# 9 PROVEN SaaS marketing strategies you need to try in 2026

Channel: Marketer Milk
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODcCYqEOuVM
Duration: 30 min
Language: English
Words: 5755
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/ODcCYqEOuVM

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[0:00] Do you know what multi-million dollar SaaS companies like Shopify, Notion, Webflow, Zapier, and a ton more all have in common? They're using a few if not all the marketing strategies you're about to learn in this video. Hey, my name is Omeed and I'm bald. What the heck? Jokes aside, I've spent my entire career working with SaaS companies and working in marketing. I worked at marketing agencies, I've worked in-house, I worked with clients, I still work with clients to this day helping them with their marketing, specifically their organic marketing. And one of the highlights of my career was being an early marketing employee at a company called Webflow and

[0:38] later on leading content marketing and SEO initiatives at that company. So, a lot of things I've learned there, I'm also going to talk about in this video. And to lead nicely into the first one, we're actually going to talk about SEO. about SEO, I mean it in two different ways: editorial SEO and programmatic SEO. So, for SaaS companies, there are a few different types of pages you want to create to maximize your SEO potential, and these are going to be mostly conversion-focused pages. I'm not going to talk about creating content to drive a ton of traffic to your website, but I'm going to be talking about creating

[1:08] content that actually people at the bottom of the funnel are going to be searching. If you actually look up SaaS content marketing strategy in Google, um or you look up say B2B SaaS SEO, I have a couple articles on my blog that go into these a lot more in detail, but here's just the main gist of it that you need to know. So, for example, let's say we're Webflow and we know that people are searching up things like Webflow

[1:31] versus WordPress. Now, when you look up Webflow versus WordPress, right now of course there's a Reddit coming up cuz Google's loving Reddit. Um but the first one you can see is actually a landing page from Webflow. So, the first SEO strategy on the editorial side is actually creating these versus-style landing pages. And if you look at the URL here, with Webflow they have this versus subfolder, and in each one they actually have their competitors. So, if I actually change this to Squarespace, we can see it goes to another landing page. And if you were to look up Webflow versus Squarespace, it's ranking this

[2:07] page ends up ranking for that keyword. Again, I'm going to go into more videos on how to do SEO, and I already have a ton of content on my blog, so I'm not going to go into too much detail on the actual on-page SEO of this, but besides versus pages, what you want to also go after are list posts. So, for example, say you're a SaaS company that's a productivity app. If you were to write a blog post around the keyword best productivity apps, and you were to try to optimize around that keyword and get it to rank in Google, you would essentially show up in these results

[2:35] here. And in this case, Zapier is an article that's a SaaS company going after this keyword best productivity apps. Next strategy with SEO is to actually do like blog content, and here you want to pay really close attention to the user search journey somebody goes through when they're actually going and looking for your SaaS product. In this case, on my blog post on SaaS content marketing, I created a diagram that essentially shows how I approach content for SaaS websites. And this diagram, it's been talked about a lot now on some other YouTube videos and some other blog posts. I wrote originally this blog post several years ago, um but it is a

[3:10] strategy that I ended up using at Webflow and was pretty vocal about it when I was there on different webinars and podcasts that I was on. Um but I essentially developed this framework uh of going through the levels of awareness of when somebody is searching, you know, are they problem aware, are they solution aware, are they product aware, or are they most aware? And through those different stages, you go through and identify what people are searching for at that stage, and you find what's the demand of the search query that people are searching for, and you go and create that supply. In this case, it's mostly creating blog posts. Now, I'm

[3:43] going to show you a couple examples of companies that do this really well. So, Zapier is a SaaS uh company that does this extremely well. Uh they basically have a blog around tons of different blog posts. And if we actually look at Zapier's SEO traffic, as you can see there's been kind of a correction with the recent Google algorithm updates, but they've kind of re-stabilized. They get around 4.3 million monthly visitors just from SEO. And if we actually go to their top pages, we can see that most of them, if not all of them, are coming from blog posts. So, as you can see, they rank

