5 Effective Website Marketing Tactics for SaaS Businesses

One of the most challenging aspects of starting and running a SaaS business is getting visitors to come to your website.

There are over a billion websites. It’s easy to see why you might think getting your site found is almost impossible.

But don’t worry. There’s a way for your business to stand out and get the traffic–and paying clients—it deserves. In this article, you’ll learn five website marketing tips you can use. Let’s get started!

1. Harness the Power of Organic Social Media Posts

With a rock-solid organic social media strategy, you can get potential customers to learn about your brand free of charge. As of 2022, over half of the world's population uses social media. That means if your SaaS business doesn’t have a social media presence, you could be missing out on promoting your site to that many potential customers.

You can start your organic social marketing journey by creating accounts on relevant social networks. What social platform does your target customer frequent? Make sure you also create a business, not a personal, account. This type of account will give you access to analytics tools you can use to enhance your organic marketing efforts.

You’ll also want to make sure that the branding on your social media accounts matches your website’s. So, if you’re using a manufacturer web design, for instance, your social channel should have the same industrial look. If you’re using a perky web design, your social platform should look just as vibrant. With this strategy, you can help ensure brand recognition. When people visit your social channel and website, they’ll know both of them are your brand.

Now when posting organic social media content, you don’t necessarily have to promote your website directly. You can post a link to your site’s informative content. Just make sure it’s related to your product. For instance, if you’re selling email marketing software, why not promote a blog post on email marketing trends? Check out how email software Sendible does it in the screenshot above. The SaaS company shares a teaser of its interview on email marketing with a content marketing specialist on its Facebook post. Then it leaves a link to its site where those interested can access the full interview.

We’ll talk more about these other types of content marketing later. Suffice it to say that if you promote your site content on your social channels, you won’t just get website visitors. You can also boost engagement, and get more Instagram followers, Facebook comments, and retweets.

You can also post organic content that engages enough to get people to your site. For instance, why not leverage quizzes like the one above users can interact with? You can ask them teaser questions as part of the quiz on social media, then ask them to go to your site for the full quiz. Or you can run a social media contest, and then say you’ll announce the winners on your site.

Whatever organic posts you publish, use an editorial calendar to organize your scheduling efforts. Include a compelling call to action that directs readers to your website.

To get the most out of your social accounts as a free marketing tool, include your website’s URL in your profile section.

2. Invest in Other Types of Content Marketing

Content marketing involves creating valuable content that meets the needs of your potential customers over a prolonged period (hence the word “invest”). We’ve talked about how you can use organic social media posts to promote your site. But there are other types of content you can leverage—from blog posts to guides and even guest posts on other websites.

Content creation as part of your SaaS website marketing plan provides several benefits.

For one, regularly churning out informative content lets you position your SaaS business as an authority. Over time, your target audience could come to associate your brand with know-how.

SaaS company Ahrefs, for instance, is now a go-to resource for SEO and marketing content thanks to its informative blog content.

Also, producing high-quality content lets you educate your business’s user personas about your brand covertly. For example, you can create relevant content that informs your audience about a problem they may have and how your SaaS business can help them solve it.

You’ll need a solid SaaS content marketing strategy to effectively market your website. That means you’ll need to curate content that meets your customers at every stage of their buyer’s journey. So, don’t just create a blog post sharing email marketing tips for the awareness stage. You’ll want to create product comparison guides and case studies to help potential customers decide at the consideration stage as well. Offer a live demo to finally close that sale at the decision stage.

Content marketing is free, so make sure to take advantage of this powerful website marketing tactic.

3. Optimize for SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) involves using established techniques to make a website user and search engine-friendly. The truth is, you need this to ensure effective content marketing as well. SEO ensures the blog posts, and case studies, among others, we discussed above are found in the first place. If you are a beginner, it helps to use an easy website builder that guides you through on-page optimization.

There are several types of SEO: on-page, technical SEO, and off-page SEO.

On-page SEO involves setting up your website to give your target market an excellent user experience. The technical side of this SEO involves making it easier for a search engine’s robots to crawl the website.

