17 Top Marketing Channels for a B2B SaaS

If you want to grow your SaaS through marketing, you have to focus on the right marketing channels that will grow revenue at the lowest acquisition cost.

You know you should be marketing your product.

However, you need to figure out the marketing channels worth prioritizing.

Finding the channels that can grow revenue and your brand presence.

It also matters what type of marketing channel you go after, too.

Whether it’s inbound or outbound marketing.

When finding the right marketing channel for a B2B SaaS, there isn’t one channel that works across the board.

You need to figure out the marketing channels that will drive signups and demo requests.

Especially as a startup with limited funding or budget, you don’t have the luxury of using every marketing channel out there.

That means you need to focus on the marketing tactics that are low leverage/high reward.

That’s why I put together this article.

This article will highlight some of the best marketing channels for a SaaS.

I’ve used most of these channels for either myself or clients, so I’ll list the ones that work best.

Let’s jump in.

How Should a SaaS Prioritize Their Marketing Channels: Inbound or Outbound

Before you start your SaaS with marketing, you should have a general idea of your goals with marketing.

With your goals/strategy, you’ll have a much easier time figuring out which inbound or outbound channels to prioritize.

For inbound marketing, these are marketing channels where you are organically building interest in your brand and product through content.

Like social media posting or SEO, you’ll want to position your product in front of users with content while building a community for your brand.

For outbound marketing, you’ll typically have to use paid advertising to meet your audience.

Like using LinkedIn Ads or PPC to position your product in front of your audience.

While inbound marketing usually has lower CACs and longer-lasting growth, outbound marketing is still a great channel to drive initial signups to your SaaS.  

Outbound marketing = great short-term growth.

Inbound marketing = great long-term growth.

While I’m always inbound marketing first, it really depends on the type of growth you want to see with your marketing.

Which marketing channel is the most effective for a SaaS?

There really isn’t a best marketing channel for SaaS.

The marketing channels that work for you will all comes down to:

• Your brand’s positioning
• Your product offering
• Your industry
• Your competition
• Your decision-makers and ideal customer profiles

With that being said, from personal experience, here are the marketing channels I see work best for B2B SaaS companies:

• SEO (inbound)
• Brand Building (inbound)
• Organic Social Posting (Inbound)
• YouTube Posting (Inbound)
• Email Marketing (Inbound)
• Retargeting (Outbound)
• Account Based Marketing (Outbound)
• Conferences and Trade Shows (Outbound)

The Best Marketing Channels for B2B SaaS Companies

Let’s jump into the actual marketing channels now.

As mentioned before, these are all channels I’ve had personal experience with, so these should be a good starting point for your marketing.

Marketing Channel #1: Email Marketing to Nurture Audiences and Capture Signups/Demos at a Much Lower Cost

Email marketing is a must-have marketing channel for B2B SaaS companies looking to speak directly with their audience.

It’s the only marketing channel where you truly own your audience.  

While email marketing takes time to build up your audience, it’s the best way to cut through other content noise and reach them directly.

If you want to make email marketing work for you, here are a few tips that make it work well for a SaaS brand.

Don’t Spam Your Audience With Emails

Think about how many promotional emails you receive daily.

How many are junk, and how many do you actually read through per day? The average office worker receives around 121 emails daily.

Now, how many emails do you open coming from brands/people you like?

I guarantee you have at least 2-3 newsletters you’re invested in.

This is what I mean when I say you have to have a devoted audience.

Yes, you can continue to build this through your email marketing campaigns (you need to have a really solid newsletter), but you likely need to grow your newsletter and brand reception through other channels.

Meaning:

• Promoting your newsletter on social media
• Promoting your newsletter on your website
• Creating a referral program for your newsletter

You can also capture emails from lead magnets.

While the audience won’t be as brand-devoted, they’ve still shown interest in your company by downloading a relevant resource.

Capturing Contact Info for Email Marketing

You can even use your CRM to capture their contact information and business information.

Say in my case, I create a dedicated Ebook on SEO for B2B SaaS companies. I’d likely have a mix of SEOs from agencies (who do marketing for SaaS) and SEOs from SaaS companies downloading my resource.

Since I’m not targeting agencies, I can basically remove them from my email segments.

But once I have them filtered out, I’m left with SEOs from SaaS companies who I can continue to build a relationship with.

Which is also considered to be nurturing.

