# SaaS Marketing Strategies That Actually Work in 2026

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUeeVU-OoCM
Duration: 12 min
Language: English
Words: 2444
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/bUeeVU-OoCM

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[0:00] I've watched hundreds if not thousands of Founders over the years build amazing products that absolutely no one uses they spend 6 months coding in their basement they launch on product hunt or throw a random post onto Reddit and then crickets so as a bootstrapper I get it when you're just starting out every dollar counts you can't throw thousands of dollars at paid ads or hire expensive marketing agencies and frankly those approaches might not work anyways but you're not sitting on millions of dollars in funding after building bu and selling multiple SAS companies all of them bootstrapped all on a shoestring marketing budget I feel like I've

[0:36] cracked the code on a lowcost marketing strategy that actually works this isn't the spray and prey advice you see everywhere it's not about burning cash on Facebook ads or hiring expensive Consultants your time is limited and you need to be systematic and focused on finding growth channels that actually move the deal so over the next 7 to 10 minutes I'm going to show you exactly how to choose the right marketing channels to start with and get your first pay customers even if you hate marketing and you have a tiny budget I'm Rob Walling a Serial entrepreneur an investor in more than 210 SAS companies and I've written five books on starting

[1:11] startups so a good chunk of the framework that I lay out in this video Builds on my second book and I wrote it back in 2011 it's called start marketing the day you start coding and I revised and updated that book just 2 years ago if you stick around to the end of this video I'll let you know where you can get a free copy of that book no strings attached so when I think about marketing and marketing a SAS company specifically the challenge of it is there is no one-size fits-all approach because there are a lot of different ways to get the word out about your SAS company so in my

[1:43] fourth book The SAS Playbook I have a list of all 20 B2B SAS marketing approaches that I've seen people use you can get a free sample chapter of that if you head over to SAS playbook.com but just to run through a few of the approaches that I mentioned out of those 20 there's content there's SEO there's pay-per-click ads cold Outreach Partnerships and Integrations which I group together as a single approach affiliate marketing free tools Hangouts Q&A sites there's there's a lot of them so that's a handful of them to give you an idea of the approaches that I'm talking about and a question I often hear is okay I have your 20 marketing

[2:16] approaches how do I know which channel to start with and to answer that I have two questions for you where are your customers where do they hang out where are they looking for a solution like yours if they're going to Google then you probably want to try Google SEO if they're going to YouTube then you either want to be interviewed on people's YouTube channels or you want to create YouTube videos that are answering the questions that people are asking when they're trying to solve your problems you can also instead of doing SEO you can buy payperclick ads if you have the budget now I know this video is about

[2:47] lowcost marketing approaches but I do want to call that out as an option cold Outreach which is to do emails DMS on LinkedIn on X Twitter on other place to find folks who are qualified so that's the first question is where do your customers hang out and where are they looking for a solution to the problem that your software solves then the second question I would ask is do you have an advantage with any of the marketing approaches and I'm not saying ask yourself which of these do I want to do cuz that's a terrible question it's not what you want to do you know if you

[3:20] want to lose weight you need to eat more spinach eat less ice cream and you need to work out what you want to do is eat more ice cream no spinach no workout that doesn't matter if you actually want to lose weight if you actually want to get fit you have to do things that you don't want to do same thing with building a business if you only want to do the things you want to do which is write code and post to Twitter go find a hobby don't start a startup don't start a SAS company building a company doing it well and being successful requires

[3:50] you to do things you don't want to do from time to time and marketing and sales might be two of those things posting to Twitter and social media does not count as marketing I really want to drive that home here so don't come here saying well I'm building an audience so that I can someday sell my sass to it don't do that do something that actually moves the needle like content SEO cold Outreach free tools affiliate marketing Hangouts Q&A sites you know whatever whatever it is from the SAS Playbook you're asking yourself these two questions where are your potential customers how are they searching to find

[4:20] a solution like this and do I have an advantage with any of the existing marketing approaches so once you have all the marketing approaches I would personally put them in like a Google sheet and and I would do an IC analysis which is impact confidence and ease so on a scale of 1 to 10 what is the impact of this particular marketing approach in my given space that if it works what will the impact be what is my confidence of How likely it is to succeed and then the E is how easy is this to execute right so 1 to 10 with 10 being you know

[4:51] an impact of 10 is huge confidence of 10 is I'm super certain and 10 is oh it's super easy to do and so then what you can do is you can multiply your ice scores for each of these marketing approaches and you get a single number and would I just sort descending order and do the one at the top probably not I would want to sanity check it for sure and you're not just guessing at these but there is some guesswork involved realistically you may have to go online and do some research you might need to have a conversation with someone you know who knows about marketing or you

[5:21] might need to read a book like traction by Gabriel Weinberg about marketing you might need to do some research on YouTube you might need to have a conversation with chat GPT or Claude and learn more about these marketing approaches and figure out how I can find out where my customers are and how they are searching for the solution to the problem that they have the problem that I'm solving so once I had those IC scores I would also then look at the speed of each of the marketing approaches so I have this thing called the three Factor framework and I apply this to marketing approaches the three