[4:14] really high for things like keyword research, free video editing software, best website builder, AI video generator, free project management software. Now, this might seem super random, uh and there's a strategy behind this, and I'll create another video on this strategy. I do go over this in my training that's in the description, but I will create more videos that are free for everybody to check out uh on this stuff. So, leave a

[4:38] comment if you want to see those videos. But, besides Zapier, there's also one where I worked at, which was Webflow. And if we actually look at the Webflow website, or especially specifically the blog, I had joined way back in early 2019 and worked on the site all the way up until 2022 when I left to do freelancing full-time and build the Marketer Milk website. But, as you can see that the strategy that's been done has continued to drive a lot of traffic, and they've continued to build on it as well. And here, again, it was around blog posts. So, things like portfolio examples, website ideas, small business

[5:13] website design, uh marketing websites, web design portfolio, how to promote your website, brand design, and just a ton of other content around web design and web development and building out a website. Now, that's the content side. Let's quickly look at what the programmatic side looks like. Now, if we look at Zapier's apps section of their website, they're essentially doing this play where they've created 70,000 landing pages leveraging two different

[5:38] brand names and being their integration. So, Zapier is like a glue between two different apps, and it's like an integration platform. Uh and a lot of times people might be looking up things in Google like Google Sheets and Webflow integration. And as you can see, they have even have it as their ad, but over here Zapier is coming up as a Google Sheets and Webflow integration. And as you can see through the URL, it's in their app folder. So, they've gone through, if we look at their SEO data on their apps page and look at their top pages, we can see that they have tons of integrations with like

[6:12] QuickBooks. Uh, they've done everything from brand names to categories like artificial intelligence, Office 365, Pipedrive, Google Sheets, Calendly, and they have tons of different uh, pages that they've just created over 70,000 programmatically, basically creating this framework of brand or app name plus brand or app name, and then they create a landing page based off of those combinations, and there's tons of combinations. So, for this case, your your SaaS product has to kind of have this like product-led SEO approach, and Zapier is a great example to look at how to do that. Now, the next strategy is going to stay on the theme of creating content, and this one's going to be

[6:52] creating product-led courses around your SaaS product. So, what I mean by this is chances are your SaaS company, especially if you're in the B2B space or you're like a B2C tool for creators, your tool basically solves a problem that businesses or creators are looking for. For example, you could have an email marketing platform, and you can teach people how to do email marketing or how to start a newsletter. You might be a platform like a a website builder like Webflow, and then you teach people how to build a website or how to design a website. And in these cases, the idea is that you're creating a how-to pieces

[7:25] of content or tutorials on how to do a broad subject, but in order to actually complete your tutorial, they have to use your SaaS product. So, for example, Webflow has the Webflow University, where you can go through and learn everything about how to design a portfolio, how to create a website, and how to or how to even design a website, or also how to just do Webflow like one-on-one 101. And one of the strategies that works really well with this is when you're actually leveraging

[7:55] SEO to drive traffic to your website. And then what you do is you create a course as a gated piece of content, and it acts as a bridge before somebody goes from landing on your website to actually signing up for your SaaS product. For example, if I were to search how to learn web design, I can see there's this article from Webflow that we released a long time ago. It's been updated ever since, but it's around how to learn web design in nine steps. And what we notice is when we used to try to send people straight to signing up for Webflow, it is a really complex SaaS product, the

[8:31] conversion rate was really low. So instead of going from straight landing on a piece of content to signing up for the SaaS product, you you go from landing on a piece of content to consuming a free course, to then that course basically showcasing the SaaS product. And that's how you can really improve conversions with any piece of content outside of just SEO, even if you're making YouTube videos. So for example, on this article, if you actually scroll through, we created these inline blog ads, and this basically is a call to action to getting the 100 video course on web design for free. And you hit start course, and it

[9:07] goes into the Webflow University Ultimate Web Design course. And then, once you want to enroll, you're presented to sign up for the product. And this is a really good way to get people to sign up for your SaaS product. Now, the next strategy is creating growth loops within your product. And this is something that was coined famously by Brian Balfour, who was the former VP of growth at HubSpot, now teaching how to do growth at his company called Reforge. And growth loops are basically this new concept of kind of like the new marketing funnel, at least in Silicon Valley. And it's really based around like user retention. So,