But in the case of B2B SaaS companies pitching their audience, you can capture your audience through email and send them content like:

• Ungated resources
• Educational content
• Entertaining content (don’t rely on this one too heavily)
• New product updates
• Product videos

Segmenting Your Email Audience Based on their Buyer’s Journey

This is the top-of-the-funnel level of nurturing your audience, but you can and should segment your audience based on where they are in their customer journey.

So this means you won’t be sending out the same email to every user.

You want to split your emails up based on your email segments.

You want to segment your email audience based on things like:

• Nurturing stage
• Consideration stage
• Decision stage
• Retention stage

So if a user is visiting your case study or pricing page, you’ll know they are deeper in the funnel compared to someone who only downloaded your ebook.

And the best part about all of this?

You own this channel and audience.

It’s not like SEO and organic search, where they happen to come across your brand through search.

Your audience has willingly signed up for your email list and already has positive associations with your brand.

So now you have the perfect opportunity to pitch your audience without being too intrusive.

Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Email Marketing Campaigns

And email is like no other when it comes to metrics and KPIs.

You can measure your email campaigns with opens, clicks, and conversion tracking.

You can refine your campaigns with subject lines, content, and A/B testing.

And along with your CRM data, you can see:

• Who your subscribers are
• How they interact with your emails
• If you can do anything to make them more engaged

All this data makes personalization easier and increases the likelihood of your target user signing up for your product.

Marketing Channel #2: Optimize Your Website for SEO to Capture Leads at a Much Lower Acquisition Cost

Compared to outbound channels, SEO will provide much more long-term visibility, leads, and traffic for B2B SaaS companies.

With paid ads, the results stop coming in as soon as you pause your budget.

With SEO, your results will compound over time.

Once you publish your content, it has the potential to rank and drive results over a longer period.

That’s not to say that your content will always rank without any additional work (you still have to factor in content decay), but it takes much less budget and resources once the content is indexed and ranking.

Outside of email marketing, SEO has one of the lowest customer acquisition costs of any marketing channel.

Especially for a SaaS, creating a funnel that drives leads is much easier after a user has engaged with other touchpoints with your brand.

Lead Potential From SEO

The biggest benefit of SEO is the lead potential you get from it.

Google is the largest search engine in the world, with 8.5 billion searches per day, which leads to plenty of opportunities to capture plenty of searches throughout your audience's buyer's journey.

You can capture bottom-of-funnel searches where users are searching specifically for your solution.

Or you can target middle-of-funnel searches where you can position your product as a solution for people actively looking to fix a current problem they have.

For SEO to work for a SaaS, you have to start with actual keyword research to find searches that are relevant to your brand, product, ICP, and industry.  

For B2B SaaS companies with long sales cycles, SEO is a great way to speed up that process by acting as a touchpoint for each relevant search from your audience.

You’ll still want to blend SEO with other channels to see the best results from it, but SEO by itself is a solid way to generate leads directly for a SaaS.

And I don’t mean leads like marketing qualified leads; I mean actual signups and demo requests.

Using SEO to Build a Brand

One of the most neglected benefits of SEO is that it can help you establish a solid brand presence for your SaaS.

When you focus on creating genuine value for your readers, people will likely seek out more of your content.

The main lever behind successful SaaS SEO is building trust with your audience and having them trust you as a resource for your industry.

When you add product-led content, you’re now marketing to your dedicated audience and showing them a better way of doing things.

When you establish that trust, your users are more likely to consider the solutions you’re recommending.

So focus on adding genuine value to your content.

Don’t just publish content for the sake of having content.

Don’t Neglect CRO with SEO

You also need to prioritize conversion rate optimization (CRO) to help increase the likelihood of a user taking a desired action.

For a B2B SaaS company, SEO traffic isn’t enough.

You want them to take some kind of action while they’re on your website.

So while marketing qualified leads apply here, you want to focus more on getting a user to take that next step to sign up for your product or request a demo.

This could be as easy as adding additional social proof to your website or making your CTAs easily accessible.

Really, it’s just a matter of showing off your product, explaining why a user should trust your product, and making it easy to convert to using your product. O

Marketing Channel #3: Use Video Marketing to Catch Your Audience’s Attention

Video marketing is going to absolutely take off in the B2B SaaS space in the coming years.

With more competitors taking up space on the SERPs, YouTube is still mostly untouched for most SaaS industries.

Not only is YouTube the second largest search engine in the world next to Google, but video marketing also does a great job of keeping your audience's attention.

With content taking time to read, videos usually take anywhere from a couple of minutes to 30 minutes.

