A Guide to Modern Marketing for SaaS

By Haralds Gabrans Zukovs, B2B Marketing & Growth Expert | Last Updated: October 10, 2023

If you’re here, you’re likely tired of the generic advice floating around about marketing for SaaS. You’re searching for a real-world, strategic framework that actually works for B2B SaaS companies—whether you’re a recently funded startup trying to find your footing or a scale-up ready to pour fuel on the fire.

This is that blueprint. It's an actionable guide for building a marketing function that drives predictable, profitable, and long-term growth by satisfying user intent at every stage.

Key Takeaways

• Choose the Right Go-to-Market Motion: The foundation of your strategy is deciding between Product-Led Growth (PLG) for intuitive, self-serve products and Sales-Led Growth (SLG) for complex, high-ACV solutions. A hybrid model is often the most effective.

• Build a Balanced Demand Engine: Combine inbound marketing (SEO, content) to attract prospects with outbound strategies (ABM, targeted outreach) to actively pursue your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

• Design Self-Sustaining Growth Loops: Move beyond linear funnels. Create viral, content, or paid loops where the output of one cycle becomes the input for the next, creating compounding growth.

• Optimize for Conversion: Use tools like heatmaps and A/B testing to fix friction points in your funnel. Develop lead nurture sequences and a seamless onboarding experience to turn interest into revenue.

• Measure What Matters: Focus on core metrics like MRR, CAC, LTV, and Churn Rate. The LTV:CAC ratio (aiming for 3:1) is the ultimate indicator of a healthy, profitable business model.

The Modern Playbook for SaaS Marketing Success

We're going to unpack the critical decisions you need to make, starting with the very foundation of your go-to-market motion: the choice between Product-Led Growth (PLG) and Sales-Led Growth (SLG). It's a decision that echoes through every part of your strategy.

From that starting point, we'll dive into building a powerful demand generation engine. We’ll cover the practical application of advanced tactics like Account-Based Marketing (ABM) and how to thoughtfully integrate AI-powered automation without losing the human touch. We'll also explore how to design self-reinforcing growth loops that create their own sustainable momentum.

Finally, we'll get into the nuts and bolts of conversion rate optimisation (CRO) to ensure all that hard-earned interest actually turns into revenue. Think of this as one piece of a much larger, cohesive strategy, which we've detailed in our full-cycle B2B marketing playbook).

The goal here isn't just to help you acquire customers. It's to give you an actionable plan that fuels genuine, lasting success.

Choosing Your Go-To-Market Motion

Your go-to-market (GTM) motion is the engine that drives your entire growth strategy. It’s not just a marketing plan; it dictates how you find, win, and keep customers, shaping everything from your product’s features to the structure of your sales team. For B2B SaaS companies, this choice usually comes down to two main paths: Product-Led Growth (PLG) or Sales-Led Growth (SLG).

Nailing this decision from the start—or knowing when to pivot—is fundamental. Get it right, and you're set up for scalable growth. Get it wrong, and you'll be fighting an uphill battle.

Understanding Product-Led Growth (PLG)

Product-Led Growth is the "try before you buy" model that has become the signature of many modern SaaS giants. With PLG, your product is the main vehicle for acquiring, keeping, and expanding your customer base. Think about how you started using tools like Slack, Calendly, or Dropbox.

Chances are, you never spoke to a salesperson. You just signed up and started using it. That’s PLG in a nutshell. The entire user journey is self-serve, designed to be as frictionless as possible and deliver a "wow" moment fast. This motion thrives when your product is intuitive, solves an obvious problem, and has a very low barrier to entry.

Expert Insight: The core idea behind PLG is simple: the best salesperson is the product itself. When a user experiences its value firsthand, the path from trying to buying feels natural and inevitable.

The Power of Sales-Led Growth (SLG)

On the other end of the spectrum is Sales-Led Growth (SLG), the more traditional, high-touch model. SLG is absolutely essential for products that are complex, carry a hefty price tag, or demand a significant change in how an organisation operates. This is the world of enterprise software like Salesforce or Workday, where average contract values (ACVs) are high and sales cycles can stretch for months.

In an SLG world, skilled sales and marketing teams collaborate closely to identify the right accounts, build relationships with key decision-makers, and guide them through a complicated buying process. This human-to-human approach is critical when a purchase involves multiple departments and a serious financial commitment. For this model to even stand a chance, your sales and marketing alignment has to be flawless, something we cover in our framework for boosting pipeline velocity).

