Running a good marketing campaign for a SaaS company takes planning, research and some inspiration. This covers all three as part of a wider digital marketing strategy.
First what makes a campaign work, then eight examples that produced real results.
What a marketing campaign is
A marketing campaign is a coordinated effort toward a specific goal, such as generating leads or building awareness. It can run across social, search, TV, radio or print.
Most marketers now work digitally because it is cheaper and more targetable. Traditional channels still work, and they need a budget most companies do not have.
An acquisition campaign aims at new customers while keeping existing ones engaged, usually through educational content that starts a relationship before any sales conversation.
Very few companies can spend a million dollars on prime-time television, which is most of why digital has taken over.
The real advantage is precision. You can target specific segments and ideal customers far more tightly than traditional media allows, including targeting existing customers for renewal or upsell.
The definition
A series of coordinated activities aimed at one business objective, promoting a product, service or brand across marketing channels including social, email, advertising and content.
Each campaign is built for a specific audience, so the message fits the people receiving it.
Using several channels together extends reach and drives specific outcomes: brand awareness, leads or sales.
What campaigns are for
Increasing sales, generating leads, building awareness. Also launching products, promoting offers, or repositioning a brand.
Whatever the objective, the campaign should return more than it cost, which is what makes defining the purpose up front matter for marketing generally.
Marketing versus advertising
People use the terms interchangeably. They are not the same, though the line has blurred.
Both aim to build awareness and persuade someone to buy. Marketing covers the research into the product, market and target audience, and the promotion across every channel. Advertising is one part of that.
An advertising campaign specifically means creating the persuasive content and copy.
Good campaigns tend to combine several elements, such as dedicated landing pages, strong creative and engagement tactics. Advertising sits inside marketing rather than alongside it.
Demand gen versus lead gen
The other pair that gets confused is demand generation and lead generation.
A content campaign typically runs 30 to 90 days against a specific audience or topic.
The difference:
Demand gen builds awareness and creates interest. This strategy finds your audience and brings them into the funnel.
A demand generation campaign aims to:
Make people aware of the problem you solve
Build trust and authority
Reach a broad audience
Provide genuinely free, accessible resources
Lead gen converts prospects into leads, through signups, downloads or direct contact.
A lead generation campaign aims to:
Show how your product solves their specific problem
Generate qualified leads
Use gated content to capture contact details
Campaign objectives
Common goals:
Build brand awareness
Generate sales
Generate leads
Improve conversion rate
Acquire customers
Grow social following
Drive social engagement
Increase landing page visits
Generate website traffic
Improve customer experience
Defining the goal comes first, and tying demand gen KPIs to it comes immediately after. A new business entering a crowded market will reasonably prioritise awareness over conversions.
What separates good campaigns from bad ones
Five components, and five habits that decide whether they work.
The components
A clear objective. One goal, defined before anything is built.
A defined audience. Specific enough that you know where to reach them.
Channels. Chosen because your audience is there, not because you are comfortable with them.
A content plan. What gets made, for which stage, on which channel.
Budget and people. Allocated properly rather than assumed.
What the good ones do
Say one thing clearly. Campaigns that make three arguments make none of them.
Look good. Weak creative undermines strong messaging, and audiences read it as a signal about the product.
Target precisely. Reaching fewer, better-matched people beats reaching more.
Get measured. Decide what success looks like before launch, not afterwards.
Get adjusted. The ability to change mid-campaign is often what separates the ones that work.
The lesson underneath all five is that campaigns fail on preparation more often than on execution.
Building an effective campaign
A digital strategy rests on understanding your product and your audience, and following the customer journey from first awareness through to renewal.
Four steps.
1. Set the goals
Before spending anything, decide what the campaign is for. You cannot measure success against a goal you never defined.
Business objectives should drive this rather than the other way round.
Once you know the goal, set the KPIs that will tell you whether you hit it.
2. Know your audience
This determines everything else: the messaging, the channels, the campaign type.
For SaaS specifically, research the customers properly, including the language they use about their problems. Using their words rather than yours is most of what makes copy land.
They are also not all on the same platform. Find out where they actually are before deciding where to spend.
3. Get the messaging right
Messaging follows from knowing the product and the audience. If you understand the problem and how they describe it, the tone and language follow.
Connect it to the business goal too. Decide what you want people to do, and make the message point at that.
4. Measure and adjust
You cannot predict which campaigns will work. Some do, some do not, and the difference is often not obvious in advance. Define the goal and the KPIs first so you can tell which happened.
Then use what you learn. Small adjustments frequently produce large differences, so keep testing.
Is B2B marketing different from B2C?
Plenty of people argue that B2B and B2C need different psychological approaches, on the basis that businesses decide logically and consumers do not.
Rory Sutherland, vice-chairman of Ogilvy, argues otherwise in The Objectivity Trap, where behavioural science suggests the business world is considerably less rational than it claims.
He makes the case for a more human approach to B2B marketing, on the grounds that purchasing decisions are driven by fear and self-preservation more than by rational self-interest. Nobody gets fired for choosing the safe vendor.
So if your product is built for businesses, remember you are still selling to people. They are just at work.
The channels
There are many. Most businesses do better with a few chosen deliberately than with all of them.
Demographics differ by platform. A younger audience is more reachable on TikTok than on LinkedIn.
Building a list and sending to it, with clear objectives, a lead magnet worth the exchange, and a sending frequency that does not exhaust people.
Privacy legislation has made it harder than it was. It still returns more than most channels.
Organic search
An SEO campaign attracts customers through organic traffic, by optimising for the terms high-intent buyers actually search.