But video also makes it easier to capture your audience’s attention  

The biggest benefit of video marketing is how easy it is to repurpose.

You can repurpose your video by:

• Turning it into a LinkedIn short
• Taking the transcript and turning it into an article
• Adding your video to your article
• Sending a clip or summary to your email audience

Video marketing is one of the best marketing channels for building brand awareness and driving your content engine.

It can be a powerhouse for your marketing engine.

Marketing Channel #4: Host Webinars to Get Your Audience Engaged With Your Brand

While I don’t think webinars work as well as people think with driving conversions, it’s still a solid way to get more people engaged with your brand.

Yes, you get the benefit of contact information.

But again, MQLs can be a bit misleading.

People attending that webinar aren’t necessarily always in the market to buy.

Sure, if you have 100 webinar attendees, sales can convert around 2-3 into paying customers.

While that technically leads to our end goal, it takes a huge amount of effort from sales to pull off, and it’s not always guaranteed.

Don’t get me wrong; there are ways to position your webinar to capture more attendees interested in your solution.

Say your webinar is a mini demo of your product; people attending that webinar have some interest in the features of your product.

So you’ll have much more luck converting them since they’ve already shown interest in your product.

But if your topic is around the “state of our industry,” you’re going to have less attendees interested in your product.

It’s all about finding webinar topics about your product or what your product can help with.

Marketing Channel #5: Create Your Own Podcast or Attend Popular Podcasts

While podcasting probably shouldn’t be the first marketing channel you start with, it is a solid long-term channel for increasing awareness for your brand.

The reason a SaaS shouldn’t start with podcasting is that it won’t be much of a lead driver for you.

Podcasts work great for building interest in your brand and again, powering your content engine with repurposing (probably even more so than video content).

Still, most of the value with podcasting will be tied to the top of the funnel.

If your goal is to increase your brand presence, I’d say go for it, but if you’re starting out and need leads, there are better marketing channels on this list you’ll want to consider first.

Another thing to consider with podcasting is if you can attend other shows from semi-adjacent industries.

As Rand Fishkin says, go where your audience is.

In my case (as an SEO who only works with SaaS brands), I’d probably be better off joining a SaaS marketing-related podcast rather than just an SEO podcast.

That SEO podcast will only have SEOs listening to it, so it won’t provide much value to my ICP.

When I go on a marketing-adjacent podcast, there’s a higher likelihood that my audience will be listening to that episode.

More value will come from it vs. just from SEOs who might not need my services.

Marketing Channel #6: Consider Influencer Marketing to Reach New Audiences

When it comes to influencer marketing, it’s all about having thought leaders build trust for your product.

The benefit of influencer marketing is accessing an audience who already trusts this influencer.

While they won’t take their word as law, they rely on them for useful information.

They’re considered thought leaders because they have insights that other companies consider worthwhile.

When you partner with an influencer, they’ll have a much easier time getting buy-in from that audience.

If you want influencer marketing to work, you need to find influencers who not only have a solid audience built up (look at engagement, not follower count) but also have a genuine need for your product.

If you can sell them on your product and your mission, they’ll have a much easier time selling their audience on that vision.

Another tip to consider is that B2B influencer marketing is much different than regular influencer marketing.

Normally, influencers are promoting a product by recommending it to their audience.

While you can have your influencer do that for you, you’ll find it much more effective by having them showcase your product and its use cases.

That’s the reason why they’re considered to be an industry leader too. People follow them to learn of better ways to do things.

So when they can promote your product as a more effective solution, you’ll generate way more interest around your product vs just selling it.

The selling part works since people trust what that influencer says, but the show-not-tell approach will show them why they need your product, not why they should have it.

Marketing Channel #7: Content Marketing to Build Trust in Your Brand

Content marketing is a great way for B2B SaaS companies to get their message across to potential clients.

It helps explain complex products to buyer personas over long sales cycles and helps your audience better understand how your product can be a solution for them.

Using Content Marketing for the Full B2B Buyer’s Journey

You want to focus on topics that can help influence a user’s purchasing decision and help build awareness and consideration for your product.

Topics that are relevant to your ideal customer profile.

Not only this, but after a user signs up for your product, you can create content to help guide them when using a crowded market.

It’s the only time this is a positive, but you can basically imagine this as being the loudest person in the room.

But this time, the loudest person in the room is actually offering helpful advice. You don’t want to drown your audience out with content, but you want to be visible to them.

Content Marketing for Thought Leadership

As a long-term strategy, SaaS brands can use content marketing to show off thought leadership and position themselves as a trusted brand in a crowded market.

