The Best SaaS Marketing Strategy for 2026

0:00In this video, I'm going to break down the exact [music] marketing strategy that the 8 figureure B2B SAS companies I consult with are using right now to scale. The results we're seeing with this strategy are truly incredible. We've helped companies scale from 5 million to 50 million in ARR and even got one company to 160 million in ARR. And what's even crazier that this strategy works for all mid-market and enterprise B2B SAS companies, anyone with an ACV over $1,000. By the end of this video, you'll understand what this strategy is and how you can start implementing it to grow your B2B SAS company starting right now. If you don't

0:37know who I am, my name is Ryan Alice. I built my own SAS company I contact to 70,000 paying customers, 50 million in ARR, and I sold it for $169 million. I now consult with CEOs and founders of other SAS firms like instantly clear stream to Tango Seamless many others and have helped them scale from as small as 3 to 4 million in ARR up to 100 million plus in ARR. So here's the old way SAS marketing was done. They either go allin on paid ads without any strategy. They're just throwing money at

1:11Meta or Google without any coordination. or they try to do outbound email, but they're sending generic messages to random lists they bought. That's not the way to do it. The problem with this approach, the old approach, is that you're just wasting money. You're not going to get results. You're getting bad leads. Your CAC is too high, and you're not doing attribution properly, and you're certainly not building any thoughtful brand awareness within your target market, within your ICP. main difference from a 3 millionaire company to a 30 millionaire company, it's not the product, it's actually the marketing system and it's whether you can figure out the holy grail of digital ads. Let's

1:48reveal the new way and let me share with you what's actually working right now for our clients. At SAS drives, we manage $900,000 a month of B2B ad spend. We have a community of 400 SAS CEOs and founders that are part of our mastermind calls that we put on every week. And over the past two years, we've developed with our 400 members our B2B SAS growth system. Let me walk you through it step by step by step. This strategy works well for any B2B firm where the ACV, the annual contract value is between $1,000 a year and $500,000 a year. So high SMB to mid-market all the way up to

2:24enterprise B2B SAS companies. Pay close attention. There are seven steps to massive revenue scaling in B2B SAS. Step one is building your accountbased marketing lead list, your ABM lead list. It's the foundation of everything. You need to identify everyone in your target market. I'm talking about the exact job titles, industries, company sizes, and the geographies that you sell to. Then you go out and build a comprehensive

2:51list of everyone who fits the criteria. You do it on tools like Apollo, Listkit, Instantly, Seamless, LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Then you do everything else. You do your matched audience ads. You do your outbound email. You do your LinkedIn outreach. It's your single source of targeting truth for your marketing. Now, what do you do? You just search for the job titles, the geographies, the company sizes, the industries that you target, the keywords if you want, and then you export the full results to a CSV file. You import the CSV file into Meta. You turn on ads to that matched audience. And once you have the matched audience ads turned on,

3:26then you start taking the same exact CSV file, import it into Instantly, and start sending out outbound emails. So now you have omniresence. You have people seeing your ads everywhere through matched ads and retargeting ads. And then you have everyone getting your messaging through outbound email and outbound LinkedIn. When you combine these matched audience ads with other ad types like retargeting, lookike, and paid search, you can really scale up customer acquisition. Now, let's go into step two. It's your weekly content machine. Your weekly content marketing machine. It's non-negotiable. You need to produce at least one quality piece of content per week for your blog, for your

4:06newsletter, for your YouTube. It could be a case study, it could be a webinar, it could be a PDF report, it could be a video like this. The key criteria across all of these is that it must actually be valuable to your audience. It needs to educate your prospects. It needs to show that you understand the problems and challenges that they face. This video we're doing right now is not going to be useful to a school teacher in Iowa, but it's going to be extremely useful to a B2B SAS CEO and founder. So, you take your inner knowledge, the inside knowledge of the challenges your market

4:36faces, and then you distribute that content on multiple channels to your email list, to your blog. You send it out in your weekly newsletter every Monday and then you create ads around it by taking a screenshot of the piece of content and putting up in a retargeting ad. You can easily turn a video transcript from a video like this into a blog post by just plugging in the transcript into chat GBT and saying, "Make me a 2,000word blog post and adding a couple photos from a slide deck." And you can easily turn blog posts into videos using tools like Synthesia. The goal is to get 1 million