[5:51] factors are the speed of the approach how quickly it works the cost of the approach usually I think about that in terms of dollars but it can also be time and then scalability how much will this scale because posting to a Q&A site or responding to Reddit threads can be fast and relatively low cost but it's not extremely scalable that's okay nothing is perfect nothing is super fast lowcost and highly scalable right if you find a marketing approach like that you are very very lucky but usually what I'm going to do is once I've done that IC analysis I'm going to pick one fast approach and I'm going to pick one slow

[6:25] marketing approach fast marketing approaches are ones that can give you a customer tomorrow or today slow marketing approaches might be like content in SEO which might take 6 months to work and the reason that I do this is I want to be building something longterm usually the the slow ones are more scalable and you get a flywheel going and I also want to have customers now cold Outreach can be one of those where I'm dming people I know cold and warm Outreach to be honest so once I know which marketing approach or approaches I'm going to use I then I'm going to dive in I'm going to learn as much as I

[6:56] can about it and I'm going to implement and I'm going to execute and I'm going to grind until I know that it doesn't work or I know that it works right it's either working or it's not a common question I get is how long should I invest in a marketing approach before I pull the plug how do I know it's working you know it's working if it's at least bringing leads in it's bringing people in who you're having conversations with now if you don't close any of those deals or no one signs up you don't have new customers that may mean that your product isn't any good you don't have

[7:22] product Market fit you're not solving a problem people want or it may mean that you're bringing the wrong leads or the wrong prospects wrong customers into your fold and there's a judgment call to be had there but realistically most marketing approaches I'm going to invest 2 to three months at a minimum and if it's SEO it's probably six or more months so if I'm going to try to learn cold Outreach and do it well I know that from the beginning my message isn't going to be great my list isn't going to be great my product might not be that great my copy isn't going to be that

[7:51] great and so I don't just go out for a week send some emails and say oh no one responded it didn't work I educate myself on how to do it I execute pretty hard for months and then if I'm getting mediocre results I figure out can I tune and improve these if I'm getting no results I probably pull the plug after several months I've definitely tried a lot of marketing approaches in my days as an entrepreneur some of them have worked and the ones that work usually have this asymmetric upside where they work really well and you don't need five or 10 marketing approaches to grow a

[8:19] successful product you can often find one or two that work really well and if and when you do that just grows month after month after month you have to keep innovating and keep pushing on it but don't feel like you have to find 5 or 10 marketing approaches to build an incredible company and then you might be wondering all right so don't make me figure this out what are the channels that maybe 80% of Founders should probably start with and these I call my big five they're content SEO pay-per-click ads cold Outreach and Partnerships and Integrations call them the big five because they are by far the

[8:53] five most used B2B SAS marketing approaches that I see bootstrapped and mostly boot strapped founder is using those are in no particular order either these are just the things that I see working across my 212 investments in B2B SAS companies as well as the tens of thousands of SAS entrepreneurs who I interact with through my books and the podcast and my accelerator and all the content that I put out on the internet I talk a lot about Frameworks and playbooks and I know they work because I see them working in Tiny Seed Tiny Seed is the gold standard in startup accelerators that focus on SAS companies

[9:28] if you're looking for the right amount of funding mentorship advice and Community to dramatically accelerate your growth and make your journey less lonely applications for the accelerator are open now through February 23rd head to tiny.com apply to find out more and to submit your application and if you're interested in investing in B2B SAS companies that are ambitious that are mostly bootstrap that are highly Capital efficient but have high Ambitions to build seven fig companies that sell for eight figures we are raising our third investment fund we know that there's an alternate approach to venture capital that does not rely on unicorn billion dollar outcomes if you're an accredited

[10:08] investor and you're looking to diversify into ambitious B2B SAS companies and to index across a dozens or hundreds of these companies instead of trying to find your own deal flow and vet them and try to pick that's what we do for a living I've been in this business for 20 years we've gotten pretty good at it so head to tiny.com invest if you want to read our investment memo to fill out the form there and my co-founder Anar volet will reach out to you our fund is only going to be open for a handful of months and then it will close the last fund we raised was two or three years ago so if

[10:41] you're interested in potentially investing or indexing across a bunch of ambitious B2B SAS companies tiny.com invest so the bonus that I teased at the beginning of the video is my book start marketing the day you start coding and it's available to download for free over at Rob Walling I'm going to drop a link in the description for this video you can head over there and grab it yourself so if you figure out that content marketing is going to be your channel of choice and I'm betting it is for many of you you're probably asking yourself what the hell do I write about first in this next

[11:12] video I break down the exact content framework that's helped my portfolio companies go from zero to their first $100,000 in ARR it's the same Playbook I share with every founder I invest in make sure you subscribe and like this video if you want more practical SAS growth strategies thanks for watching I'll see you next time

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