Content can be tailored to different channels and stages, and it can help brands highlight their value and successes.

An effective content marketing strategy is the perfect way to:

• Inform prospects
• Capture leads
• Fill up your marketing pipeline
• Retain your current customer base
• Build brand authority all in one place

There are plenty of tools you can use to measure your marketing campaign’s performance.

Before you start creating new content, you should audit your existing assets.

Marketing Channel #8: Referral and Affiliate Channels for Easy Leads

Referral programs are an incredibly easy way to generate leads for a SaaS without doing any heavy lifting.

You’re letting a third party sell your product for you and they get a commission off those sales.

While those commissions certainly eat into the overall profitability of these channels, it’s an incredibly low-leverage marketing channel to go after.

Don’t Weak Out on your Referrals

To make referrals work, you need links, codes, and special signup pages that can be tracked, attributed, and rewarded.

How to Set Up a Referral/Affiliate Program

For example, if you partner with an HR blog and generate leads, you can quickly get in touch with HR professionals.

Plus, when those leads convert, the partner gets a 25% commission that only costs the brand when they convert.

Referrals and affiliates also create content that helps boost your brand’s visibility and credibility.

Plus, you can track your partner’s traffic, leads, and sales with a platform like Refersion.

All in all, affiliates and referrals market your business without any internal marketing involved.  

Marketing Channel #9: Use Social Ads to Target Your Decision-Makers

Social ads can be a huge lift if done right.

Particularly LinkedIn ads.

I’ll talk about this a little bit more later on in this article, but B2B audiences are almost always on LinkedIn.

With LinkedIn ads, you can target them directly.

While it may be a more expensive long-term option, it’s a great way to position your SaaS in front of qualified buyers who might be interested in your solution.

You can get pretty targeted with your LinkedIn ads too.

You can set up segments based on your decision-maker's profile.

So if your ICP is made up of VP of marketing, you can set your LinkedIn ads to target that job title + specific industries that would benefit from using your tools.

Like PPC, LinkedIn ads are a great place to start if you need short-term signups for your SaaS.

Marketing Channel #10: Use PPC to Get Short Term Leads, Signups and Demo Requests

While I’ve spent most of this article painting outbound as weaker than inbound, I still think outbound has its place.

It’s harder to get right and easier to mess up.

That said, PPC is a great option for getting short-term signups for a SaaS.

Especially early-stage startups.

While I don’t see PPC as a major long-term channel, it’s a great way to drive initial sign-ups while your other inbound channels gear up to work.

While inbound with a lower CAC overall, it takes much longer to see results.

Especially from SEO and social.

With paid ads, you’ll see ROI much quicker.

Marketing Channel #11: Use Organic Social to Build Your Brand and Community

Organic social is probably one of the easiest ways to grow your community in the B2B space.

The majority of your decision-makers can be found on Linkedin, so now is the chance to draw them in with your content.

I’d even argue here that you’ll want to take a mix of a company-led brand approach + a personal brand approach.

Build an educational community through your company's brand and become a thought leader with your personal brand.

Even better if you can encourage your employees to post.

Employee advocacy gets you additional reach compared to a singular personal brand and can attract different audiences to your brand.

Overall, it’s a solid marketing strategy that doesn’t require much effort to execute.

The only thing you need to do is be consistent.

Marketing Channel #12: Consider Cold Calling or Cold Emailing to Reach Your Decision Makers Directly

While cold calling and emailing are more of a sales tactic than a marketing tactic, it is probably the most successful marketing channel out there.

Cold calling is technically more effective than cold emailing, but you’ll have an easier time scaling your outreach by using cold email.

If you go down the cold outreach route, don’t just sell your product on what it does.

Figure out your audience's pain point and lead with the value your SaaS provides.

While the other marketing channels here are mostly based around positioning your SaaS at the right place, right time; cold outreach will be the most direct way of selling your solution.

That’s why I’m calling it more of a sales tactic than a marketing tactic.

Marketing Channel #13: Use Retargeting to Keep Your Brand Front of Mind

Retargeting is probably the most underrated outbound marketing tactic you can use.

Not only is it the cheapest ad tactic out there, but it’s also a great way to keep your brand top of mind.

You can also trigger retargeting ads based on the pages they visit on your website.

So, if a user visits a pricing page, case study, or product page, you’ll know those users are close to converting, so you just need to keep your brand at the top of their minds.