[9:42] it's when the idea is that somebody signs up for your product, they get activated, and they start using your product. And the idea is that if they love the product enough to become a repeat customer, then there's a better chance that they're going to tell people about it. And when they tell people about it, new people sign up, and it kind of creates this growth loop. And the one thing that I learned in this course that I took 5 years ago was that retention is the silent killer of many startups, especially SaaS startups. If you can't retain your users or people are churning, there's a good chance that

[10:13] no matter what you do with all your marketing efforts, your company eventually is going to die when you run out of funding or money to pour into marketing. Now, one really cool example of a company that does a growth loop really well that's like a marketing way of doing it that's pretty easy is the company Beehiiv. Now, Beehiiv's a newsletter platform. It's the newsletter

[10:32] platform that I use for my newsletter. And if you actually look at one of the newsletter editions that I have for marketermilk.com, which this is going to lead us nicely into just a quick ad for this video. marketermilk.com, it's a website that I I created where every weekday I curate the best marketing news, resources, and guides on the homepage. It's every weekday, uh Monday through Friday. And then there's a free newsletter that basically rounds up the best marketing content from the week, the the latest marketing news, a bunch of other goodies in there like different ads from the past, and uh cool marketing jobs that I see currently out there. And

[11:08] then there's also an insight from myself on things I learned in my career or something that's very like marketing tactic-related. In fact, most of the information that I give away for free, or like the deep knowledge and insights that I have, are in that newsletter. So, chances are if you ever find a video on YouTube for me, it actually was a newsletter edition at one point. So, be sure to check that out. It's the first link in the description. It's completely free to join. Over 16,000 marketers from top big companies are in it and I'm sure you'll love it. Okay, so this is at my one of my newsletter editions that I

[11:39] sent out today. And if we actually go all the way to the bottom, we can see that there's a section that says powered by Beehiiv. And if I actually click on this, it goes straight to the Beehiiv website. Now, think about this. I send my newsletter to 16,000 people every week, over 16,000 people, and 16,000 people or at least the people that open the email see that powered by Beehiiv. And Beehiiv sends multiple, multiple, multiple millions of emails every month. So, imagine how much exposure their brand gets when people are sending emails through their platform. And I actually discovered Beehiiv because an investor that I was

[12:17] following started his newsletter on Beehiiv and I saw that in the footer it said powered by Beehiiv and at the time I was thinking about starting the Marketing Brew website and newsletter and I was like, what is this platform? Clicked on that little powered by Beehiiv button, fell in love with the tool, and I've been using it 3 years later. So, these product growth loops can work really well and a lot of SaaS companies have started to notice this and especially around like creator tools, you're starting to see like made with or made by and then like a brand name. But there's tons of different ways that you

[12:49] can approach this for your SaaS company and it's really dependent on the type of product that you have. A lot of times people can use like referral programs as growth loops as well, but we'll talk about this in another strategy in this video. All right, the next one is pretty simple, but it's launching on Product Hunt or Hacker News. So, Product Hunt is a place where people launch their products. And as you can see, it's got this very much like Reddit upvote style to it. And actually a lot of big companies that you see today initially launched on Product Hunt and got their

[13:20] first like kickstart with this platform. For example, Webflow has launched on Product Hunt, Notion has launched on Product Hunt, a lot of big other SaaS companies have launched on Product Hunt. And there are a lot of guides on how to actually launch on Product Hunt. If you go into marketermilk.com and you go to topics, you go to the search section and you type in like Product Hunt, I've curated a bunch of articles there on how to actually launch on Product Hunt. Um and the main thing is that you want to launch at midnight, um which is when a lot of the products basically reset for the next day. There's also another site

