Creating a Marketing Plan for your SaaS

Here’s a scenario I see play out all the time: a founder hears someone on a podcast rave about how LinkedIn ads changed their business, so they dump three months of budget into LinkedIn ads.

Nothing happens.

They try cold email next.

Crickets.

Then someone tells them SEO is the real move, so they hire a content writer. Six months later, still nothing meaningful.

The problem wasn’t that those channels are bad. The problem was that they were the wrong channels for that particular business, audience, and price point.

Choosing marketing channels isn’t a guessing game, and it’s not a popularity contest. It’s a strategic decision that should be driven by who you’re selling to, how they buy, how much they pay you, and where they actually go when they’re trying to solve problems. Get this right and everything else gets a lot easier. Get it wrong and you’ll spend years wondering why growth feels like pushing a boulder uphill.

Let’s break this down.

Strategy first, plan second

Before we can talk about channels, we need to be clear about something that trips up a lot of founders: the difference between a SaaS marketing strategy and a SaaS marketing plan.

Your strategy is the “why” and “who.” It’s based on customer research, market research, and a clear-eyed look at your KPIs. It answers questions like: Who is our most profitable customer? What do they care about? What problem are we actually solving?

Your marketing plan is the “what” and “when.” It’s the list of campaigns and programs, the budget, the timeline, all built to serve the strategy. The plan doesn’t work without the strategy underneath it.

Most founders skip to the plan. They build a content calendar, run some ads, try cold outreach, and then wonder why their marketing feels scattered. That’s because there’s no strategy directing any of it.

Here’s how to build an effective SaaS marketing plan

Choose specific target markets or segments. Marketing plans are zoomed in. For this particular plan (say, the next six months), which segment or market do you want to acquire or grow? Your strategy tells you who. Your plan executes on it.

Identify the lifecycle stage. Are you focused on acquisition (getting new leads), activation (converting trials to paid), or retention (keeping customers longer)? Different stages call for different tactics, channels, and metrics.

Select channels based on LTV and ACV. More on this in the next section, but don’t even pick your channels until you know what a customer is worth. This is the single biggest mistake I see founders make when choosing where to invest.

Design campaigns and programs. Campaigns are one-off events like a feature launch or conference. Programs are ongoing efforts like content marketing that run continuously. Your plan will have both.

Align to key KPIs. Before you build anything, ask: do these campaigns and channels actually point toward the metrics that matter? Use leading indicators (blog posts published, campaigns run, outreach sent) to know if you’re on track before your lagging indicators (traffic, trials, revenue) confirm it.

Prioritize ruthlessly. A few prioritization frameworks I like for this: ICE (Impact, Confidence, Effort) and PIE (Potential, Importance, Ease). Score each activity and stack rank them. Then look at your north star KPI and make sure you’re spending time on the things that actually move it.

Get realistic about timeline and budget. How long will each initiative take? What’s a realistic time-to-results? Does every item have a start and end date? Assign a dollar amount to each activity and prioritize by expected ROI.

Select your team and schedule check-ins. I cannot tell you how many brilliant marketing plans I’ve seen get created and then never executed. Build in monthly or bi-monthly check-ins to ask: are we moving at the pace we planned? Are the metrics improving? What needs to adjust?

The biggest mistake: ignoring ACV when choosing channels

This is where I’m going to get specific, because the original advice I’ve shared on this topic wasn’t quite pointed enough.

Your annual contract value (ACV) is one of the most important constraints on your marketing channel options. Not because some channels are inherently better than others, but because your unit economics have to work. If you can’t recoup the cost of acquiring a customer before they churn, no channel is going to save you.

Here’s a rough way to think about it:

Less than $1,000 ACV per year: You’re looking at almost exclusively organic methods. Organic search, AI search, organic social, and inbound email marketing (where leads opt in to your list). Paid acquisition, outbound sales, and conference sponsorships are likely not going to be CAC efficient at this price point. Your growth engine needs to be lower-cost by design.

$1,000 to $5,000 ACV per year: You have more room, but you still need to be careful. Paid acquisition might work if you’re in a niche with low CPCs and your conversion funnel is very tight. Cold email as a lightweight, scrappy outbound motion could work, but a full sales team probably doesn’t. Conferences and events are on the table if the math checks out, but it’s tight.

More than $5,000 ACV per year: Now the door opens much wider. Conferences, paid acquisition, outbound sales, ABM, direct mail, speaking engagements with travel budgets, all of these become much more feasible. A sales team starts to make real sense above $7,000 to $8,000 ACV. At $10,000+ ACV, you can invest in channels with longer payback periods because the reward is high enough to justify the wait.