When they do decide to make that purchasing decision, you’ll be one of the brand names they remember.

Things to Consider When Choosing the Right Marketing Channel for Your B2B SaaS

Will You Be Able to Measure This Channel?

Will you actually be able to measure the results from your marketing campaigns?

No matter what, you can’t ignore tracking and attribution.

While some SaaS brands focus on vanity metrics like marketing qualified leads, I recommend setting up tracking for end-goal results like free trials, demo requests, and product signups.

Don’t get me wrong, you can set up tracking for metrics tied to each marketing channel.  

But those metrics can be vanity.

What we care about is whether those channels actually led to any results that affect revenue.

Either way, once you have tracking set up, it will be much easier to understand which marketing channel you should double down on.

And which channel can be cut.

Would this Channel Connect You With Your Target Audience and Buyer Personas?

Understanding whether your content is successfully reaching your audience will be a by-product of the conversion tracking you set up in the previous step.

But even without tracking set up, you have to understand that channel will actually connect you with your target audience.

Is your audience active on those channels?

Is that channel going to be competitive for your audience's attention?

Whatever it is, know beforehand whether that marketing channel will actually connect your brand with your ICP.

Do You Have a Marketing Budget Set?

Set a proper marketing budget for your SaaS by tying it directly to your marketing goals.

This can be things like:

• How many leads do you expect from each marketing channel
• How much money you’re spending to acquire each lead
• What kind of impact do you think your sales pipeline will have from these marketing activities

Once you set your marketing goals and KPIs, plan which marketing channel offers the highest ROI and the lowest CAC.

Don’t be afraid to be flexible with your budget across your marketing channels, and double down on what works.

The same for marketing channels that aren’t working.

Always use tracking to understand where to press down on the gas and where to pump the breaks.

When you’re an early-stage SaaS, budget will mean everything to you.

So you want to prioritize the marketing channels that will have the largest impact on your revenue.

If PPC might open the floodgates for leads coming in, you can easily blow through your marketing budget and not have anything left for inbound channels.

The same goes for inbound.

If your webinars aren’t driving quality leads, you’ll likely want to put them on pause until you have more flexibility with your marketing budget.

As an early-stage SaaS, you have to be precise with your marketing efforts.

There’s no room for marketing channels that drain your resources without providing much in return.

Should You Prioritize Your Existing Product Users or Focus on Acquiring New Ones?

Your churn rate is everything; one of the most neglected aspects of any content marketing strategy is retention.

We’re so focused on customer acquisition that we neglect our existing customer base and active users.

If you want to keep users, focus on any pain points they may have when using your product.

It may be something that I find frustrating with the tool.

Make sure you have content that answers their question and makes them less frustrated with your product.

Keep them in the know about product updates, answer their questions, and make it easy for them to use your product.

Churn rate is everything.

How Many Channels Can Effectively Manage Per Quarter?

Realistically figure out how many marketing channels you can manage.

As I mentioned before, the last thing you want to do is try everything at once.

Especially if you’re including outbound channels.

The goal of marketing for SaaS, especially for inbound, is to create value-added content.

Quality over quantity.

If you’re stretched in all different directions with content, your quality will suffer.

That’s why you want to find an engine for repurposing over creating something unique for each channel.

On the flip side, if you have too many outbound channels, you’re going to blow through your marketing budget way too fast.

So when you’re starting with your marketing strategy, stick with the channels you know you can execute without overloading your capacity or budget.

What’s More Valuable for a SaaS: Short-Term or Long-Term Marketing Channels

While some outbound channels are good for building up your pipeline, they’re not as sustainable as long-term marketing channels.

Especially if they’re not supported by any of your other marketing channels.

With PPC, the leads will stop flowing in as soon as you pause your budget.

So if you’re only relying on PPC or outbound for leads, you’re going to have to constantly throw money on the fire for that channel to keep performing.

While outbound has its place, you’re just renting your channel rather than owning it.

That’s why your customer acquisition cost for outbound marketing channels will almost always be double that of inbound channels.

You have to factor in ad spend vs. inbound channels, which are mostly owned.  

Growing a B2B SaaS with the Right Marketing Channels

If you want marketing to work for your SaaS, you have to start with the channels that will actually drive results for you at the lowest acquisition cost.

Your money channels will always be low-leverage/high-reward tactics.

Tactics where it doesn’t take much budget or capacity but can deliver solid results for you.

Marketing always starts with strategy, so before you start with any of these channels, figure out what your goals are and what you hope to accomplish with marketing.