[13:51] called Hacker News. And Hacker News is by Y Combinator. It's like their Reddit-like news site where people post uh things around developer tools or news in the development space. So if you're running a SaaS product that is very like developer technical heavy, this could be a great place to also launch your product. Um for example, Webflow when they initially launched the beta version of the platform when they had their web uh Webflow playground, they launched it on Hacker News. And that's how they got their initial first few thousand users and got funding by Y Combinator and started building a great product. It started with them basically launching on

[14:27] Hacker News. So I know this stuff is very simple, but it can be very powerful from basically going from absolutely nothing to getting maybe your first like 10 to 20 users of your product. Maybe even more. Now the next one is also pretty simple. It's basically doing manual outreach. So you can use a tool

[14:45] like clay.com or apollo.io. Or really you can just go to LinkedIn and figure out who your ideal customers are for your SaaS product. This is going to work mostly for people that are basically more sales-driven SaaS companies. So a lot of like enterprise or any sort of SaaS company where you see that's like book a demo with us, where there's a big deal size, and you have to do a lot of outreach. This is a strategy to basically get your first few clients for your SaaS product. Find your ideal customer, go to LinkedIn, figure out who they are, figure out their website, go to another tool like

[15:18] hunter.io, place their website within the uh hunter.io, find their email, and send them a super personalized email on basically you giving them something of value. And again, if you actually have used like the first two strategies on here where you've created content on your website for SEO, or you have case studies on your website, um or you have a lot of free courses, you can email these to potential prospects and just say, "Hey, um here's a great guide that I think would help you based off whatever problem your SaaS product solves, or here's a great course that you can take that'll help you do X, Y, and Z for your business,

[15:57] and we also do this uh for a lot of companies just like yours. Would love to hop on a call with you and basically just see if you can help them." Just purely giving value without asking much in return. Now, you can also join communities. So, there's a website called thehiveindex.com, and what you can do is you can go to where maybe your ideal customer is. So, say you are a B2B software company around selling a tool for creative

[16:25] directors. You can basically go and look up things like creative, for example. And you can find creative product managers on LinkedIn. Go through here and basically figure out where these people are. I'm not signed in to LinkedIn here, but you get the point. Just go to the hiveindex.com, search a community based off whatever it is and what industry you're in, find different communities, join them, interact with people, talk with them, and this is how you can probably get your first few customers for your SaaS product. Again, these are very much like early-stage strategies, but they're the ones that get you off the ground running. Now, the next one is doing

[17:07] community marketing. So, there's actually a company called Clearscope that I really like. It's an SEO tool, and I think they're an amazing example of a company that does community marketing right. So, Clearscope has their Clearscope webinars and it's basically around everything related to search. And if you work as an SEO manager or content marketing manager, anybody that deals with SEO and just creating content for search engines, chances are if you go on their webinars page and you start reading through some of the headlines of these,

[17:39] they are going to look super enticing. And I don't think there's any other company that I've joined so many of their webinars other than Clearscope. And they've done a great job of just curating people in the SEO community and getting them on their webinars. If you are an SEO person, this is so valuable. And so, whatever your SaaS product is, if you can find a way to create a community around webinars and get people to join those webinars, I guess it's almost like how people do podcasts these days. But then, if you can get webinars in, it'll be a really cool way to do marketing. And the thing

[18:13] I really like about this strategy is it's a way to actually build up leads for your business and then you can leverage email marketing in the future. So, for example, on their most latest webinar for Clearscope, as you can see, they have the date to register and you have to basically type in your name and your work email and then register and you would get, in this case with them, a Zoom link and you get invited to the Zoom, which would then basically be on

[18:37] on a specific day and a specific time. So, it's a live. And they even have this section where you can ask them questions and this is all published before the event actually happens. So, this event is actually happening next month and they already have the information to get people to start joining. And once the webinars actually end up happening and they're live, after that, they actually end up using those videos and uploading them straight to YouTube. So, you always have them as well. And this pretty much adds to your YouTuber content strategy. Not only did you just create a great piece of content that can go on YouTube, but you actually

