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Business to Business(B2B) SaaS founders are often faced with the huge task of planning for the marketing and growth of their product. Most of the time the founders coming from a technological background themselves are unaware of the digital marketing tactics they should employ for growth and marketing. The major points at which B2B SaaS founders struggle the most after building an MVP or a POC is to get their first new users, after which they can test their product market fit. Post PMF, founders struggle to understand what their users would want or need and how to retain them as brand loyalists in the long term. Based on the different projects that Method has worked on in the past and our professionals’ expertise, we have tried to compile a playbook for B2B SaaS founders which they can employ to get started on converting their first users into loyalists for digital word of mouth marketing.
SEO for B2B SaaS
Yes, we know that there are hundreds of articles right now and thousands of discussions across various forums that SEO is dead. But let us clarify that for you, SEO isn’t dead, it's evolving but it is still based around a core principle of how people search for information. AI Overviews are here yes, LLMs are now citing information from sites yes, traffic has dropped significantly yes, but the traffic is more meaningful now and zero click searches are actually leading more intent specific traffic leading to good conversions. Organic traction is priceless and don’t let anyone convince you otherwise and SEO is one of the major channels of organic traction not just from the perspective of numbers but simply because of the unit economics and Customer Acquisition Cost(CAC). Even from an investment perspective organic traction is given the most importance.
Focus on creating meaningful, authoritative content around the topics which are of relevance for your target audience. Create helpful content which is unique and not just copied or AI generated (you can take the help of AI but not let AI do everything) for ranking high in the search algorithms for organic discovery. Even for featuring in AI Overviews or to be cited by LLMs, focus on conversational questions which people might ask the LLMs around the topic which would lead them to your product or service. But SEO is not just keywords and content, there are other aspects to it which also require attention like Core Web Vitals, indexing, page speed, page quality, user experience, sitemap etc. which require dedicated attention. Not to mention backlinks which help the algorithm identify your website as a trusted website and help you gain a better Domain Authority(DA). Just brand mentions won’t do, context is also being taken into account by the search algorithms no matter how many updates are rolled out.
SaaS Review Platforms
If you haven’t heard about product hunt then you probably are living under a rock. Product Hunt is a review platform where users vote and express their love for a tech product they have used. Review sites like App Sumo, Rockethub G2 etc. also help users get a discounted deal on the paid versions. Product Hunt was considered a great platform to get a new tech product discovered and the product of the day, month, year badges were things to crave. But recently many new indie founders are facing considerable issues like having the upvotes but not being featured or shown and subsequently being denied a badge despite having the upvotes. Others like AppSumo and Rockethub facilitate a special discounted price on the paid plans of the products for their users while keeping a commission from each sale. These review platforms are a good means of getting discovered and can also be used to get the first few users as well. Although the individual channel specific tactics matter like in Product Hunt, if you get a good Hunter who can get the product hunt team on call within the first 4 hours of your launch should anything go wrong, then success is guaranteed- but only then- otherwise many good products like Aesty(link to be added from product hunt) have faced the issue of not getting any visibility at all despite having a good reception among new users shown from its reviews.
However, apart from focusing on the essentials of channel specific launch, also adopt a corollary social media marketing tactic to compliment launches on these review platforms. Consider using your and your teammates profiles to connect with people from Product Hunt but on other channels (X, LinkedIn) and initiating a conversation about your product so that on launch day you can ask them for an upvote or a review to help you with the numbers during a launch. For platforms like AppSumo and Rockethub, expect a considerable amount of your revenue to be siphoned off as commission or platform charges.
SMM for B2B SaaS
Social Media Marketing is one of the major channels for digital marketing and is something which is used by legacy brands as well as new and upcoming products especially SaaS because of the target audience presence on these channels. For personal profiles as mentioned above the tactic of connecting with people from Product Hunt, App Sumo, Rockethub and initiating a conversation about your product helps to get you a new user as well as ensure a review or support for launch on a platform when needed. But a personal profile focused social media marketing tactic is what can actually also get your SaaS discovered on a large scale as well. Apart from creating new connections on LinkedIn and X(formerly Twitter), SaaS founders should also focus on initiating conversation across forums and communities within those channels. Be it communities on X(formerly Twitter), subreddits on Reddit, groups on Facebook or even the discussions on Product Hunt, these are some of the places online where you will find your target audience already expressing their dissatisfaction or elaborating a pain point or giving a review for the feature you thought would make or break your product.
Focus on a meaningful participation in conversations before subtly directing them to your products, try to not get tagged as spammer and focus on meaningful conversations across different communities which are often interest based and which is where you will find the most of the users you need.
Community Marketing for B2B SaaS
From slack communities to discord servers to meta broadcast channels, a focus on community driven growth has over the years turned the traffic waves to different interest based communities beyond social media. While discord was primarily used by gamers, it evolved to a stage where developers, even the likes of those from Suno, are testing out their APIs with users first hand through discord servers. By giving users the ability to explore their product on discord, allowed a lot of B2B SaaS get their first users as well as build a relationship with existing customers as they went on to build their own communities.
Focus on participating in the discussions on such forums around the topic of interest for your SaaS and where your target audience are most likely to be found. Upon building a user base, focus on creating a community for your users so that you can open a direct channel of communication with your users. You can check out detailed steps on how to execute community marketing for your SaaS on our blog.
