Before turning on the paid advertising faucet, make sure you’ve got your product marketing house in order. That means having crystal clarity on two fundamental questions:

• Precisely who needs your product.
• Why they should choose you over other options.

This kind of preparation isn’t just helpful — it’s essential. Without it, you risk burning through your budget showing your solution to people who don’t need it, or worse, confusing the right people with the wrong message.

Your free trial isn’t just a feature — it’s often the moment of truth for potential customers. This first hands-on experience can make or break their decision to commit to your product.

This means removing unnecessary hurdles that might cause people to abandon the process, providing clear guidance that helps them succeed quickly, and ensuring they experience your product’s core value before the trial ends.

Your potential customers have specific places where they regularly look for information and solutions. These might be particular social media platforms, industry forums, professional events, or publications. By identifying them, you can focus your marketing efforts where your audience already spends time, rather than trying to be everywhere at once.

• Send a quick customer survey asking “Where do you go online to learn about [your industry]?”
• Look at your website analytics to see which platforms are already sending you traffic
• Check where your competitors are most active and getting engagement
• Join industry conversations in relevant subreddits, Discord servers, or LinkedIn groups

For example, if you sell accounting software for small businesses, you might discover your audience spends time in QuickBooks community forums seeking help, follows specific finance influencers on Twitter, and attends local chamber of commerce events.

Creating good content is only the first step — you need to actively share it where your potential customers will see it.

Each piece of content can be adapted for different platforms to reach more people. For example, a detailed blog post about a new feature can become a video tutorial for YouTube, a series of tips for LinkedIn, and an email newsletter.

This multiplies the value of your content creation efforts by reaching different audience segments who prefer different formats.

Additionally, some people might need to see your content multiple times across different platforms before deciding to try your product.

Creating an online community transforms isolated customers into a connected network that strengthens your entire marketing ecosystem.

When users have a dedicated space to interact they begin helping each other, sharing creative ways they’re using your product, and forming connections that make leaving your platform much harder than simply canceling a subscription.

Letting customers peek behind the curtain transforms them from passive users into invested supporters who feel connected to your journey.

When you share your development process, growth metrics, and even challenges, you’re you’re humanizing your business. This transparency shows there are real people making real decisions behind your product, not just an anonymous company collecting subscription fees.

The more you share about your actual process, the more customers feel like stakeholders in your success. They become more likely to provide feedback, more patient during inevitable hiccups, and more loyal as they watch your product evolve in response to their needs.

When your employees share company news, product updates, or industry insights on their personal social media accounts, the impact is dramatically different from your official channels.

These messages come with built-in credibility because they’re from real people with genuine connections — not from a branded account trying to promote itself.

Madhav Bhandari has implemented this strategy across departments at his company, encouraging team members from sales, marketing, and customer success to regularly share their experiences and insights on LinkedIn.

Storylane takes this even further with an internal LinkedIn leaderboard that turns advocacy into a friendly competition. This gamification not only increases participation but also strengthens company culture by celebrating team members who actively contribute to the company’s growth.

Beyond just expanding your reach, when employees actively promote your company, they develop a deeper personal investment in its success. This creates a virtuous cycle where external advocacy strengthens internal commitment, making your team more engaged and your marketing more effective simultaneously.

Forget generic affiliate programs where anyone with a pulse can sign up. Instead, seek out the people who already love what you do — experts and influencers who genuinely get your product and speak to the audience you want to reach.

Give these trusted voices the tools they need to share your story effectively. Their audiences already trust them, which means they’re far more likely to give your product a serious look rather than a passing glance.

Strategic brand partnerships let you tap into established audiences that align with your target market. When you team up with complementary brands or respected voices in your industry, you’re essentially getting a warm introduction to people who are already primed to care about your solution.

The beauty of this approach is its efficiency — instead of the slow climb to build awareness, you’re borrowing trust that someone else has already established. Their audience sees you as an extension of a brand they already value.

Free tools that solve specific problems attract potential customers by providing immediate value. Unlike blog posts or videos, tools give users an interactive way to solve their problems.