If your page answers the query, it appears in the results. That traffic keeps arriving without further spend.
Paid search
Paid search works similarly, except you buy the position rather than earning it. You pay per click or impression.
Facebook Ads, Google Ads, LinkedIn and Bing all fit here.
Social
A social campaign runs across platforms with planning behind it, whether that is posting content, engaging directly, or messaging. It can also use personal brands and networks, which usually outperform company pages.
Content
Content marketing drives engagement by publishing things worth reading, building awareness and authority over time.
Publishing as a strategy works through blogs, social and other platforms.
It also covers guest posts, video, whitepapers, infographics and downloadable material.
User-generated content
UGC campaigns ask your customers to create content about your product.
It works on Instagram, TikTok and elsewhere, and produces social proof for your target market at very low cost, because your customers are more credible than you are.
Influencers
Influencer marketing uses people with established, specific audiences. In B2B that usually means practitioners rather than celebrities, and the tight audience definition is exactly what makes it useful to marketing teams.
Eight campaigns worth studying
What has already worked, and why.
1. Lead gen: Oracle’s Digital Bank of the Future
An example of using content to build authority and generate a serious volume of leads.
The target was C-suite executives at smaller banks looking to modernise their technology.
It launched in 2013 with a revenue goal of $16 million, built around an in-depth report on digital transformation in banking. The report was genuinely researched, which is why people handed over their details for it.
It produced 350,000 leads and $28 million in revenue, comfortably past the target.
2. StoryBrand: Google My Business
Google used narrative to promote Google My Business.
The ad follows Zingerman’s, a sandwich business, from a small local operation to a $14 million mail-order company.
It is a textbook StoryBrand campaign: Zingerman’s is the hero and Google My Business is the guide. It even works in how the business uses Google Analytics, without the product ever becoming the subject.
3. Social proof: Salesforce’s success page
Social proof carries a lot of weight at the end of the funnel, where someone is deciding whether to risk it.
Salesforce built a page of customer successes filterable by company size, type, industry and product, so a visitor can find someone who looks like them.
That filtering is the clever part. Generic testimonials are ignored; a case study from a company of your size in your industry is not. It is an evergreen asset supporting all their other marketing.
4. Programmatic SEO: Zapier
Zapier lets businesses connect apps without code. Their SEO campaign took them past 5 million monthly visitors and annual recurring revenue of $140 million, with almost 60% of traffic arriving from search.
The method was building a landing page for every possible integration, such as connecting Google Sheets to Slack.
That came to 70,000 pages, and more than one in four ranks first for at least one keyword. Individually trivial, collectively enormous.
5. Referral: Zoho
Zoho makes business software and is best known for its email tools. Their referral campaign grew both users and awareness.
Referral campaigns do two things at once: they re-engage existing users, and they use those users’ networks to reach new ones.
The mechanism was simple. Each user got five free accounts to give away, and each of those recipients got five more. One engaged user could bring in 25 others.
Because the recommendation comes from someone the recipient knows, the social proof is far stronger than any advertising would be.
6. Email: MailModo
MailModo’s product puts interactive content inside the email body itself.
Their campaign used that directly: sales emails built with the interactive elements the product creates.
Opening the email was the demo. The recipient experienced the product rather than reading about it, which is about as efficient as marketing gets.
7. Personalisation: Double Your Freelancing
Personalisation lets you adjust a message for different segments without making it so general it reaches nobody.
Double Your Freelancing helps freelancers run their businesses, and their problem was that “freelancer” covers an enormous range of people with little in common.
Their answer was a separate email campaign per persona, with its own content, subject lines, CTAs, offers and testimonials.
Conversion rates rose 250%.
8. Feature launches on social: Spotify
Social channels work well for announcing new features, provided you already have an audience.
Spotify’s Enhanced Playlist launch is a good example: a short Facebook video with clean copy, illustration and animation, entirely consistent with their existing brand. Simple, and it drove real feature adoption.
Choosing your approach
What these examples share is that each fits its audience specifically. Zapier’s approach would not have worked for Spotify, and neither would work for a company without an existing audience.
So the research comes first. Once you know who you are reaching and where they are, the right campaign type is usually obvious. Use these as starting points rather than templates.
FAQs
A marketing campaign is a coordinated effort toward a specific goal, such as generating leads or building awareness. It promotes a product, service or brand across channels including social, email, advertising and content. Each campaign is built for a specific audience so the message fits the people receiving it, and using several channels together extends reach.
Demand generation builds awareness and creates interest, while lead generation converts prospects into leads through signups, downloads or direct contact. Demand gen finds your audience, brings them into the funnel, builds trust and authority, and offers genuinely free, accessible resources. Lead gen uses gated content to capture contact details and shows how your product solves their specific problem.
Successful campaigns share five components: a clear objective set before anything is built, a defined audience, channels chosen because your audience is there, a content plan, and budget and people allocated properly. The ones that work say one thing clearly, look good, target precisely, get measured and get adjusted. Campaigns fail on preparation more often than execution.
Zapier built a landing page for every possible integration, such as connecting Google Sheets to Slack, which came to 70,000 pages, and more than one in four of them ranks first for at least one keyword. The campaign took Zapier past 5 million monthly visitors and $140 million in annual recurring revenue.
Zoho's referral campaign gave each user five free accounts to give away, and each recipient got five more, so one engaged user could bring in 25 others. Referral campaigns do two things at once: they re-engage existing users, and they reach new people through those users' networks. The recommendation carries stronger social proof than advertising.
