SaaS companies do these parts of marketing better than everyone else

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Study B2B SaaS companies and you'll find that they do these parts of marketing better than anyone else: • Onboarding • Content marketing • Conferences • Engineering as marketing • Partner & reseller programs Steal these lessons ↓

ONBOARDING Onboarding is the crux of making a SaaS business work. You can have the best marketing in the world. But if you can't successfully onboard users into your product, they'll churn out. This is why SaaS companies are world-class at onboarding: THEY HAVE TO BE.

Want to see what amazing SaaS onboarding looks like? Check out these user flow recordings from @PageFlows pageflows.com/user-flow/user-onboarding/

I'll never forget how @Superhuman individually onboards new users to maximize product adoption and retention. Check out this interactive case study: growth.design/case-studies/superhuman-user-onboarding/

My friend @ramlijohn points out 3 of the most common onboarding killers in SaaS: 1. Email verification wall 2. Unnecessary steps 3. Describing "what," not "why" twitter.com/RamliJohn/status/1401950036997537792

More amazing content from @ramlijohn (the product-led onboarding king! 👑) You know I'm all about mental models and frameworks so this is like catnip to me. 🤩 twitter.com/RamliJohn/status/1405620055623274503

When you think of SaaS onboarding, you probably think of low-touch / self-serve onboarding. But high-touch onboarding is a whole other beast and just as important. I love this guide: arrows.to/resources/onboarding-101/

Arrows.to is dedicated software for high-touch onboarding

There are so many takeaways from SaaS onboarding that you can apply to: • Communities • DTC/e-commerce • Services • Social apps • Local groups, gatherings, and associations

CONTENT MARKETING There are two factors that have forced SaaS companies to get creative with how they drive traffic to their site: 1. A limited number of keywords directly related to software products 2. Scarcity of search demand for all keywords related to a niche/industry

See, SEO is a zero-sum game. There can only be one #1 search result. There are only so many on the first page. And if you (1) can't get to your desired keyword rank or (2) have already achieved all your desired keyword ranks... ...then you have to get traffic elsewhere.

This constraint has forced SaaS companies to innovate and creative with their content. @growandconvert, @AnimalzCo, @superpathco, and @Bonini84's Some Good Content patreon are my go-to resources for content marketing.

The @AnimalzCo team outlines these 8 content types for SaaS companies: 🔬 Teardowns ✂️ Cross-Cutting 📚 Template Library 📝 Meta Content 💻 Use-Case Content 💡 Thought Leadership 🔗 Hub and Spoke 📊 Data

They've also created this master guide for content marketing: animalz.co/blog/content-marketing-strategy/

Specifically what SaaS companies do better than anyone else in content marketing is create content that maps to different stages of a funnel, which each serve a different purpose. Here's a great explanation: poweredbysearch.com/blog/b2b-saas-content-strategy/

SaaS companies (or rather the genius agencies that create content for them) have figured out how to make lemonade out of lemons. Even with super low search volume, you can get great results. Case in point: growandconvert.com/content-marketing/seo-content-conversions/

The Grow & Convert team were one of the first to figure out ways to promote content in ways beyond just SEO. They grew their blog to 32,977 unique visitors in 5 months using only content promotion via communities. growandconvert.com/content-marketing/community-content-promotion/

Since then, they've adjusted their strategy to include a mix of short-term and long-term promotion strategies. This includes: • Paid distribution through Facebook ads • Link-building growandconvert.com/content-marketing/content-distribution-strategy/

Zapier programmatically generates 25,000+ pages to get millions of visitors to their site. I haven't seen any other type of company do this. ryanberg.co/how-zapier-reached-35m-arr-with-this-saas-seo-strategy/

Shopify has created full-blown courses with influencers and celebrities like Tim Ferriss, Daymond John, and Ezra Firestone. shopify.com/learn

Close has been killing with ebooks and downloadable content. close.com/resources/

Groove centered their blog around their startup journey and grew to $5M+ ARR through this type of content marketing. groovehq.com/blog/how-we-built-a-5m-business-with-content-marketing

The @ahrefs team is one of the first and most successful case studies for using YouTube. 244k subs 🤯 This video has over 1M views: youtube.com/watch?v=DvwS7cV9GmQ

Mailchimp has gone full media-compan-mode with Mailchimp Presents. Films, documentaries, series, and podcasts. mailchimp.com/presents/

And we can't forget about @davegerhardt with @Drift's Seeking Wisdom podcast. One of the first breakout branded podcasts. drift.com/blog/introducing-seeking-wisdom-a-podcast-from-drift/

CONFERENCES Dreamforce by Salesforce attracted 170,000+ attendees pre-covid 🤯 Recognize any of these past speakers? They're not messing around!