5:07content impressions per month within your ICP across ads, web visits, warm email, cold email, LinkedIn, and YouTube. That's how to set up a B2B marketing machine. So, now we've covered how to set up your ABM lead list, and we've covered how to set up your content machine. Now, let's go on to step three, which is how to launch outbound marketing. This is where AI personalization comes in. You take your ABM lead list you created in step one and you use a tool like instantly to write personalized subject lines and opening lines and even PS lines for every person on your list. We send these out with three to five step sequences

5:43about 2 to 3 days apart. And we alternate between a focus on clicks and a focus on replies. Now why do we do this when most people in cold email say only do replies? We focus on clicks and replies because when you can get someone to click, then you can get them in the retargeting ad audience and then make your brand omniresence and follow up automatically. And you can also export that list, that CSV file of all the clicks, send it to your sales development rep, and they can follow up via phone or email or LinkedIn. All right, so why go for clicks sometimes is so that your targeting ads and your SDRs

6:14can follow up and make your brand omniresent within your target market. And then you layer in LinkedIn outreach, automated LinkedIn outreach on top. When someone clicks on the email, you set up a web hook or import the CSV file to Hey Reach and you use Hey Reach to set up a LinkedIn connection request. And when that's accepted, Hey Reach will send a personalized voice note and AI customized message sequence to the prospects. And now you're hitting them on multiple channels. You're hitting them on email, you're hitting them on

6:40ads, you're hitting them on LinkedIn. You're starting to build awareness of what you solve, the problem that you solve in the marketplace. This process creates multiple touch points and that is the key to making your brand truly omnipresent and it's crucial in this day and age when there's so much noise. Step four is to set up conversion tracking. This is because you need to know your actual CAC and your target CAC. To determine your target CAC, just figure out what your ACV is, your annual contract value, and divide by two. How

7:06much do you get per year? Divide by two. That'd be a sixmonth payback. And that's a pretty good average. You could also take one six of lifetime revenue or lifetime value. That's a good way to estimate your target CAC. Now, once you know your target CAC, you figure out what your target cost per lead should be, which is just your target CAC

7:22multiplied times your conversion rate. And then you figure out what it is that the actual cost per lead and actual cost per qualified lead and actual CAC is going to be from the ad networks. We'll walk you through that just now. What are the ad networks that you're going to want to use? Meta, LinkedIn, Google, and Bing. You can use a tool like Cometly, which we highly recommend, to track which channels and which ad types are

7:46driving qualified leads and customers. And that's way better because if you just rely on the ad network's internal ad tracking tools, they're going to take credit for the same customer. You're going to be doing retargeting on Meta, LinkedIn, and Google. And all three of those networks are going to say, "Hey, I showed it out of that person, then they signed up. Give me credit." So you need a tool like Cometly to disagregate and ddup the conversions so that one customer shows up as one customer not three. The other thing that a tool like Cometly does is it uses Cappy conversion API to send back the conversion data

8:17back into Google and Bing and LinkedIn and Meta so that you can very easily train the algorithm on who is a good customer for you so they can send more people like that. Let's move on to step five, which is launching your ads. And this is where most people mess up. They try to do all the ad types at once. And I'm telling you right now, don't do it like that. Do it sequentially, step by step by step, and do it in the following order. First, you need to turn on retargeting ads. That makes sure your brand is omniresent across New York Times, ESPN, across Facebook, across

8:52Instagram. So, turn on retargeting ads on Google Display, turn on retargeting ads on Meta, and turn on retargeting ads on LinkedIn. anyone who visits your website in the last 180 days, you show them ads repeatedly. Once you have that going, then you do matched audience ads. You take your ABM lead list that you built earlier and you upload it to Meta, LinkedIn, and Google. And then you'll get a match rate. The match rate will be between 30 and 60%, usually. You can increase the match rate by enriching your list with personal email addresses or even phone numbers. You could do that on clay.com. And then you show ads to