You can see the need for a strong sales-led motion in growing markets. For instance, SaaS-based CRM software is a huge growth area in Spain as more businesses get serious about digital transformation. While giants lead the pack, the market's expansion shows a clear demand for powerful solutions that can handle complex customer relationships—a perfect scenario for a sales-led strategy. You can read the full research on the Spanish CRM market.

Which GTM Motion Is Right for You?

The real question isn't about which model is "better." It's about which one is the right fit for your product, your market, and your customer. Often, the smartest move is a hybrid approach—using a PLG motion to get a foot in the door with users and then layering on an SLG team to close high-value enterprise deals.

To help you figure out where you stand, here’s a quick comparison of the two models.

PLG vs Sales-Led Growth At a Glance

This table compares the core characteristics of Product-Led Growth (PLG) and Sales-Led Growth (SLG) to help you choose the right go-to-market strategy.

Ultimately, your GTM motion must be a direct reflection of your product's value and, more importantly, how your customers actually want to buy. If you analyse these factors honestly, you can build a growth engine that doesn't just attract users, but turns them into profitable, long-term partners.

Building Your Demand Generation Engine

Once you’ve figured out your go-to-market motion, it's time to build the engine that actually drives it. This isn't just a metaphor; it's a system designed to create a predictable flow of qualified opportunities—the absolute lifeblood for any SaaS company. We’re not talking about just running a few ads here and there. This is about architecting a machine that consistently captures attention and creates genuine demand for your product.

A truly solid demand generation engine finds its balance between two core activities: inbound marketing, which pulls interested people towards you, and outbound strategies, where you go out and find your ideal customers. The real magic happens when you get these two playing together, creating multiple ways to fill your pipeline.

Blending Inbound and Outbound

Think of your inbound marketing as a powerful magnet. You create genuinely useful content—blog posts, guides, webinars—all optimised for search engines (SEO) to answer the burning questions your ideal customers are typing into Google. This people-first approach positions you as a helpful expert, drawing prospects in naturally. It's a long game, for sure, but you're building a valuable asset that pays dividends over time.

Outbound, on the other hand, is less like a magnet and more like a high-powered spotlight. Instead of waiting for prospects to stumble upon you, you identify them and reach out directly. This is essential for getting in front of those perfect-fit accounts who match your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) to a T but might not be actively looking for a solution right now. A healthy growth engine needs both the magnet and the spotlight to really work.

The Rise of Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

For a lot of B2B SaaS businesses, especially those with a high average contract value, a generic outbound blast just won't cut it. This is where Account-Based Marketing (ABM) enters the picture. Instead of casting a wide net and hoping for the best, ABM treats each high-value target account as its own unique market.

Expert Insight: ABM completely flips the traditional marketing funnel. You don't start with a massive pool of leads that you slowly filter down. Instead, you begin by hand-picking your most valuable target accounts and then run hyper-personalised campaigns to engage the key decision-makers within them.

This "flipping the funnel" approach demands tight alignment between your marketing and sales teams. It's not easy and it takes resources, but the payoff can be massive—think larger deal sizes and much faster sales cycles.

Executing a Practical ABM Playbook

Getting an effective ABM programme off the ground isn't black magic; it's a clear, methodical process. Here’s a simple, actionable playbook to get you started:

1. Define Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): Look at your best customers right now. What do they have in common? Pinpoint the firmographic data (industry, company size, location) and technographic data (what tools and software they already use). This gives you a crystal-clear snapshot of the accounts most likely to love your product.

2. Build a Hyper-Targeted Account List: With your ICP in hand, create a "dream" list of accounts you want to win. This shouldn't be a list of thousands. Quality is everything here. Focus on the accounts that would genuinely move the needle for your business.

3. Identify and Map Key Stakeholders: Inside each of those dream accounts, figure out who’s who in the buying committee. You'll usually have champions who will fight for you, decision-makers who sign the cheques, and influencers who have a say. Map them out and understand their individual roles and pain points.

4. Create Personalised Campaigns: Now for the fun part. Craft messages, content, and outreach that speak directly to the challenges and goals of each specific account and the people within it. This is where you graduate from generic emails and show you've actually done your homework.

