How to create, run, and manage marketing campaigns for B2B SaaS businesses

If you’re a marketer in a growth-minded B2B SaaS company, you would know how important it is to create, run and manage goal-oriented B2B SaaS marketing campaigns and achieve success. However, even if you have the world’s perfect software to offer your customers, a poor B2B SaaS marketing strategy can easily make your research and development investments go to waste. 

There is a common misconception that B2B SaaS marketing is similar to the marketing strategies that brick-and-mortar companies use. Believe it or not, the SaaS niche contains hundreds of new companies innovating new software and finding ways to challenge their industry leaders. You might also find some of your competitors selling certain products for free. 

Considering these facts, it’s understandable that B2B SaaS companies require a distinct market approach to stand out. So, if you have been struggling to market your SaaS creations to the right audience, this article will guide you on how you can create and manage successful marketing campaigns. Based on a podcast with JJ Reynolds, this article gives you deep insight into B2B SaaS marketing campaigns.

Fast forward >>

• How do you design a marketing campaign for a B2B SaaS product
• What campaign metrics should you track for B2B SaaS marketing campaigns
• How do you track CAC and LTV, and when should you start tracking these metrics
• What website metrics should you track for B2B SaaS marketing campaigns
• How do you structure a campaign performance report, and how do you take action on the results

How do you design a marketing campaign for a B2B SaaS product

When it comes to designing a B2B SaaS marketing campaign, the first step is to recognize the differences between SaaS marketing and other forms of marketing. Here are three ways in which they’re different. 

• SaaS products are pretty complex and are loaded with numerous features. As a SaaS marketer, your core challenge is to ensure that all those features are summarized into a few benefits so that you can have a single answer to how this product can help a customer gain success. 
• While marketing a SaaS product, it’s imperative to understand the user persona. You not only have to consider the companies that might use your products, but you’ll also have to understand the team members that might be working with your product in a company.
• Pricing of a SaaS product is a recurring expense for companies, so they don’t have a fixed price tag. Instead, a SaaS product’s price is divided into three to five tiers, making it easy for different customers to use it according to their business needs. 

Now that you know how B2B SaaS marketing varies in different ways, let’s start with establishing a plan to design a successful marketing plan. So, where should you start?

Start with creating a strategy

Before you start a marketing campaign, it’s essential to establish your business expectations from what you might work hard to accomplish. After that, it’s all about creating a strategy and then moving backward to make that work. 

For instance, if you’re a small B2B SaaS company, your primary aim in marketing might be to gain ten customers within a month. That’s your expectation, and once you have established that, you can then work backward by taking relevant actions to make that goal possible. 

Here is an example. As a marketer, the best way to start creating a strategy is by using a whiteboard and writing all your desired outcomes. Then work out the percentage of leads that you want to attain. 

Once you have that, work backward and calculate the number of emails you might have to send to achieve your goal. Again, this method helps curate a realistic expectation that works with all SaaS companies. 

Sometimes the biggest challenge you may face is the conflict between reality and expectations. However, this problem can also be resolved by having a solid conversation with the leadership team through data analytics. 

Focus on your brand 

Your company’s brand is one of the most crucial components of SaaS marketing. Branding is tough, but if you work on it, it can help build consumer trust, increase clicks on your ads, improve conversion rates, and establish a strong base for your business. 

To create a strong SaaS brand, you should first work on your visuals. This may include the content and stories you create to highlight your company. 

Secondly, it’s essential to establish a clear narrative for your company. Then find your voice tone and establish a formal writing style. 

Finally, be consistent with your approach and invest in tools such as content and education to add value to your branding. 

Pay attention to buyer persona

Before designing a marketing campaign, find out about the people who might want to buy your product. Your marketing activities usually depend on the Ideal Customer Profile, so it’s imperative to understand your target buyers’ needs.

What campaign metrics should you track for B2B SaaS marketing campaigns

After you have the strategy ready and have finally launched your campaign, you can’t just let it produce results without any checks and balances. There are some useful B2B SaaS marketing metrics, divided into three major categories, to measure the performance of your campaign. 

The categories are named after the B2B SaaS marketing funnel and are called the top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, and bottom of the funnel metrics. 