Inbound by HubSpot this year is featuring Oprah Winfrey. The first one was held all the way back in 2012. inbound.com/

Drift was ambitious enough to start their own conference just a couple years after founding. @dcancel was kind enough to fly me and my wife out to attend! One of my all-time favorite experiences. youtu.be/gL2YSBXY5Rg?t=68

Even though @ConvertKit isn't small anymore, they were hosting conferences even when they were a fraction of the size called Craft + Commerce. (p.s. @nathanbarry can you guys come back to San Diego for 2022? 🙏) conference.convertkit.com/

What do you take away from this if you're not a SaaS company? Conferences are a great way to gather like-minded people. It's also a fantastic way to build a deeper relationship with your audience.

The legend @PatFlynn hosted a conference for the @teamspi community here in San Diego. Creators can host conferences too! flynncon.com/

I've heard amazing things about Laracon, which is based on a common love for the popular programming framework Laravel. laracon.net/

ENGINEERING AS MARKETING B2B SaaS companies are masters of creating free tools and sites that generate exposure to their products. Here's a ton of examples: twitter.com/coreyhainesco/status/1217998287719911424

Love this post by @hnshah producthabits.com/why-your-saas-business-needs-free-tools/

These are some of the best tangible examples: twitter.com/coreyhainesco/status/1218005295693099008?s=20

Since 2008, HubSpot's website grader has generated millions of leads for them. blog.hubspot.com/marketing/website-grader

Within about six months of launching HubSpot's email signature generator, they were generating 75,000+ visitors to the free tool per month. And those visitors were converting into approximately 50,000+ net-new leads per month. learn.g2.com/the-worlds-most-effective-b2b-marketing-campaign

What do you take away from this if you're not a SaaS company? Well, you don't have to be a SaaS company to create free tools. Anyone can. Here's a couple examples ↓

Bryan Harris had his team create a bunch of free tools that led to his coaching/training program. twitter.com/boaticus/status/1218047088333918208?s=20

Ryan Bonnici created a self-assessment quiz that generates leads for his content/community site. executiv.co/resources/five-dysfunctions-of-a-team-self-assessment

PARTNER & RESELLER PROGRAMS Here's one that's truly unique to SaaS. Rev share and whitelabeling aren't all that common in other industries. But there are huge implications.

With yet another HubSpot case study, @pc4media grew their partner program (AKA channel sales) past $100M+ in attributable annual recurring revenue. They recruited marketing agencies to sell HubSpot on their behalf and take a cut of the revenue for HUGE results. Win-win.

I can't give away who they are, but I know a SaaS company who exclusively sold whitelabel licenses where the end customer wouldn't even know it was them. They grew to multi-millions in revenue from that "channel" alone.

HighLevel sells an all-in-one platform that marketing agencies can use to build out bespoke SaaS products for clients to use. This way, the agency can charge for the service AND the software. The agencies do all the work to sell the software. gohighlevel.com

How can other industries adopt this? Here are a few examples ↓

@donaldmiller and his @storybrand team very smartly packaged up everything they know into a certification program that consultants can use to sell services to clients. storybrand.com/guide/

Sharyn Sheldon creates white label courses for companies through her business contentsparks.com Listen to this podcast episode: onlinecoursecoach.com/how-to-create-white-label-online-courses-for-companies-with-sharyn-sheldon/

I think there's a huge opportunity for anyone with specialized knowledge to repackage their content for other's to use and resell. In fact, SaaS companies should be looking to partner with course creators in their niche to resell at a discounted price or even for free.

Or think about DTC companies that haven't reached mass distribution. Big retailers like Costco, Walmart, and other stores are always looking for private label opportunities. This applies to CPG companies as well.

There are even partner/reseller opportunities for services. Many agencies and service companies (1) don't have the bandwidth to take on certain projects or (2) don't have the in-house expertise to take on certain projects. Subcontract and you've got built-in distribution.

There ya have it. I think this is really where SaaS marketing excels: • Onboarding • Content marketing • Conferences • Engineering as marketing • Partner & reseller programs Agree? Disagree?