Scaling Outreach with Modern Automation

Running personalised ABM campaigns for dozens of accounts sounds like a manual nightmare, right? Well, it used to be. Today, modern automation tools have completely changed the game. Platforms like Clay, n8n, and Make let you build incredibly powerful workflows that find data, enrich it, and automate outreach without sounding like a robot.

Imagine building an automation that can:

• Spot when a company on your target list hires a new VP of Marketing.

• Instantly find that person's work email and LinkedIn profile.

• Use AI to scan their recent posts to understand what they care about, then draft a personalised "congrats on the new role" email that subtly introduces your solution.

This is the kind of sophisticated automation that allows even a small team to punch well above its weight, running advanced ABM plays that truly connect with decision-makers. By marrying a clear strategy with the right tech, you can build a demand engine that doesn't just generate leads, but creates a predictable, scalable revenue pipeline. To get started on the content side, explore our comprehensive guide on inbound marketing for B2B businesses.

While Spain-specific SaaS marketing data is a bit scarce, figures from across Europe paint a clear picture. It's common for SaaS companies to invest between 80% and 120% of their revenue back into sales and marketing during their first five years. This just goes to show how expensive it is to acquire customers in a crowded market. With less than 20% of revenue typically coming from upselling existing accounts, winning new business is everything. You can discover more insights about these SaaS statistics.

Designing Self-Sustaining Growth Loops

The best SaaS companies have moved beyond the old-school marketing funnel. Instead of just pouring money into acquiring customers one by one, they build smart, self-fuelling systems called growth loops. A funnel is a straight line—you put money in, and a customer hopefully comes out the other end. A growth loop is different; it uses its own output to power the next cycle of growth.

Think of it like this: a funnel is a bucket you have to keep filling by hand. A growth loop is a flywheel. It takes a bit of effort to get it going, but once it's spinning, it builds its own momentum and spins faster with each turn. This shift in thinking is the key to building a truly sustainable acquisition engine.

This diagram shows how different demand generation tactics—whether it’s inbound, outbound, or ABM—can all feed into and strengthen your growth loops.

As you can see, it doesn't matter if you're pulling customers in with great content or targeting specific accounts with precision. The real goal is to channel all that activity into a system that compounds over time.

The Three Core Types of Growth Loops

Growth loops aren't a one-size-fits-all solution. You have to design them around your product, your users, and your business model. Most of them fall into one of three main categories, each powered by a different engine.

1. Viral Loops (User-Driven Growth)

This is the one everyone dreams of. A viral loop happens when one user brings in one or more new users just by using the product. The output—a happy user—directly creates the input for the next cycle: new users. For this to work, your product needs some kind of built-in collaboration or social sharing.

• How it works: A user signs up, invites a colleague to work on a project, and boom, that colleague becomes a new user. The product itself is the acquisition channel.

• Classic Example: Dropbox. When you share a big file with someone who isn't a user, they have to sign up to get it. The very act of using the product naturally brings new people into the ecosystem.

2. Content Loops (Content-Driven Growth)

In this model, your content attracts users, and those users—or the data they create—help you generate even more valuable content. Over time, this becomes a powerful SEO and authority-building machine that’s hard for competitors to replicate.

• How it works: SEO-optimised blog posts or guides attract organic traffic. When those visitors sign up or interact with your product, they generate data, reviews, or even user-generated content (UGC). You can then turn that into new articles, case studies, or social proof, which in turn attracts more organic traffic.

• Classic Example: Glassdoor. Companies create profiles (the initial content), which attract job seekers. Those seekers leave reviews about companies (more content), making the platform more valuable and attracting even more companies and job seekers. It's a perfect loop.

3. Paid Loops (Capital-Driven Growth)

This is a pure financial play where you reinvest revenue from customers directly into paid ads to get more customers. It’s a straightforward loop that can scale incredibly fast, as long as the numbers make sense. The golden rule here is that your Lifetime Value (LTV) must be significantly higher than your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).

• How it works: A customer pays for their subscription. You take a slice of that revenue and put it into Google Ads or LinkedIn Ads. Those ads bring in new paying customers, whose revenue then funds the next round of ad spend.

• Classic Example: HubSpot. They use a portion of the subscription revenue from their CRM and marketing platform to bid on high-intent keywords like "CRM software." This brings in new customers, who then fuel the budget for the next ad campaign.