[19:12] held off first and you turned it into a webinar that was gated and now you actually have leads and a list of emails from people that you can actually reach out to and potentially get them to become customers of your SaaS product. Which then this leads us nicely into email marketing and essentially starting a newsletter. I think the future for SaaS companies and I've been saying this for many years now is SaaS companies are turning into media companies and if they're not turning into media companies they're acquiring media companies. For example, HubSpot, a huge SaaS company, acquired The Hustle which was a huge newsletter around business. We also saw

[19:47] another company that's publicly traded, Semrush. It's an SEO tool and they actually ended up acquiring backlinko.com which was a huge website around SEO, still is, that Brian Dean, the founder of it, created. And if we actually look at Backlinko, this site gets like a million visitors a month. There's essentially an email list that you can join and you bet that in any sort of piece of content where they're talking about a keyword research tool, Semrush has inserted themselves into this name leveraging the existing brand Backlinko has built over the years. So if you can start a newsletter around your industry and basically be the person that curates

[20:23] news in your industry or has really thoughtful original insights and get people to just learn things from you and you can nurture your community, this is a great way to actually drive people and attention to your SaaS business. Now the next strategy is to create an affiliate program for your SaaS company. And there's a handful of tools that you can

[20:41] use specifically for SaaS in the space. I've seen SaaS companies using FirstPromoter. I've also seen them using Rewardful. And for a larger SaaS companies like Webflow or Notion, I've seen them use things like PartnerStack. And these are great platforms to build out your affiliate program with. And once you have an affiliate program, you can get existing customers or different publishers to promote your products and services and give them a commission. Now, some of my favorite companies that do this really well are Webflow and Beehiiv. They both have a commission structure of 50% for the first year of any paying customer, and it's the 50% is really good because

[21:22] it creates this incentive for the creator or the publisher that 50% is a lot for a software company, but then it's only for 12 months, so the incentive on the SaaS company's site side is that they only have to pay out for a customer for up to 1 year. So, if that customer stays for 2, 3, 4 years, say they stay for 4 years, they're actually only paying the commissions on one of those years, and the other 3 years is like a full customer to that actual SaaS company. So, definitely for this you want to look around and see what other SaaS companies have and have

[21:56] how they structure their commissions. A lot of SaaS companies also do just lifetime commissions at like 20% or 30%, but maybe if you can find a way to do a higher percentage, but maybe not make it lifetime, and balance those incentives, you can get a lot of publishers to start promoting your product. And this is actually a great way to even passively build backlinks and build your domain authority if you're investing in things

[22:19] like editorial SEO and programmatic SEO. And last but not least, I want to talk about creating a great homepage. Now, you might be asking, "Hey, this isn't a marketing strategy." But everything we've been talking about is about driving people to your website and to learn about your brand, and what good does it do if people land on your website and have no idea what your product does or who it's for, what problem it solves? And so, you need a great SaaS homepage. I made another video recently about the top SaaS websites and the seven questions that it needs to answer, but really, if you want to think about just your homepage, you

[22:52] need to think about three core things. So, when someone lands on your homepage, they're going to kind of ask themselves three things. One, does this product satisfy my desires? Two, does this product work? Does it fulfill my role? And three, is anyone else actually using this product? Do I believe this is the best product I can use to satisfy my desire? And all of this comes straight out of the book Breakthrough Advertising. It's a great book on just understanding consumer desires and the different levels of awareness somebody goes through when they're purchasing something. But if we go back to the first one, it does this product satisfy

[23:30] my desires? Basically, desire is defined by the wants and needs that drive your target audience through life. Desire isn't something that's easy to create and people generally have their own motivations on how to live their lives. But your goal as a marketer, especially somebody who's marketing a SaaS product, is to understand your prospect's desires and expand on them, fine-tune them, and channel them into your product. This is why it's so important to create ICP so you can study who your target audience is inside and out. And when it comes to your website, you channel your ICP's desire through your headline or essentially the hero section of your