For example:

• A design software provider could create a free color palette generator that helps designers find perfect color combinations, naturally leading them toward the full design platform.
• A financial SaaS businesses might create free burn rate calculator that help founders visualize runway scenarios.
• For example, an email marketing platform might offer a free subject line tester that predicts open rates using AI.

These tools often rank well in search results because they provide unique value, and users tend to share useful tools with colleagues. And each person who uses your free tool becomes a potential customer for your paid product.

Customer advocacy is about creating structured opportunities for your happy users to share their success stories with potential customers. It’s one of those strategies that automatically scale with your business.

What makes advocacy particularly powerful for SaaS companies is the built-in credibility. When a prospect hears from someone in the same role or industry about specific results achieved with your product, it cuts through skepticism in ways your marketing claims never could.

You can begin by identifying customers who consistently express satisfaction with your product. Reach out to ask if they’d be willing to share their experience in ways that benefit both of you.

This could be as simple as featuring their success metrics on your website, inviting them to join webinars where they can showcase their expertise, or creating guest content opportunities that position them as industry leaders while naturally highlighting how your product helps them succeed.

A well-designed certification program transforms product knowledge into a valuable credential that professionals can proudly display.

When users complete your certification, three powerful things happen naturally:

• They become significantly more successful with your product.
• They’re more likely to recommend it to colleagues and clients
• Your company steadily builds recognition as the industry authority.

This creates a self-reinforcing cycle where authority drives adoption, which further strengthens your authority.

Appearing as a guest expert on podcasts and webinars puts you in front of established audiences who are interested in your area of expertise (just like our podcast’s guests).

Unlike creating your own content from scratch, guest appearances leverage existing audiences that hosts have already built. When you share practical knowledge and insights on these platforms, you build credibility with listeners who are actively seeking information about topics related to your product.

Laura Roeder turned this strategy into a significant growth driver by appearing on over 300 industry podcasts. This outreach significantly boosted brand awareness for her companies and connected her with potential customers who were already interested in solutions like hers.

The key to success is focusing on delivering genuine value rather than promoting your product directly. When you share actionable insights that help solve real problems, listeners naturally become curious about the solutions you’ve built.

Account-based marketing targets specific high-value companies instead of pursuing many leads at once. You identify ideal companies based on clear criteria, deeply research their specific challenges, then create customized outreach addressing their exact situation.

This approach works because personalized messaging that addresses a company’s actual problems gets far better engagement than generic marketing. When a prospect sees you’ve taken time to understand their specific challenges, they’re more likely to respond.

While you’ll reach fewer companies overall, ABM typically generates higher-quality opportunities with better conversion rates and larger deal sizes, making it particularly effective for B2B solutions with higher price points.

Andrew Davies at Paddle has found ABM particularly effective when working with enterprise clients. His team creates tailored experiences for each target account, developing custom content that addresses their specific industry challenges, sharing personalized insights through video, and designing focused outreach that reaches the right decision-makers where they already spend time, like LinkedIn.

You can also apply this personalized approach in the earliest stages of your business. Guillaume Moubeche built Lemlist from the ground up using these principles, personally crafting highly customized cold outreach to potential customers.

Each message demonstrated clear understanding of the recipient’s business and precisely how his solution addressed their specific challenges. This thoughtful strategy helped him quickly acquire his first 100 customers and validate product-market fit without a massive marketing budget.

Want to get noticed in a crowded market? Sometimes you need to break the pattern and do something that makes people stop scrolling.

When done right, these campaigns create natural momentum: customers spread the word on social media, and journalists get an interesting story to cover. Just remember to think through all possible reactions — you want people talking about you for the right reasons.

The main takeaway that I personally got from these interviews is that success comes from truly understanding who your customers are and finding authentic ways to help them.

The SaaS marketing playbook isn’t complicated, but it does require focus. Get your core messaging right, make sure people have a great first experience with your product, and then thoughtfully expand your reach through channels that make sense for your audience.

Keep in mind that none of these approaches are overnight magic. They take consistent effort and you’ll need to adapt them to your unique situation. What works for one SaaS company might need tweaking to work for yours.