Here are some factors you need to address when doing on-page and technical SEO:

• Page Speed: your SaaS website must load quickly, or else you risk putting off impatient visitors. Google recommends a page load time of under two seconds. So, compress images and use a content distribution network, among others.
• Keywords: the content on your site–including your blog posts and guides—and even your guest posts on other sites should use relevant keywords that match the ones your prospective customers include in their search queries. In a nutshell, before writing, conducting keyword research that takes cognizance of search volume, competitiveness, and user intent is key. You can leverage keyword research tools like Semrush and Moz for this.
• Structural Hierarchy: your website’s content needs to be organized in a hierarchical structure of headings and subheadings.
• Mobile-friendliness: Your website should be compatible on mobile devices. So, use a responsive website design template.

Meanwhile, off-page SEO primarily involves link-building, that is, getting other websites to link back to yours. You can receive backlinks in many ways, including using aged domains and guest posting and creating valuable and shareable content like well-designed infographics. If authority websites link back to your content, it’ll tell a search engine that your content is authoritative.

With the right enterprise SaaS SEO strategy in place, you can get search engines to reward your efforts with higher rankings (i.e., better visibility) on their search engine results pages (SERPs). This translates to more organic traffic, which can translate to paying customers.

4. Utilize Paid Advertising

While it’s true that SEO, social media marketing, and other types of content marketing will benefit your SaaS business, those free website marketing tips take time to bear fruit. Thus, it’s impossible to talk about online marketing for SaaS websites without mentioning paid advertising campaigns.

Paid advertising falls into three main categories: search engine marketing (SEM), display ads, and social media advertising. While all three require ample marketing budgets, they can produce faster results for your business by giving your website almost instant visibility.

SEM involves paying for visibility on search engines like Bing and Google. You’ll bid on keywords related to your SaaS business against competing websites/companies. The higher your proposed bid amount, the higher your SaaS website will appear at the top of a search engine result page (SERP).

In the image below, SaaS company Dilitrust outbid Zoho for the keyword “project management software”, appearing higher on Google’s SERP.

Social media ads take a similar approach to Google Ads in that you pay for visibility on social platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Many social media channels have business tools you can use to laser-target your business’s ideal user personas. They can appear in your potential customer’s feeds as sponsored posts.

Finally, display ads involve using an advertising platform like Google Adwords to give your SaaS website visibility on the platform’s partner sites. Potential B2B customers who visit a partner website may see your ad displayed.

The three paid advertising methods share the pay-per-click (PPC) model. In summary, you only pay when a user clicks on your ad. There are variations, like paying per impression (when your ad is loaded on a web page), but the principle idea is the same. For example, you could set up a PPC campaign for your SaaS business and pay $0.50 every time a user sees or clicks on your ad.

Paid advertising can be a powerful marketing tactic for marketing your SaaS website. Consider making room for it in your marketing budget.

5. Craft Impactful Press Releases

Finally, why not leverage PR to drive traffic to your SaaS website?

Press releases are formal statements about your business. They’re usually announcements about your business’s accomplishments meant for the press. Newsworthy achievements you can share with the world include:

• Brand new products and product updates
• Funding rounds (if your SaaS is a startup)
• Donations to charitable causes.
• Awards earned; and so on

You can market your SaaS site through your press release in different ways. You can publish your release on your site and optimize it for SEO. This way, it’s likely to appear in search engine results pages given a relevant search query. The press can get wind of it, and give you media coverage. Or, you can proactively pitch your press release to relevant media organizations for coverage. You can use email for this.

Either way, the press release can help send traffic to your SaaS site.

To make your press releases impactful, include data and visuals. Also, avoid overhyping your SaaS business’s accomplishments or making inaccurate claims. The last thing you’d want is to damage your brand’s reputation irreparably.

Conclusion

Marketing your SaaS website can be straightforward when you know how. In fact, the website marketing tips revealed in this article should get you off to a flying start.

Harness the power of organic social media posts for increased brand exposure. Invest in other types of content marketing. Use SEO to optimize your website so it can rank higher on SERPs. and utilize paid ads. Finally, craft impactful press releases to generate buzz and send visitors to your website.

Follow these five website marketing tips, and you’ll get people to your SaaS site, increasing your chances for conversions.