Top of the funnel metrics 

These metrics include all your team’s actions to build your marketing campaign. For example, they may include the number of emails you sent, ad impressions, social media engagement and reach, or podcasts you might be attending to market your SaaS product. So how do you track your most important metrics that gauge how your brand is going at the widest, most general audience level? How do you track your social media organic metrics, impressions, and engagement on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and LinkedIn? Our free Supermetrics Free Social Media Mix template is a great place to start.

Try out this Google Data Studio template to get all of your most vital social media channel metrics in one place, with automatic refreshes so you’re always up to date.

These metrics are pretty easy to track. Suppose your company’s CEO has failed to attend a podcast, and as a result, your marketing campaign has suffered. In that case, you can instantly figure out the factor that requires your attention. 

Middle of the funnel metrics

The middle-of-funnel metrics are designed to help you comprehend the ways leads are shifting from the awareness to the consideration stage of the funnel. In addition, these metrics help to quantify the purchase intent of consumers within your funnel. 

They also track the performance of your website during your marketing campaign. We’ll learn more about website metrics below, but these might include the page view metrics that help track the number of people who viewed the product you may have on offer. 

Moreover, the bounce rate of your website is another one of the primary metrics that can help you evaluate the performance of your campaign through your website. 

Another example of the middle-of-the-funnel metrics is the number of phone calls your team may have received to investigate the product.

Try out this Google Data Studio template to have a look at your CallRail metrics.

Bottom of the funnel metrics

These metrics are the most effective in measuring the performance of your marketing strategy at the customer and opportunity stages. They help you recognize revenue impact and guide campaign optimization and managing improvement decisions.

An example of a bottom-of-the-funnel metric might be the lead sales generated during a campaign. High lead sales represent the excellent performance of your campaign and your implemented strategy. On the other hand, low lead sales mean that your campaign might fail to produce your desired results.

Try out this Google Data Studio template to have a look at your HubSpot metrics.

It’s essential for every marketer like you to know about these B2B SaaS marketing metrics and analyze them appropriately. Without these, you may not be able to measure the performance of your efforts and make improvements where required.

How do you track CAC and LTV, and when should you start tracking these metrics

There is no doubt that there are tons of metrics that you should track to evaluate the performance of your SaaS marketing campaign. The number of metrics might overwhelm some, but prioritizing may help. Prioritizing is crucial so that you don’t end up chasing useless metrics.

So, when it comes to B2B SaaS marketing, there are two principal metrics that take the spotlight. These are CAC and LTV. So, let’s discuss each in detail. 

Customer acquisition cost (CAC)

CAC is the metric that measures the amount your company spends on acquiring new customers. Now measuring cost is a challenge in itself. Each department in your company may consider its related cost as the total customer acquisition cost.

For instance, your advertising department may label the spending on an ad under customer acquisition cost. Alternatively, the finance team may calculate CAC by taking all the costs incurred by the marketing department.

This confusion may easily affect the overall results of the metrics. However, the issue can be resolved by adequately defining the cost. The definition of the cost may vary in different companies, but it needs to be consistent with yours.

So, for example, if you consider your ad spending as cost, make sure you’re constantly dividing the number of acquired customers by ad spend to get the final customer acquisition cost.

It’s also important to mention another scenario here. What if you have hired an agency, and they’re responsible for running your ad? In that case, any cost that they charge you is extra and not related to your metrics.

It’s tough to measure CAC, especially if there are multiple expenses that you may have to deal with. However, you can measure CAC within minutes with the simple equation below.

CAC = [Total cost of sales + Total cost of marketing] / New customers acquired

Lifetime Value (LTV)

LTV, or lifetime value, is also one of the most critical metrics for SaaS marketing strategies. It measures the value of a particular customer for a business across the entire relationship.

That said, LTV is one of the most difficult metrics to measure and has many complications involved. How? Here is an example.

Suppose you have a customer who is still a student. They have a free account because of their university. But as soon as they graduate, they no longer have access to the university email address, so they create another.

Now, if your company tries to sell the student something, you might have to approach them through their new email address. All your efforts to measure a customer’s relationship may go in vain because the student will now have to sign up with a new email address.

To overcome this issue, the best way to measure LTV is by setting a date range that’s relevant to the company’s length and is helpful in predicting LTV in the future.

The formula to measure LTV is as follows:

LTV = ARPA / Net MRR Churn %. In this equation, ARPA stands for average revenue per account in this formula, while MRR is the monthly recurring revenue.