How To Start Building Your Own Loop

Let's be clear: a growth loop is not just a marketing project. It requires deep, cross-functional teamwork between your product, sales, and customer success teams. Everyone has to be rowing in the same direction. For more on that, you can check out our playbook on breaking down silos to align your revenue teams).

Expert Insight: A true growth loop isn't an accident. It is an intentionally designed system where the product, marketing, and business model are engineered to work together to create compounding growth.

To get started, map out your entire customer journey from first touch to loyal advocate. Look for points where the output of one step can be looped back to feed an earlier step. Ask yourself questions like, "How can our current users help us find new ones?" or "What valuable data are our users generating that could become our next big piece of content?"

When you focus on loops over funnels, you stop renting attention and start building a genuine, self-sustaining growth asset for your business.

Turning Clicks into Customers: How to Optimise Your Funnel for Conversions

Getting leads in the door and building slick growth loops are massive wins, but honestly, that’s just getting you to the starting line. The real measure of success in marketing for SaaS is how well you turn that hard-won interest into actual, paying customers. This is where Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) and smart nurture playbooks come into play.

Optimising your funnel means getting forensic about every single step of the user journey. From the moment someone lands on your site to the second they become a happy, paying user, every interaction is either an opportunity for improvement or a hidden leak.

The goal is to sand down the rough edges, remove all the friction, and create a smooth path that guides people from curiosity to action. This takes a deep, analytical dive into user behaviour and a real commitment to constant testing and tweaking.

Finding and Fixing the Friction Points

The first job in CRO is figuring out where people are getting stuck or just giving up. You can't fix a leak you can't see. Luckily, today's tools give us x-ray vision into these friction points.

• Heatmaps: Tools like Hotjar are brilliant for this. They create visual maps showing exactly where users click, move, and scroll. You can instantly see which bits of your landing page are getting all the love and which are being completely ignored.

• Session Recordings: This is like looking over a user's shoulder. You can watch anonymised recordings of real people using your site, seeing their confusion, frustration, and those little moments of delight as they happen.

• A/B Testing: This is the science behind CRO. You create two versions of a page (maybe with a different headline or button colour), show them to different groups of visitors, and let the data tell you which one performs better. No more guesswork.

Using these tools, you can move from hunches to hypotheses. Instead of just thinking something will work, you can say, "I believe changing the CTA from 'Sign Up' to 'Start My Free Trial' will increase conversions," and then prove it.

Building Nurture Playbooks That Actually Work

Once a lead shows interest, you can't just cross your fingers and hope they figure out the rest. A lead nurturing sequence is your automated salesperson, working 24/7. It’s a series of communications, usually emails, designed to build trust and deliver the right information at just the right time.

A truly powerful nurture playbook doesn't just sell; it educates. It provides genuine value and builds a relationship long before it ever asks for a credit card.

Expert Insight: Your nurture sequences should feel less like a sales pitch and more like a helpful guide. Each email should answer a potential question or overcome an objection, moving the prospect one step closer to understanding your product's true value.

An effective sequence usually starts with a warm welcome, moves into educational content that speaks directly to their pain points, and then, eventually, introduces a clear call to action like booking a demo or starting a trial. This structured approach can dramatically shorten the sales cycle and boost trial-to-paid conversion rates. It’s the perfect follow-up for high-quality leads generated from platforms like LinkedIn, a topic we cover in our guide to high-converting LinkedIn ads).

Designing a Seamless Onboarding Experience

For any SaaS company, but especially for PLG models, the user onboarding process is arguably the most critical part of the entire conversion funnel. This is the moment of truth where you deliver on all your marketing promises. A clunky, confusing, or overwhelming onboarding experience is the fastest way to lose a potential customer forever.

Your one and only goal here is to get new users to their first "aha!" moment as quickly and smoothly as possible. That's the point where they truly get the value of your product and see how it solves their specific problem.

This part of the funnel is becoming a make-or-break factor. For example, Spain’s SaaS market revenue is projected to hit US$3.13 billion in 2025, as more businesses go digital. With key sectors like professional services, education, and SMEs all adopting SaaS, a flawless onboarding experience is a massive competitive advantage. You can explore more about the Spanish SaaS market findings here. By optimising every single touchpoint, from the landing page to that first-run experience, you ensure your marketing investment pays off with sustainable revenue.

Measuring What Matters in SaaS Marketing

In SaaS marketing, data is your north star. But it's incredibly easy to get swamped by an ocean of charts and numbers, most of which are just noise. The reality is, only a handful of metrics truly tell you if your business is healthy and, more importantly, profitable.

