SaaS marketing is very different from marketing as it is not only selling a product but also making up relationships and driving retention; therefore, it is necessary to have an independent SaaS marketing plan to scale your business above excellence.
Old marketing plans forget the concept of prospects and the activities involved in it because SaaS marketing is much larger; SaaS marketing is about the entire lifecycle of a customer, and it focuses on retention and the value generated thereafter.
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What is a SaaS marketing plan?
SaaS marketing plans provide a complete roadmap that shows how your company will map out strategies to differentiate its product from competitors and ensure it reaches the target market. With the SaaS market estimated to reach over $1 trillion by 2032, it’s crucial to have a strong plan to capitalize on this massive opportunity.
It starts with determining the target audience, defining their pain areas, and outlining the best ways of converting them from prospects into customers, including content marketing, paid campaigns, and creating customer relationships.
However, SaaS marketing is not limited to acquisition; it lists further strategies for encouraging active service users. This includes but is not limited to a customer’s journey from a prospect to a long-term user. Therefore, continued engagement will be key for sustained growth and maximization of customer lifetime value.
Why is a marketing plan important for saas companies?
SaaS marketing is more about lasting relationships than capturing short-term prospects with one-off sales. Such an approach would lead to a very high return on investment because that is where customer loyalty and retention come in. In turn, marketing to such customers requires a lot of patience and would take time to develop relationships.
Effective marketing plans include demand generation strategies that will also be flexible enough to accommodate changes in market trends and customers’ needs, among others. Although this requires initial investment on the front end, its payoffs for your SaaS brand can be great in the long run:
- New customer attraction at all stages of their buyer’s journey.
- Keep existing customers involved and interested in your brand.
- It sets forth the customer’s expectations of your product and brand.
- It moves the visitor into a lead, the lead into MQL, and MQL into a customer of a loyal and long-standing relationship.
Small businesses and startups will benefit more from being agile, prioritizing experimentation rather than rigid planning.
Rather than a routinely orchestrated marketing action, SaaS companies would experiment with different tactics and adjust their approaches with real-time data to lift the opportunities. At the same time, they will never be bothered by defined plans much.
However, very stringent marketing plans would reduce flexibility for start-ups. Better agility may prevail for small firms in keeping experimental, quick-readjusted approaches and methods compared to always following inflexible programs.
How to create a saas marketing plan?
Step 1: Build Detailed Buyer Personas
The first step for your marketing team is to identify and create your ideal buyer personas. A user persona is a detailed and hypothetical description of your target customer regarding profile characteristics, behavior, and needs.
This process helps to get the most out of understanding where your audiences are and, more importantly, what they require and what would effectively attract and convert them.
By these personas, you can create messaging that directly speaks to their pain points and the benefits they seek. Plus, you can choose the most engaging channels to increase your conversion rates.
Step 2: Research Your Competitors
Competitor research helps you understand what’s working for your competitors and what strategies are currently successful in your market. By analyzing their tactics, you can identify the keywords they rank for, their approach to generating demand, and the channels that bring in the most effective leads.
This valuable insight allows you to refine your own marketing strategies, choosing the right channels and crafting a stronger value proposition. You can highlight how your offering differs from existing solutions, positioning yourself as a better choice for potential customers.

Step 3: Set Clear Marketing Goals and OKRs
Without measurable goals, a marketing plan is incomplete in evaluating its effectiveness. SMART KPIs (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-bound) are used by marketing teams to track their progress in achieving targets.
Increase a website’s monthly average unique visits from 100 to 2,000 in the second quarter of 2022 by implementing an SEO strategy and a customer-focused content marketing strategy; make it a SMART goal. These goals are clear-cut and straightforward to track.
OKRs (objectives and key results) are another method of creating goals. They are all geared towards improving one specific metric; the improvement is measured using three to five parameters in order to get a good measure of how successful the goal has been.
Step 4: Select the Right Distribution Channels
This stage answers how your target audiences find your marketing efforts. After spending your budget on investing in new strategies, the next step is to ensure that the right people receive your message without drowning in other campaigns.
There are different marketing tactics for reaching demand and growing customer retention in the Software as a Service (SaaS) sector. Most target-specific ones are Email Marketing, Content Marketing, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). All of those work by attracting new customers, retaining existing ones, and giving your brand meaningful visibility among competitors in the market.
Step 5: Determine Your Marketing Budget
Your preferred channels and the timing frame would determine your market spending. Each marketing channel has its associated costs while some may vary depending on the chosen strategy.
To illustrate, if your purchase goal were achieving a free trial sign-up in the next two months using quite several forms of display advertising, the budget would need to be much larger.
On the other hand, if your budget does involve generating organic traffic through content
marketing, the required amount may be lower and focus on a longer-term and more cost-efficient cost.

Step 6: Choose the best Marketing Tactics
Generate leads and direct customers through the sales cycle using marketing techniques or strategies. For your SaaS company, you have to select the best tactics that you need to use and put on the priority list.
The insights gained from creating buyer personas and conducting competitive analysis will be very useful in selecting the tactics that are most likely to appeal to your ideal customers. These tools certainly provide you with an understanding of the activities or messaging that engage your audience toward driving up the conversion rates.
Step 7: Monitor and Analyze Results
It’s crucial to closely monitor your progress at every stage of meeting those goals so as to determine the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. Data analysis could point out what was effective, what was not, and why.
It also informs the improvement of your strategy to perfect your efforts for better returns on investment. Besides, using applications like these with flows will have the additional benefit of giving performance insights by tracking user behavior and engagement far better when engaging users in-app and testing different flow designs.
Expert opinion
If you’re starting with a smaller set of data to analyze in order to decide which areas to focus on in your strategy, we found that looking at the data very granularly and regularly helped us to quickly understand what looked promising and what didn’t.
Step 8: Test
Successful SaaS companies know that experimentation is key, so it’s important to understand that your marketing plan isn’t fixed—it can evolve as you learn more and try new things.
Once your marketing plan is in place, it serves as a guide, helping you stay focused on your goals. But it should be flexible enough to adapt as needed.
Regularly test, monitor, and adjust your strategy using the goals and KPIs you’ve set. This helps you track your progress and shift focus if necessary. Many SaaS tools are available to help you track your marketing efforts, and you can find some recommendations in our SaaS Marketing Tools article.
Conclusion
A good SaaS marketing plan is key to building long-lasting customer relationships, keeping them engaged, and growing your business. It’s not just about getting leads; it’s about understanding your customers, connecting with them, and ensuring steady growth. While having a clear marketing plan is essential, startups may also find it helpful to stay flexible, allowing for testing and quick changes.
You can ensure your SaaS company stands out by following a simple process—from creating buyer personas to choosing the right tactics and tracking results. Whether you focus on organic growth with content marketing or use paid ads, a solid marketing plan will help guide your efforts, improve your strategy, and build customer loyalty.
Frequently Asked Questions