9:23that exact audience that you just uploaded. And now for the third layer, once you're doing retargeting and matched audience ads, you want to do lookalike ads on Meta and you create your list of your best customers, your best prospects, your best demos. You need at least a couple thousand records and you upload that as a lookalike audience. And then what Meta will do is it'll show ads to people that psychographically, formographically,

9:47demographically look like those people. Fourth, you do paid search on Bing and Google for your both your brand terms, your competitor brand terms as well as your market terms. Finally, for your fifth layer, you do thought leader ads on LinkedIn where you boost your organic post to your matched audiences and you layer on LinkedIn sponsored message ads that go directly to the inbox of your recipients on LinkedIn and that is to your matched audience prospects. This stepbystep process, this formula is how you make your brand omniresent across multiple channels in B2B marketing. If you want to learn more about how we're doing this, check us out at

10:22sasrise.com/growth program. We have a 16week program where we take you and your marketing team through this step by step by step by step. That one costs 5,000 a month for 4 months. Now that you have your ads going, we got to tell you how to scale it up. Cuz most people, they'll turn on ads, they'll give it a try, they'll fail after one or two months, and then they'll say, "You know what? I'm just giving up. The key here is that you have to do conversion rate optimization and budget optimization. So step six to this whole process is scaling what works. You track your cost per lead and you track

10:53your cost per qualified lead and you track your CPA, otherwise known as your cost per acquisition, your customer acquisition cost, same thing. And you do that for every ad network in every ad type. Now, what is a cost per lead? It's just ad spend divided by leads. What's cost per qualified lead? Ad spend divided by qualified leads. That could be sales accepted leads, SQLs, opportunities, whatever you consider to be a qualified lead. And once you have your cost per qualified lead per channel, then you just put more budget into the channels that are generating the lowest cost, cost per qualified lead. And you just scale budget on the

11:25channels that are working best while keeping in mind the delineation between demand generation and demand capture where demand generation often happens on Meta and LinkedIn and demand capture often happens on Google and Bing. And so if your cost per acquisition is a little bit higher on Meta or LinkedIn than it is on say Google or Bing, that's okay because a lot of times it's the display ads that generate the awareness and then the paid search ads that capture the

11:48awareness once it's actually generated. A good tool like Cometly can sort that out for you. Now what you want to do is you want to make sure you focus on conversion rate optimization for your landing page and ads. Now that all comes down to what your offer is. So don't make your call to action a demo. Maybe

12:03on a later retargeting ad, that's fine. But on your initial awareness ads, you want to make your call to action something that's a little bit easier to get them to show up for a live call. So don't make your CTA demo. That's too far down the funnel. No one wants to get on a sales call at the very beginning of a

12:19sales process. That's for later. Instead, use short recorded 5 to 10 minute demos. Interactive demos made with Story Lane are also great. Or if you have a PLG motion, use a trial and free account. That's a great way. even tools like play or instantly. You can just get a free account and play around and then upgrade if you like it. You can use high quality content pieces as well as lead magnets. So create some highquality PDF case studies, reports, take responses from your customers or your surveys and then put that out to rest the prospects in your similar industry. Put those content pieces out as what you're advertising or free

12:52accounts, free trials or interactive demos. That's way better than advertising a demo. By not going for the kill right away, you can build up trust, educate your prospects 2 3 months down the line, then they're going to reach out to you for that sales call. And lastly, you methodically work to optimize every step in the funnel from ad click-through rate, visitor lead conversion, lead conversion to qualified lead conversion, qualified lead to opportunity conversion, and lastly,

13:17opportunity to closed one conversion. And you do that through a mix of marketing automation via email and SMS and ringless voicemails and through your SDR team doing manual reachouts. An unoptimized funnel might have a CAC of $50,000 or $100,000 whereas an optimized funnel built with this system could have a CAC between a,000 and $10,000. A 10x difference. And that's the difference between a company that can scale to 50

13:39million AR and a company that doesn't. If you want to check out more of the training I have here on YouTube, check out the next video where I break down how Clay.com is making over a hundred million a year in revenue and how they got to a $3 billion valuation. Hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Check

13:56us out at sassrise.com.