The acquisition problems specific to software companies
Software is sold on a subscription, so the economics of acquisition are different from almost any other business. A customer that costs more to acquire than they pay in the first year is fine if they stay for four, and a disaster if they churn at month three. A SaaS marketing agency has to work inside those constraints: CAC payback, net revenue retention and expansion revenue all shape how aggressively each channel can be pushed.
The funnel type sets the strategy. Product-led companies with a free trial or freemium tier need volume at the top and activation in the product, so the marketing question is which sign-ups actually convert to paid. Sales-led companies with a demo request and a sales team need fewer, better-qualified leads, and a form fill from the wrong company size is a cost rather than a win. Many companies run both motions at once, with self-serve for small teams and sales-assisted for mid-market, and their reporting has to keep the two apart.
On top of that, software categories are unusually crowded in search. Paid CPCs for terms like “project management software” or “CRM for small business” are high because incumbents with large budgets bid on them, and review sites such as G2 and Capterra occupy much of the organic real estate. Winning requires precision about which queries are worth fighting for.
Where SaaS companies usually find growth
- Bottom-of-funnel search. Queries containing “alternative”, “vs”, “pricing”, “integration” and “for [use case]” are lower volume than category head terms but convert at multiples of the rate. Most SaaS sites under-serve them because the content is unglamorous.
- Comparison and alternative pages. Honest “[Competitor] alternative” and “[You] vs [Competitor]” pages capture buyers who are already evaluating. They work when they are specific and fair, and fail when they are thinly disguised sales pages.
- Competitor and category paid search. Bidding on competitor brand terms and high-intent category terms is expensive, so it needs tight landing pages and lead qualification to justify the spend. It often pays for sales-led companies with high contract values.
- LinkedIn for account targeting. For mid-market and enterprise, LinkedIn’s firmographic targeting is the practical way to reach specific roles at specific company sizes. It is expensive per click and works best for retargeting and named-account lists rather than cold prospecting.
- Review site presence. G2, Capterra and similar directories rank for the category terms your site cannot. A managed listing and review generation programme, plus their paid placements where the economics work, turns them into a channel rather than a competitor.
- Partner and affiliate programmes. Consultants, integration partners, course creators and niche publishers can refer customers on a recurring-revenue commission. Software suits affiliate marketing well because the lifetime value supports meaningful payouts.
Recommended services for SaaS
SaaS SEO
Bottom-of-funnel keyword architecture, comparison and alternative pages, integration and use-case pages, plus programmatic templates where the data supports them.
Content Marketing
Product-aware content that answers evaluation questions, written with subject-matter input from your team rather than generic top-of-funnel articles.
Paid Search
Category, competitor and brand-defence campaigns with landing pages matched to trial or demo intent and offline conversion imports from your CRM.
LinkedIn & Paid Social
Account-list and job-title targeting, retargeting of trial and pricing-page visitors, and creative built around specific use cases rather than the brand.
Partner & Affiliate Programmes
Recurring-commission programmes on PartnerStack, Impact or similar, partner recruitment and enablement, and attribution that respects your trial-to-paid lag.
CRO
Pricing page, sign-up flow and demo-form testing, with experiments measured on qualified conversions and activation, not raw form submissions.
How Axoria approaches SaaS growth
Define the conversion that matters before choosing channels
For a product-led company we usually optimise to an activation event (a workspace created, a first project published, a card added) rather than the sign-up, because sign-up volume is easy to inflate and activation predicts revenue. For a sales-led company we import qualified opportunity and closed-won stages from HubSpot or Salesforce back into Google Ads and LinkedIn as offline conversions, so bidding learns from pipeline rather than form fills. This is the foundation for everything in our lead generation work.
Build search around evaluation intent
We map the buying journey for your category and prioritise pages by intent rather than volume: pricing, comparison, alternative, integration, use case, then category. For a workflow tool with 40 integrations, that might mean 40 integration pages built from a shared template with unique copy, a comparison page for each of the five competitors that show up in your sales calls, and a small number of category pages targeted only where the domain can realistically compete. Our SEO guide covers the general method; the SaaS version leans much harder on the bottom of the funnel.
Run paid media against payback, not lead cost
Every paid channel gets a target based on what the resulting customers are worth. A competitor-term campaign that produces demos at three times the cost of a category campaign can still be the better investment if those demos close at a higher rate and higher ACV. We report cost per qualified opportunity and projected CAC payback by channel, and we cut channels that cannot get inside your payback threshold. See the PPC guide for how campaign structure supports this.
Treat partners as a channel with its own economics
SaaS affiliate and partner programmes work when commissions are structured around retention. A recurring commission for twelve months with clawback on early churn aligns publishers with your interests better than a large one-off bounty. We handle recruitment, contracts, enablement content and attribution windows that account for a 14- or 30-day trial before revenue appears. More on this in our affiliate marketing guide.
A note on top-of-funnel content
We will not recommend publishing forty “what is [category]” articles a month. Broad informational content has a role once the bottom of the funnel is covered, but for most SaaS companies it is the last thing to build, not the first.
How we measure SaaS marketing
Getting this right depends on a clean handshake between web analytics, product events and the CRM, which is why tracking setup is normally the first phase of engagement.
Common SaaS marketing mistakes
- Optimising to sign-ups. Free-trial volume rises, activation falls, and the campaigns that look best are the ones bringing in the wrong users.
- Bidding on category head terms too early. Without a differentiated landing page and a lead qualification process, high-CPC category terms burn budget on unqualified traffic.
- Writing comparison pages that are not honest. Buyers can tell. A comparison page that concedes where a competitor is stronger converts better and earns links.
- Ignoring pricing page conversion. The pricing page is usually the highest-intent page on the site and the least tested.
- Paying one-off affiliate bounties. Large upfront commissions attract low-quality referrals that churn; recurring commissions with clawback attract partners who care about fit.
- Mixing self-serve and sales-led reporting. Blending a £30/month plan and a £30,000 annual contract in one CAC number hides what is actually working.