marketing? There are a number of definitions out there, but here’s how it’s defined for this guide:

Growth Marketing: Using highly measurable, ROI-driven customer acquisition, engagement, and retention experiments to increase conversions whether it’s a paying customer or an email list signup.

Growth marketing combines components from both marketing and growth.

It's more data driven and technical than typical marketing work, but less technical and product driven than typical growth work.

This post is focused on customer acquisition, but future posts will cover onboarding, retention, and other topics.

Why this guide?
While there’s no shortage of writing on growth marketing, it’s all very focused on short term tactics.

There just isn’t much content from a strategic, long term view, so I wrote this guide to share what I’ve learned running growth and marketing for startups and to improve my own knowledge.
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Growth Marketing Strategy vs. Tactics
Your growth marketing strategy is the business’s overall plan for reaching potential customers and turning them into new customers.

It identifies who you’re selling to, how they like to buy and what to say to them to get them buying.
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It helps you maintain relevance and consistency across each interaction with your audience while your tactics ensure that those interactions happen.
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Strategy is about the long term while tactics are short term projects. Strategy rarely shifts while tactics can change frequently.
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Each component of a growth marketing plan can influence other components, and good strategy makes sure all the parts fit together.

Strategic components
The components you need to start acquiring customers:

• Have a product
• Have someone to sell it to (Audience)
• Have a process for them to buy it through (Funnels)
• Have product selling points (Positioning and Messaging)
• Have a place potential customer go to for your selling points and funnels (Webpages)

Audiences

Target Audience: The group of people you’re marketing to, including both your customers and people you want as customers.

Intro
You have a product to market and now you need an audience to target. You have the entire potential audience for your product, but your current product only serves a portion of them.
 
And out of that group, you’ll have different sized segments you can create by slicing and dicing based on different characteristics.
 
All of these potential audiences require some minimum level of marketing personalization to be convinced to buy your product.

Defining your audience
The larger your audience segment, the more variation it will have behaviorally, demographically and culturally and the more viewpoints you need to consider.

This increases the tradeoffs you have to make, decreasing the amount of personalization you can do, making your marketing less effective.

You wouldn’t sell a product to the CEO of a company the same way you’d sell an individual contributor nor would you sell a tool to small businesses the same way you’d sell to the Fortune 500.

The more tightly defined your audience is, the easier it is to market to them.

As a thought exercise, imagine selling to one person and only that person. You’d quickly know them so well you could guarantee a sale every single time.

A more tightly defined audience allows you to learn their needs and concerns faster.
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Some audiences are easier
Some audiences are just easier to market to than others.

They’re easier to:

• Access because they’re more online
• Access because they’re more active in public places online
• Get to try new products
• Get to share with their friends and others 

As you’re deciding who to target, take into account these aspects for the different groups. 

Research your audience deeply
‍To persuade people to buy from us, we need to know the needs and concerns that drive them to become a customer or buy the competition.

Different groups have different buying processes and are trying to fulfill different needs and wants. The better you know your target audience, the more effectively you can market to them. 

By knowing how your audience thinks and behaves your marketing is more likely to reach them in the right place, be relevant in their world and increase their trust in you.

What to research:

• Where customers spend time online and offline
• Who influences their purchases
• How and where customers get new information
• How they like to buy

Funnels

Funnel: A series of steps your audience goes through to buy from you or interact with your business in another way. 

Intro
‍Funnels provide a very helpful structure for optimizing the steps in your buying process to drive more conversions.

A funnel step can be entering credit card information, using a feature in your app or clicking on an ad.
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Improving your conversion rates is about reducing or increasing friction.
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Reducing friction increases the number of people who convert to the next step, but can result in lower conversion rates farther down the funnel and lower quality customers overall.
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Increasing friction is used to increase the quality of conversions to the next step.

The more expensive a product and intensive the sales process, the more a company should qualify a customer before spending the resources to really sell them.
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AIDA and AARRR
‍Both marketing and growth have high-level funnels used for strategy.
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For Marketing, it’s AIDA:

• Awareness - Your customer has to be aware of your brand or product before they can take any other step towards buying.
• Interest - Your customers have to be interested in your product before moving forward.
• Decision - A customer makes the decision to buy.
• Action - Where the purchase actually happens

For Growth, it’s AARRR:

• Acquisition - A customer is acquired
• Activation - A customer is onboarded and gets the core product experience 
• Retention - A customer keeps coming back
• Revenue - A customer pays you
• Referral - A customer gets a friend into the acquisition stage and the funnel starts again

AIDA captures the stages a customer goes through up until acquisition and AARRR starts with acquisition and ends with customer referrals. 
 