It’s imperative for you as a marketer to retain customers for an extended period to build LTV. Similarly, new technologies and agile ways can be implemented for sustainable acquisition to refrain CAC from rising.

The next question is, when should you start tracking CAC and LTV? If you want to use both these metrics to make decisions on your marketing campaign, you need to ensure that the data flowing needs to be meaningful to generate a predictive value.

Therefore, it’s important that you should wait for some time and track these metrics when you have valuable and authentic information to include in the equations mentioned above.

What website metrics should you track for B2B SaaS marketing campaigns

We’ve touched on a few website metrics above, but let’s look at them in more detail. 

There are some primary website metrics that you should track for your company. Here is a list that you may want to go through. 

• The number of visitors: Before you flaunt the engagement on your website, you need to track the number of visitors that visit your platform. Low visitors means that your marketing campaign might be ineffective in driving traffic, and you may have to work out a situation to improve the number.
• Bounce rate: If you’re a marketer in a SaaS company, you should also track the bounce rate of your website. This rate refers to the number of people who visited your website compared to those who bounced back because they found your products or website unattractive. 
• Page views: If you want to calculate the number of visitors who browsed a certain number of pages on your website, the average page view metric may help you find your desired result.
• Interactions per visit: This excellent metric helps you measure how your visitors navigate your company’s website and make interactions. If many visitors are engaging on a page with information on a particular software, you can evaluate the popularity of that product from there. 

Tracking website metrics is essential for any SaaS marketing campaign. That’s because these factors can help you establish the impact of your campaign on the number of visitors who might be interested in exploring your company and products in a better way.

Try out this Google Data Studio template to have a look at your website metrics with Google Analytics.

How do you structure a campaign performance report, and how do you take action on the results

Your B2B SaaS marketing metrics can help you run and manage your marketing campaign effectively, but only when they’re together and generated from different channels. There is no point in designing different reports for each metric and measuring campaign performance.

But with numerous metrics to track, how can you ensure that your final report reads well and communicates all the crucial findings to your audience?

The most important thing for a campaign performance report should be its simplicity. It’s impossible to read and understand a report with too much data, graphics, and unnecessary stats that might not be beneficial for your business. So, when creating a performance report, you should focus on a structure that flows well and is easy to comprehend.

When preparing a performance report, start with answering a primary question that may come to the mind of people reading your report. Your audience should get an overall idea about your report through the answer, helping them take relevant actions.

After getting their first answer, the primary question should be followed by a secondary question that your report’s readers may want to know.

Here is an example to help you understand this structure.

There might be many products in various categories to offer in your SaaS business.

So, the primary question here could be which product category is popular among your customers? Moving on, the secondary question of your report could be specific products that have gained immense popularity throughout the year.

Your second question is what your reader may want to ask after viewing the answer to your primary question. Its answer should be actions the readers of the report should take to make the results profitable for your company. This framework works best in situations when you have a large team and numerous metrics to track.

More tips for your report

Other than simplicity, you should also pay attention to the style of your report. After all, a good presentation makes things look visually appealing. Make sure that your report is written in a narrative style and has an outline approach.

Furthermore, to support your report’s simple layout, place your focus on better visualization. Explain your findings through charts, bars, or tables rather than words. Again, your ultimate motive should be to create a report that’s easy to comprehend.

When explaining the report results, your main objective should be to emphasize your marketing campaign’s performance. Make sure to mention the factors that might have affected the results through your secondary questions.

Finally, at the end of your report, give some space for recommendations to help in your future campaigns. In this section, also highlight the factors that helped achieve your campaign’s desired results.

Take actions on results

The motive of your campaign performance report shouldn’t only be to highlight the findings. It must also contain suggestions or moves that your company should follow to make improvements.

One of the biggest mistakes many marketers make is tracking metrics without any motive. Unfortunately, this makes it hard for these marketers to develop an action plan for your campaign.

If you have no idea about the metrics and are still tracking it, there is no point in putting in that effort. However, if you want to take relevant actions on the results, make sure you understand the purpose of the metrics first and then curate strategies to combat any problems you may face while running and managing a campaign.

About JJ Reynolds

The topic of this article was also covered in a podcast interview with JJ Reynolds on B2B SaaS marketing. JJ Reynolds is an expert marketing analyst and a regular user of Supermetrics.

He runs a well-known agency, Mediauthentic. JJ usually appears on videos on the agency’s website, sharing his knowledge on the different aspects of marketing.