5 simple marketing tips for B2B SaaS founders

Marketing for B2B SaaS founders

Marketing your B2B SaaS product doesn't have to be complicated or confusing. As a founder, you can take simple steps to understand your users and effectively market your company. Here are five straightforward tips to get you started:

None of these are what you probably think of when you envision a marketing strategy. Marketing strategies and tactics are important, but these fundamental skills are critical if your company is going to scale.

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1. Care about your users. Your objective is to figure out what your customers aspire to achieve, how they use your product, and why they chose you to help them achieve their lofty goals. As a founder, you should care about their success more than anyone else, including your competitors and sometimes even your customers themselves. Care so much that you can't stop sharing your customers' success stories and celebrating their wins as much as your own. Care is infectious and you are the best person to spread this core principle every day. A genuine appreciation for your customers spreads to your co-founders and early team, making this principle much easier to protect as the company scales. As a secondary benefit, this relentless focus on your current customers attracts more prospective customers.
2. Be the best communicator. Pursue clarity in your statements and reinforce your strong vision every day. You will use this skill every day, even after your company has a full marketing team. Your early customers selected you because they believed in your vision and trust your perspective on the ecosystem in which you operate. You care about their success more than anyone. Be the embodiment of this vision and share it every day.
3. Know your product's current state. Understand where your product stands today so you can precisely communicate the value it delivers. Identify the existing features that provide immediate benefits to your customers and identify areas for future iteration. By recognizing your current product capabilities, you will be better able to help prioritize a roadmap that delivers value for your existing and prospective customers. This understanding is crucial for aligning your team and ensuring that your marketing efforts reflect the current capabilities of your product while hinting at future innovations.
4. Identify keys to your customers' success. Discover the specific elements of your product that resonate most with new and experienced users. Is there a particular action or step that makes everything click for them? Is there a feature that compounds in value over time? By pinpointing these key factors, you can enhance your product's onboarding process and ensure that your marketing messaging highlight these strengths. Understanding what drives customer delight will help you to identify and connect with your ideal customers with confidence that they'll receive ongoing benefits.
5. Repeat your vision. Describe the future to people inside and outside your company… over and over and over. If you have a co-founder, start by stating the value you believe your product will deliver for customers and lay out your boldest vision of where this goes when you are successful. Then ask them to describe the vision back to you. Listen carefully. Did they get it? Did their eyes light up? Great! Now do this over and over. At first, doing this in person with your team is the best way to learn and iterate. Repetition is important. At a later point, you will begin talking to people outside the team so you may find that recorded videos or briefs are a more efficient way to scale. It may take a long time to catch on within your team and even longer with your ideal customers. Keep going until everyone is sick of hearing you lay out your vision. Then keep going until they can state it back as well as you.

That's it. 5 simple steps that barely even feel like marketing.

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Start working on these areas today and you will find yourself a better marketer tomorrow.

The work you invest in these foundational areas will continue to pay dividends over time. As you invest in specific marketing strategies and tactics, your understanding and mastery of these five principles will increase your odds of success.

What's stopping you from becoming the most effective marketer in your company?