The software-as-a-service marketing strategies with the best return on investment bring qualified leads to your website while strengthening trust in your company’s credibility and industry leadership. Short-term gains come from high-intent bottom-of-funnel visitors, while strategies focused on attracting top-of-funnel and middle-of-funnel visitors bolster your sales pipeline over the longer term.
A well-rounded SaaS marketing strategy in 2027 will include on-site, off-site, and word-of-mouth components that meet your target audience where they actively search for answers. Implement one strategy at a time and make it part of your workflow for the most sustainable results.
On-Site SaaS Marketing Strategies
Your company website is your most powerful marketing tool and the one over which you have the most control. Igor Avidon is the founder of Avidon Marketing Group, a leading SEO agency specializing in SaaS SEO services. Mr. Avidon says:
“Your website connects the marketing ecosystem. Organic search, social media, email, PR, and paid search advertising ultimately drive prospects back to this destination. And you own that space entirely, so you need to make sure all of your ideal prospects can find how your software helps them with language catered specifically to them.”
There are several important ways to make sure your website is properly connecting your prospects with what your product can do for them.
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Build Industry-Specific Landing Pages
Create industry-specific landing pages to be discovered by the verticals that you most want to attract as SaaS customers. This may include those:
- For which your SaaS product has produced the best results in the past
- That are currently growing in scale and demand
- With a sufficiently sized software budget to pay for your SaaS product
For example, a customer relationship management (CRM) software company might create landing pages for businesses in:
- Ecommerce
- Financial services
- Insurance
- Healthcare
- Real estate
- Information technology
- Manufacturing
- Professional services
- Hospitality
- Education
- Nonprofits
Each industry-specific landing page must demonstrate the company’s knowledge of the vertical and highlight the software product features that cater to its unique requirements. For example:
- A healthcare-related landing page for U.S. customers must clearly explain how the software fulfills HIPAA privacy regulations for patient data.
- CRMs for financial services businesses must comply with SEC Rule 17a-4 regarding the preservation of records, and FINRA Rules 4511 and 3110 regarding recordkeeping and supervision.
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Write How-To Articles About Your Products With Screenshots
Blog articles explaining how to use your software products are a useful form of marketing if your brand is already well-known. Keep the steps and screenshots up to date to remain the authoritative go-to source of truth about your products for users, search engines, and AI assistants.
The secondary benefit of publishing how-to guides about your software products is that it helps your current customers use the available features to their full advantage. This supports customer satisfaction and retention, boosting customer lifetime value (CLV).
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Structure Blog Content in Machine-Readable Formats
Structuring content in a machine-friendly way takes your SaaS marketing investment further by increasing your chances of AI Overview and AI-assistant citations. Appearing in these places in addition to organic search is critical for software-as-a-service companies, considering that 66% of B2B professionals used AI to research vendors and solutions in 2026.
AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Gemini look for clear definitions from authoritative sources to provide as answers to user questions. Craft each paragraph of your content to answer a single question clearly if it were lifted out of the surrounding context.
Consider this clear definition of “finance transformation” from an article “How cloud ERP accelerates finance transformation”:
If an AI system were to scour the web for a clear answer to the question “What is finance transformation?” it could lift out this paragraph cleanly and serve it as a complete answer, linking back to the SAP blog.
Compare this to the following paragraph:
“As mentioned above, it’s strategic. So, is your company in on the action?”
This much shorter paragraph could be about finance transformation. However, it could also be about team-building retreats in the Pacific, because no reference term appears in the paragraph itself.
Igor Avidon highlights the importance of an LLM-friendly content format:
“Treat LLMs as a toddler that needs simple, explicit information that’s easy to understand. You only need to do this for key questions and information related to your topic. Complicated concepts can still be explored after the definition or question is answered.”
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Refresh Blog Content Regularly
Search engines and AI systems prioritize up-to-date content, especially ChatGPT, according to 2025 research from Ahrefs. This makes content refreshes a vital strategy to implement in your SaaS marketing plan. Current statistics, screenshots, and instructions boost credibility and trust. They show your company is active and interested in its customers’ ongoing success.