[24:08] homepage. For example, Webflow's homepage, their hero section, especially their H1 heading, says, "Your site should do more than look good." Now, it's really cool that they're using the word your cuz it's speaking directly to the person that's landing on the website. It's also speaking to the desire of their website visitors. They know that people that are going to be using Webflow, they want to create website like that's fully custom, but at the same time they want to have all the tools they need to make sure that they can grow their website. And this messaging can change over time. For example, Webflow's messaging now is very much enterprise focused where they're

[24:45] targeting a lot of big businesses to use their product. And a lot of big companies do use Webflow. And Webflow knows that a lot of these companies, design is nice. They care about how things look, but it's more than that. They need to make sure that things are secure. They need to make sure that there's a great SEO tools to grow their website. They need to make sure that there's things like website localization, so if they're selling products internationally, the language of their website translates into different languages really easily. It's a lot of stuff that's more than just a design, and Webflow knows this. So, they

[25:18] speak to that desire in their headline really well. And if there's one takeaway from desire, it's that you need to lean into the true desire prospect has for even wanting to use a product like yours. And that's what your headline really needs to speak to. Next, for your homepage, you want to pay attention to the job roles that somebody has that's looking at your SaaS homepage. And the role is where your ICP begins to think about the legitimacy of your product and how it will act as their tool to achieve their desire. And with your homepage, this is mostly your feature benefit section. For example, Ahrefs, the tool

[25:53] that I showed you the different SEO data earlier in this video, has a really great section on roles, where they're showing the features and the benefits of their product. So, things like study websites of your competitors, audit and optimize your website, learn what your customers are searching for. These are all basically jobs to be done for somebody who's a content manager or an SEO manager. And they're speaking directly to the things that those types of people want and what their job role really pertains. A great way to figure this out is actually, if you say sell to businesses and you know your ICP is somebody that say they're like a product

[26:36] marketing manager or whatever their job role is, it can be outside of marketing. I'm just using it cuz my brain is so much in marketing right now. But say it's a product marketing manager, go and look at job postings for product marketing managers and see what the roles are and the requirements for that role and start speaking to what it says in those job descriptions because those are the things that a product marketing manager is going to care about the most when they're evaluating tools to help them with their job. And for roles, the main takeaway is that you need to prove your product works and how it fulfills

[27:07] your target customers role. Okay, now let's go on to the last part of your homepage, beliefs. Beliefs are basically the world of emotionalized reason. Just like desire, it's very hard to change or create someone's beliefs. It's not impossible, but it's hard. Instead, you should understand your ICP enough to know how they logically come to conclusions in their life. For this part, you need to instill trust in your target audience so they believe that your product is for them. Essentially, you need to give them social proof and prove that your SaaS product is the best one available on the market to fit their role. Asana is an example of a SaaS

[27:46] company that does this really well. If you scroll all the way down their home page, you can see that they have this section on the world's top companies trust Asana with all their case studies and you can go through and see all these testimonials and case studies from people that actually use their product. For example, if somebody is an associate manager somewhere, they might come across this section and see that an associate manager at Spotify actually uses Asana and loves the product. And then they begin to see themselves in this product and they believe start to believe that it's right for them because there's somebody else just like that

[28:20] that's using the tool. Another great example of this is Ghost. So Ghost is a CMS tool. Um if you actually scroll all the way down on their homepage, they have this section that says a product you can depend on. Ghost is open source, independent, and funded 100% by users. No investors, no BS. And as you can see here, they're really emphasizing on a product you you can depend on. And this does a great job of explaining that no other product on the market satisfies their audience's desire like theirs does. And the main takeaway here with beliefs is that you need to prove that people rely on your products and that no

[28:58] other product satisfies your audience's needs as well as yours does. Show your products creative strength. All right, that's it for this video. If you want to see any more videos, you want me to dive even deeper into any of these strategies, leave a comment below. Any sort of comment helps me understand what you guys want to see and I just want to basically download my brain onto the internet and just give as much as value as I can. I love creating videos. I stopped doing it for 7 years and now I'm back to doing it again and I really want to just create amazing stuff. So, leave

[29:30] a comment on anything you want to see. Leave a like on this video. Subscribe, hit the bell icon and catch you next video. Peace.

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