Top 5 B2B SaaS Marketing Tips for Startup Founders

Startup founders, especially in B2B SaaS, have so much on their plates at any given moment. While marketing can often be an afterthought, with today’s digital buyer’s journey, abdicating marketing can be a huge mistake. 

In this short video, you’ll learn about the top five most critical B2B SaaS marketing tips that startup founders need to take to heart.

1. Invest in customer insight early and often to give your company a competitive advantage. You have to know your most important buyer personas and their preferred buyer's journeys and jobs-to-be-done better than they know themselves. When you do that, you gain the ability to provide insight, thought leadership, and value that positions you and your team as the definitive go-to experts in your space.
2. Set SMART goals so you can align on and measure incremental progress. (Specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timebound) This goal-setting will help you focus on campaigns that move the needle the most with lead generation, sales cycle acceleration, opportunity generation, and customer marketing/expansion revenue.
3. Use educational content to be present in the early and middle stages of the buyer's journey. Most B2B SaaS buyers have completely changed the way that they research and make purchase decisions. Most now strongly prefer to self-serve in the early and middle stages of buyer's journey -- and for all intents and purposes, have become allergic to spending time with salespeople until the latest stages of their research and decision-making process. Many times, the only way to earn a virtual seat at the table early enough to matter is by using content to educate and build trust. (As Apple and Google make third-party cookies extinct in the coming months, B2B SaaS companies won't survive without a strong brand that supports this content strategy.)
4. Figure out where product-led growth (PLG) fits in with your go-to-market strategy. Regardless of whether your B2B SaaS company focuses on small businesses, mid-market, or enterprises, there's a very high likelihood that your marketplace will be disrupted and reshaped by the SaaS company that's able to use land/expand with a single user starting with a free version of your platform. Asana, HubSpot, and Slack have all flourished because of PLG.
5. Make sure that your marketing leader is part of your executive team. Many B2B SaaS companies make the egregious, strategic mistake of burying marketing under sales within their org chart. For marketing to effectively improve the prospect and customer experience (CX), and help drive business growth, marketing can't be relegated to a glorified order-taker for the sales leader or high--performing sales reps. The legendary tech entrepreneur David Packard got it right decades before the commercial web ever transformed commerce: "Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department."

Which marketing plays have been important to growing your B2B SaaS startup? What advice would you give to other founders? Let me know in the comments below.