Launching a SaaS business can be intimidating in the beginning.

There are over 30,800 SaaS companies in 2024 serving millions of customers worldwide. How do you get attention? How do you scale after getting the attention? With the right tactics and robust planning, it is possible. 

This guide will be a foundation to help you launch and scale your SaaS business. We will also review some of the most effective pre- and post-launch marketing tactics.

Validate Your Market and Build an MVP

This is the first and most crucial stage in starting your SaaS business. 

This process helps you decide whether your solution is in demand. It can also prevent you from wasting hours, days, and significant amounts of money on a product that doesn’t meet actual demand. The MVP is a basic version of your product built to streamline development. 

There are two ways to take this concept further:

• Create a simple solution: Uncover your target market’s most significant pain point. Second, build an MVP for it. This will allow you to test your idea and acquire feedback from potential customers.
• Landing Page: Create a simple page for selling your solution, even if it is not fully developed. Try to make these buyers use this solution. You have a product if people are willing to pay for it.

Building A Great Team

Choosing a good team will be your greatest asset in building your powerful dream product. A clear vision of the culture you want to develop is crucial. The most important thing is to look for someone willing to learn and be passionate about the work they do.

Hiring the right team involves convincing talented folks to believe in your product and vision, and this is no different from pitching your customers. 

Pre-Launch Marketing: Building Traction Before Your SaaS is Ready

It’s essential to leverage the time before the launch wisely. It is an excellent time to build interest in your SaaS product. Building traction and garnering interest in what you plan to launch is also wise. Some kickass pre-launch Strategies can be highly effective, such as:

• Creating stories that your target audience can relate to on social media platforms
• Offering sneak peeks of your product
• Running pre-launch promotions

Be active on social media channels that deal with your niche. Another strategy is to create groups that establish you as an authority figure on the subject. 

Robinhood, the commission-free stock trading platform, executed a highly successful pre-launch referral campaign. It drove 1 million user signups even before the app launched. 

Some critical elementshttps://wytlabs.com/saas-content-marketing-agency/ of their pre-launch strategy:

• A simple and well-defined landing page
• Email-only signup
• Waitlist strategy of inviting your friends to climb the waitlist
• Video teaser explaining how the app works
• Gamification and FOMO techniques to keep users engaged

With this plan, they were able to build significant hype and anticipation before the official launch.

If you are going to be a sales-driven business, then use the pre-launch phase to build a pipeline. This involves setting up meetings with prospective customers, talking to them, and identifying elements that are missing in their current workflow. Such a strategy also doubles up as an exercise in identifying the perfect product-market fit. 

For small ticket products, you could invest in a call center software yourself or hire an external team to speak with prospective customers and perfect your sales pitch so that they may be converted when your product is out of beta. 

Post-launch Marketing Optimization

After your SaaS product goes live, you need to consider post-launch marketing. Engaging a SaaS PPC agency at this stage can ensure your marketing campaigns are optimized for maximum impact. Here, you must heavily promote your offer, following the audience-building work from the previous stage. 

If you start building an email database, it will be handy later. It will help you reach them when your product launches and even for your ebook or upcoming events. 

Promoting your idea and yourself developing valuable content such as:

• E-books
• Webinars
• Groups on social media

Some post-launch marketing includes engaging your audience by posting content with the help of SaaS content marketing services. One significant thing to remember is that this is not spammy. It should appeal to your audience to keep them engaged and deliver value.

ProductHunt and AppSumo have large audiences. If you get on these platforms, you will typically find a large, engaged user base looking for something new and different to try. They will publish here to boost interest.

Develop a sustainable strategy to ensure that your marketing plan is more rounded. It should include a mix of inbound and outbound marketing.

The secret sauce for social media is providing more value and fewer sales-y posts. Exciting content will engage your target customers. They will appreciate and relate to it, encouraging them to interact with you.

The success of Zoom lies in its post-launch marketing strategy, which began after it launched. Here are a couple of those tactics they used after launch:

• Leveraged word-of-mouth marketing by giving away a free plan
• Focused on simplicity and reliability during COVID pandemic
• Zoom also partnered with schools and universities to provide free access to remote learning
• It continuously updated its platform by taking user feedback
• Extensively used data analytics to identify and ad new features to stay ahead of the competition

These factors helped them become a household name in a very short period.

Balance Between Inbound And Outbound Marketing

As your SaaS business grows, it’s essential to have a balanced marketing plan that includes both inbound and outbound strategies. Inbound and outbound marketing strategies can help create an effective marketing strategy to attract relevant users. 

Inbound marketing strategies like SEO and social media may take some time to succeed. Still, they could provide a consistent flow of people into your business without additional expenses. These are more effective in the long run.

On the other hand, you can use PPC advertising as an example of outbound marketing. It will give your customer acquisition a more immediate peak. However, this is an expensive strategy to manage. It also doesn’t help you beat competitors in the lower funnel, as your pricing should always be higher than what you pay per click.

You can create a long-term successful marketing plan by combining inbound and outbound marketing.

A key objective for a pre-launch marketing campaign, besides generating interest, is to narrow down on the right channels to target your audience. Obsessively track the performance of your campaigns.

Use analytics tools to see what works and what doesn’t so you know what strategies to scale up, and which ones to discard. 

One SaaS platform that perfectly balances inbound and outbound marketing strategies is Semrush. Here is how they do it effectively.

Inbound Marketing Strengths

• They have a content marketing engine with high-quality
• Blog posts
• Guides
• Resources
• Free Tools
• Strong social media presence to share valuable content and engage with the community
• Ranking highly for relevant keywords to drive traffic to their website using SEO techniques

Outbound Marketing Strengths

• Active outbound sales team that proactively reaches out to potential customers in the B2B space
• Targeted email campaigns
• Personalized outreach to connect with decision-makers
• Participating in industry events, conferences, and webinars to raise brand awareness

This balanced approach has allowed them to attract organic traffic and leads while actively pursuing new business opportunities through outbound channels.

How To Raise VC Funding For Your SaaS Startup

As your SaaS business grows, you may face the challenge of competing with well-funded competitors. If you want to scale and play in the bigger league, VC financing is a great way to stay in the game. VC funding is for you if you are into severe scaling up and planning to compete effectively. 

Some key things to keep in mind before your first VC round:

• Hire a strong founding team
• Make an expansion plan, consider scalability
• Prepare financial models, be ready with a plan B
• Spend time creating pitch decks and business proposals
• Consider different company valuation models and shareholders’ structures to ensure you are well-prepared for negotiations
• Make a list of potential investors
• And finally, meet with potential investors to discuss your growth strategy

Wrapping Up

Starting a SaaS business is challenging, and staying relevant after starting a business is even more difficult. What would help? Continuous learning. Businesses that needed to learn from customer feedback or innovate quickly went stale. 

As your business’s ideator, you must be passionate about solving problems, delivering a seamless user experience, and investing in growth. 

Having a data-driven approach is also the key. In the long run, you will know what works and what doesn’t. You will make more informed decisions when you do that A/B analysis. As much as internal data analytics is essential, so are external.

Monitoring your competitors is a great way to stay ahead of them. This will also help you identify critical areas for improvement. There is no harm in even considering strategic partnerships. It will expand your market reach.