Focusing on these core Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is how you cut through that noise. This isn't about tracking vanity metrics for a flashy report. It's about understanding the story your data is telling you, so you can make smart decisions that actually drive growth.

Your Core SaaS Marketing Metrics

Let's get straight to it. These are the numbers every SaaS marketer should live and breathe. They're the ones that connect what you do every day directly to revenue.

• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): This is the pulse of your business. It’s the predictable, reliable revenue you can count on coming in every single month. More than just a number, it's a direct indicator of your growth and momentum.

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): How much does it really cost you to land a new paying customer? CAC gives you the answer. It bundles up all your sales and marketing spend over a period and divides it by the number of new customers you brought in. No hiding from this number.

• Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): LTV is the total revenue you can reasonably expect from a single customer over the entire time they stay with you. A high LTV is a sign of a fantastic product and happy, loyal customers who stick around.

• Churn Rate: The silent killer of many SaaS businesses. This is the percentage of customers who hit the cancel button in a given period. If this number is high, it's a massive red flag that something is wrong, no matter how fast you’re acquiring new users.

Looking at these metrics in isolation is useful, but the real magic happens when you see how they work together.

The LTV to CAC Ratio: The Golden Metric

If you track only one "combo" metric, make it the LTV:CAC ratio. This simple ratio compares how much a customer is worth to you over their lifetime versus how much you paid to get them in the door. It's the ultimate health check for your entire business model.

Expert Insight: A healthy SaaS business should be aiming for an LTV:CAC ratio of at least 3:1. Think of it this way: for every dollar you spend to win a customer, you should expect to get at least three dollars back. If you're below that, you might be burning cash too fast. If you're way above it, you might actually be underinvesting in growth.

This ratio gives you a clear, honest answer to the most critical question: is our growth engine actually profitable? It tells you whether you can afford to pour more fuel on your paid channels or if you need to go back and fix a leaky bucket first.

To make this even clearer, here’s a quick-reference table that breaks down these core concepts.

Essential SaaS Marketing KPIs Explained

This summary breaks down the most critical metrics for measuring SaaS marketing success, including their formulas and what they truly indicate about your business health.

When you build your dashboards around these specific KPIs, you graduate from tracking vanity metrics like page views or social media likes. You start measuring what truly matters, which lets you make smarter, data-backed decisions that fuel profitable, long-term growth.

Frequently Asked Questions about SaaS Marketing

What's the one metric an early-stage SaaS should obsess over?

While MRR and user growth are important, the real health indicator for an early-stage SaaS is the LTV:CAC ratio (Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost). It answers one simple, brutal question: are we actually making more money from a customer than we're spending to get them? If that ratio is out of whack, it's your earliest warning sign that something in your marketing or product strategy needs fixing before you scale spending.

How much should we really be spending on marketing?

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, but there are solid benchmarks. For a SaaS company in a heavy growth phase, it's not uncommon to invest between 80% and 120% of annual revenue into sales and marketing to capture market share. Once more established, this number often settles between 40% and 60%. The right number depends on your growth targets and the efficiency of your LTV:CAC ratio. A strong ratio justifies higher spending because it proves profitability.

When will we actually see results from SEO?

SEO is a long-term investment, not a quick fix. If you're starting with a fresh domain and consistently publishing high-quality, optimised content two or three times a week, you'll likely see initial traction in about 6 to 9 months. However, to achieve meaningful organic traffic that converts into leads, you should plan for a 12 to 18-month journey. Success depends heavily on your market's competitiveness, your domain authority, and the quality of your execution.

Should we go with product-led or sales-led growth first?

This decision comes down to your product and your price tag.

• Product-Led Growth (PLG): Best for products that are intuitive, solve a clear pain point for an individual user, and have a low price point. It's a fantastic way to acquire many users quickly without a large sales team.

• Sales-Led Growth (SLG): Essential for solutions that are complex, require integration, and have a high Average Contract Value (ACV). A dedicated sales team is necessary to guide prospects through a longer, more consultative buying process. Many successful companies eventually adopt a hybrid model that combines both approaches.

Ready to build a scalable growth engine for your B2B tech company? Haralds Gabrans Zukovs specialises in creating automated marketing and sales loops that drive predictable revenue. Let's discuss how we can accelerate your growth.

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