Take both these funnels into account for a more strategic look at the health of your business and opportunities for optimization. 

Specific funnels
‍AIDAR and Growth Funnels help with monitoring the health of your business, but aren’t helpful for optimizing a specific ad campaign. For day-to-day optimization, you need much more specific funnels.
 
For example, these are typical funnel steps for an ad campaign:

• Your ad beats others in the auction
  
• Ad gets shown to your audience
• Someone in your audience clicks the ad
• Person arrives on your landing page
• Go to your pricing page and click sign up
• Enter personal information and submit it
• Enter payment information and submit it
• Acquired

Positioning

Positioning: The process of finding the place in the market for your product that highlights your competitive advantages. 

Intro
The goal of positioning is to occupy a unique corner of your market that plays up your strengths and downplays your weaknesses. The components you need to consider for your positioning are:

• Competing solutions
• What your product does differently
• What value it brings customers
• What target audience
• The market category

These components all influence each other, making positioning a difficult process.

Even the best positioning is a series of tradeoffs.
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Your real competitors
‍Customers think about products and brands in relation to other products and companies.

There is no position without competitors to place it against and a market to place it in.
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Determining who your actual competitors are is a common place for startups to make mistakes.

Some common mistakes:

• Looking at every product in the market as a competitor
• Positioning against the enterprise-focused behemoth in the market when you’re focused on smaller businesses
• Making assumptions rather than asking customers what solutions they think of and how they seem them

Positioning creates assumptions
You position your product to create assumptions among your audience.

Good positioning creates assumptions that are both true and highlight your strengths.

Highlighting strengths that aren’t true may help you get the initial sale, but will lead to unhappy customers. 

Position your product against enterprise companies and customers will assume it’s for large companies even if it’s built for small businesses.
 
Positioning is a massive growth lever
Positioning creates an anchor that many aspects of your downstream marketing are attached to, informing components like your product roadmap, marketing campaigns, and product pricing.

• If your positioning plays to your strengths, but isn’t clear, you’ll have an uphill battle getting customers interested.
• If your positioning is clear, but doesn’t play to your strengths, you’ll have an uphill battle making sales.
• For startups targeting businesses, a sales team can help you make sales even with bad positioning, but it will still catch up to you with customer retention.

Position your product poorly, and it won’t matter how good the rest of your marketing activities are.

Messaging

Messaging: The key points supporting your positioning that you break down into your copywriting. 
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Intro
‍Messaging refers to how a company talks about itself and the value it provides. Your messaging provides a foundation for campaign themes and guides what your ads say for example.

Building out your messaging structure starts with your primary message, which is informed by your branding, positioning, and the audience you’re targeting.

Your primary message is an elevator pitch that contains your product’s key messaging points.
 
Key message points
Key messaging points should be clear and concise, use language your audience understands, and differentiate your product while going through the key benefits you offer.
 
Key messaging points are supported by proof points, or the evidence that makes your messaging points true. This can be a product feature, an industry expert quote, or an award.
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Good key messaging points include believable information relevant to your audience and address how they help customers meet their goals.
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Building trust
Messaging’s first job is to inform and its second is to build trust. You build trust by showing you understand your audience and their situation.

You do this by addressing their concerns and using scenarios specific to them on your website and through your buying process.
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Copywriting
Copywriting is the end result of building a messaging structure and it touches on many areas of marketing, whether it’s your marketing website, ads, or blog posts. 
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For effective copywriting:

• Use you audience’s words - The wrong language makes it harder to understand what you do and creates bad assumptions.
• Concise and choppy - Audience attention spans keep getting shorter, whether the medium is short or long.
• Tone matches the situation - You wouldn’t carry an overly positive brand voice into an announcement raising prices.
• The length matches the medium - Headlines are shortest, then email subject lines, feature bullet points, Facebook ads, emails, blog posts and guides. 

Webpages

Marketing site: Your public web pages under your main domain like your Homepage, Features page, and About page.
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Intro
‍The purpose of your marketing site is to inform people in your target market about your product and influence them into buying.
 
Any significant marketing effort will drive folks to your site who aren’t in your target market. A good website will filter them out early so you don’t waste resources on them.
 
Three levels of information
‍Potential customers will go to your site in different stages of their buying process. Consider the three levels of engagement based on what stage they’re in.

• Homepage - Tell people whether they’re in the right place or not, ideally above the fold.
• Supporting pages and feature groups - Someone interested in your product will look at your Pricing, Features, About pages and more. 
• Documentation, FAQs, and specific features - Where someone is looking at the details of the product or investigating usage.