Refreshing SaaS blog content every three to six months is a good rule of thumb to remain competitive. However, the best frequency will match each query type and how quickly it loses relevance for user intent:
- Refresh year-specific “trends” articles annually.
- Refresh year-specific “statistics” articles annually.
- Refresh software roundups annually.
- Refresh software product how-to guides after a product update.
- Concept overview articles might not need refreshing for a couple of years.
Google patent US20120209838A1 describes an “update amount score” by which it determines that a page has been refreshed. According to this patent, the changes that carry the most weight include:
- Updating the title tag
- Changing the anchor text of forward links
- Adding a new “page,” meaning around 500 words of text
Mr. Avidon cautions that it’s important to keep publishing new content while refreshing older articles to maintain organic visibility:
“It’s not really an ‘either or’ choice. Your industry doesn’t stand still, and new questions and concepts appear every year. This makes annual content review a critical part of your content marketing strategy. New content that addresses topics related to your SaaS product is vital for targeting and educating your prospective customers.”
Off-Site SaaS Marketing Strategies
Digital SaaS marketing in the AI era requires a web of on-site and off-site publications that support the same message. Search engines and AI systems check a variety of authoritative sources to build their concepts of your software company and decide that you’re worth trusting and citing. Promoting value adds in relevant publications and engaging in expert-led marketing both help to build off-site knowledge about your company.
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Promote Value Adds in Highly Relevant Publications
One of the most powerful off-site marketing strategies for software-as-a-service companies is seeking editorial coverage in highly relevant publications. These features should highlight your software product’s value adds. Igor Avidon emphasizes this tactic:
“This under-utilized strategy carries a ton of value. It adds SEO equity to your site directly thanks to the brand mention and backlink to your site. It also carries business value, as more of your target audience sees your company featured. This increases brand awareness, creates more branded searches, and adds direct traffic to your site—all strong SEO factors.”
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Engage in Expert-Led Marketing
Expert-led marketing is a broadening of the well-known concept of founder-led marketing. It’s a powerful SaaS marketing strategy because it positions the company as an authority in its niche.
Founder-led marketing involves company leaders conducting webinars, writing blog posts, and posting social media content on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and X. Sharing relevant expertise, statistics, industry news, and insights positions these professionals as thought leaders in their verticals, building trust in their software products.
Expert-led marketing refers to the thought-leadership activity of most or all of the professionals in a company, rather than the founder alone. As software engineers, DevOps engineers, product managers, account executives, and technical support specialists share their knowledge and insights online, your SaaS company will become synonymous with innovation. Potential B2C and B2B customers will choose you not only for your product’s features but also for the trust they have developed in your company’s representatives.
Word-of-Mouth-Based Strategy
Word of mouth continues to be an effective marketing strategy for software-as-a-service companies because it is perceived as genuine. This perception holds whether recommendations are made online or offline, formally or informally. A customer referral program is the most formal system for recognizing customer recommendations.
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Launch a Customer Referral Program
Customer referral programs reward customers who get someone else to sign up for your company’s software service. In these programs:
- Users are typically given a personalized referral link or promo code.
- To be rewarded, the referred customer needs to use this link or code, complete the sign-up process, and make their first payment or stay active for a defined retention period.
- The referrer typically receives a discount or gift card.
- The referred customer also receives a reward in programs that offer double-sided incentives.
Most software-as-a-service companies offer double-sided rewards in their customer referral programs. This motivates both the referrer and referred customers to complete the process and reduces social friction.
Prioritize SaaS Marketing Strategies That Offer the Best Return
Optimizing your SaaS company’s marketing spend requires identifying the strategies and adjustments that will have the greatest impact on your lead pipeline, sales, and customer retention for the time and money invested.
Begin with your current workflow and start with improvements to what you’re already doing. For example, upskill your writers in AI-friendly paragraph architecture and add article refreshes to your existing content calendar.
From there, introduce new action items in a small, sustained way. If your experts aren’t already sharing their insights on relevant social channels, start posting once a week or try a monthly podcast or webinar. Continue until it becomes a habit before attempting more. If several company reps all do this, your online presence and credibility will grow significantly over time.
Finally, keep your highest-margin target audience front and center. Meet their needs with genuinely helpful software product features, up-to-date content, and referral rewards, and watch your revenue grow.