The more information you have on your website, the: 

• More content and SEO opportunities
• Easier it is to sell higher priced products
• More you build potential customer’s knowledge, which builds their trust

Build trust
‍A good marketing site builds trust. You want to remove the unknowns in a potential customer’s mind while building your product’s credibility as the right solution.
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You get this done by:

• Providing information about your product
• Using the same words as your customers to describe it
• Addressing customer concerns thoroughly with familiar scenarios
• Describing product functionality in terms of customer goals

• Showing that others like it as well with:
  

  • Testimonials
  • Customer logos
  • High usage numbers
  • Press logos
  • Industry awards
  • Industry association memberships

Acquisition

Customer acquisition: The process of converting your audience members into customers.
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Intro
How do you get new customers? Once you have a website or landing page that builds trust, it’s time to research which channel will drive quality customers and can be scaled.
 
The major online acquisition channels are:

• SEO
• Organic Social Media
• Content marketing
• Search ads
• Social ads
• Email
• Partnerships
• Retargeting and Display ads
• Affiliates

Channel focus
‍Every channel has a minimum investment required to be a significant source of traffic or sales. Strong competition increases the requirement.

It’s easy to underestimate how much work or money you need to put in a channel to get good results.

When the investment is underestimated, it’s easier to justify working on more than one channel.
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You’re far better off putting a quality effort into one channel than splitting your time and money across three. Many tactics don’t carry over from one channel to the next.
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How to pick a channel
‍Every channel has tradeoffs and some are just a poor fit overall for your business.

Business products perform poorly on Snapchat and Tiktok, but well on Twitter and Facebook, while consumer products can sell through all three but bomb on Linkedin.
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Measure each channel you’re considering by:

• The strength of competition
• How long you can expect to see results
• How many hours per week it typically takes to get results
• How much money it typically takes to get results
• How quickly you can produce for the channel

For example:

• Ad channels are fast to drive results, but you’ll spend thousands on the testing and learning you need to drive significant results. 
• SEO can take months to show significant results and money doesn’t speed SEO up as fast as it can with ads. 
• PR takes as long as it takes you to develop something interesting and significant to talk about which is often much harder than most startups expect. 
• Good long form content marketing takes either significant time or significant money to produce.  

How to get good at a channel
‍As channels become more competitive, your growth with that channel will slow.

To stay competitive in the short term, watch for new features in the channels that are working for you.

To stay competitive in the long term, keep an eye on emerging channels.

• Search for best practices from a variety of sources
• Methodically test new features and configurations
• Learn the channel’s top metrics well and find benchmarks to build ranges
• Find popular examples
• Research the algorithm if applicable

Experiments

Experiment: The test of a growth marketing hypothesis, typically at the tactical level with a control.

Intro
A/B tests dominate startup experiment conversations, but they’re only one part of an experimental culture.

Many initiatives don’t make sense to be A/B tested, but still benefit from an experimental planning process.
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The elements of good experiment strategy:

• Structured
• Tied to goals
• Consistent outcomes
• Methodical
• Starts small

You'll want to follow the Question-> Hypothesis-> Test-> Analyze process of the scientific method for your experiments. This simple structure helps minimize bias and drive consistency.
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Start with small experiments
Keep your experiments only as big as they need to be to test your hypothesis, which often means focused and small.

The smaller the test, the less work to launch it which means less risk and faster testing and learning. 
 
Earn your way up to larger tests by successfully implementing smaller tests.

This applies both to getting tests built as well getting the necessary buy-in from stakeholders.  
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Experiment structure
‍Many dream of that one A/B test that drives explosive growth, but the reality is that strategy is more responsible for significant growth long term than any one idea. 
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And while you can’t predict the future, running impact assessments can expose planning mistakes and provide more guarantee around outcomes.
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Have processes for:

• Generating ideas
• Building tests
• Prioritizing tests
• Recording what you learned and applying it back into your work

The factors to consider for individual tests:

• Implementation
  

  • Cost in dollars
  • Cost in hours
  • How long to implement considering budget and hours available
• How closely your hypothesis aligns with your goals

• Impact
  

  • What metric it will affect
  • How much it will affect that metric
• Concerns for any negative downstream effects

I hope this was helpful! If you liked the guide, you can sign up to get future posts right below. And if you really liked the guide, I'd appreciate you sharing it!
- Jon

About the author

I have run growth and marketing at startups like Heap and Periscope Data (acquired by Sisense), helping to generate millions in revenue. Marketing education is a passion of mine and I'm building products to help people grow startups faster.