This isn’t a hard and fast rule for every business, but it’s a useful gut check. If you’re charging $99 a month per user and you’re running outbound sequences through a dedicated SDR, the math is probably not mathing.

Your marketing mix is unique to your target customer

I want to be really direct about something: there is no universal channel playbook for SaaS. Not for 2016, not for 2026, not ever.

I’ve worked with hundreds of SaaS companies. I’ve advised even more. And I can tell you with complete confidence that one person’s marketing mix is not going to work perfectly for you. What worked for the company you admire, the one with the case study you bookmarked, the one whose founder gave the conference talk you watched three times: it worked for them because it fit their audience, their market, their price point, and their motion. None of those things are yours.

The reason founders keep chasing the shiny channel is this pervasive belief that there’s some secret playbook everyone else is using, and that’s why they’re growing while you’re not. But mostly they just got really dialed in on their customer and figured out where that customer lives. So that’s the actual work.

What you need to deeply understand before you can make smart channel decisions:

Your target market. Not just “small business owners” or “marketing teams.” Get specific. What industry? What size? What region? What type of problem triggers them to start looking for a solution?

The segments and personas within that market. The decision-maker is often not the end user. The person who feels the pain most is often not the person who signs the contract. Understand who is who and how their buying roles interact.

How they buy. Do they want to try before they buy? Do they need a demo? Do they need to get budget approved by a committee? Do they google things, or do they ask colleagues, or do they trust review sites? Do they attend conferences in their industry? Understanding the buying motion shapes everything.

Where they go to make decisions. This is channel selection in a nutshell. Your buyers are somewhere before they buy from you. Find out where that somewhere is.

Levels of awareness: the buyer’s journey, but better

Most frameworks for thinking about the buyer’s journey are too linear and too tidy. I find it more useful to think about this through the lens of Eugene Schwartz’s Levels of Awareness, which maps out five stages a buyer moves through before they’re ready to purchase:

Unaware. They don’t know they have a problem. They’re not searching for anything. You can reach them, but only through very top-of-funnel content that meets them where they are, often through broad educational content, social media, or channels they passively consume.

Problem aware. They’ve started to feel the pain. They know something is off but don’t yet have language for it. At this stage, they tend to search for symptoms. Things like “why are our signups not converting” or “how to improve email open rates.” They’re reading blog posts, watching YouTube videos, lurking in communities.

Solution aware. They know solutions like yours exist, but they haven’t picked one yet. Their search behavior shifts to more comparative and categorical queries: “best onboarding software” or “Intercom alternatives” or “CRM for SaaS companies.” Review sites, comparison pages, and content that speaks to your category become much more relevant here.

Product aware. They know your product exists and are evaluating whether it’s the right fit. They’re on your website. They might be in a trial. They’re reading your case studies and testimonials, watching demos, asking questions in sales conversations.

Most aware. They’re close to buying. They might just need a nudge: a trial extension, a discount, a conversation, the right pricing plan.

The reason this matters for channel selection is that different channels reach buyers at different stages of awareness, and you need to meet your buyers where they actually are.

Here’s how each stage maps to buyer behavior, their actual mindset, and the channels most likely to reach them:

If your buyer doesn’t search online at all, organic search will always underperform for you, no matter how good your SEO is. If your buyer decides at a conference, your blog isn’t going to close them. The channel has to match the stage and the behavior.

The master channel list: my rapid-fire take

Below is a comprehensive breakdown of every major marketing channel, along with my quick thoughts on how to think about each one. I want to be clear upfront: this is not a ranking. None of these are universally good or bad. What matters is whether they fit your audience, your price point, and your market.

Word of mouth

• The best channel in the world, full stop. But you can’t manufacture it.
• It’s the outcome of building a product people actually love. Works for literally any product in any market.
• Focus on building something worth bragging about and this takes care of itself.

SEO / Organic search

• One of the most sustainable and scalable channels for most SaaS businesses, but only if your audience actually searches for their problems or solutions online.
• Also worth bundling AI search in here: still a fraction of overall search volume, but growing fast and worth paying attention to.
• Generally very CAC efficient.

AI search

• Increasingly important to track separately as behavior shifts. Still nascent, but data from SparkToro and Datos suggests it’s a fraction of overall search.
• Worth optimizing for, especially if your content answers specific, nuanced questions well.

Search ads (SEM / Google Ads)

• Similar application to organic search: your audience needs to be actively searching. Requires meaningful ACV for the math to work.
• Very competitive markets will eat your budget. Commit to at least two quarters of testing before drawing conclusions.
• Budget typically starts at $30,000 to $50,000 before you have enough signal.

Organic social

• Higher conversion rates once people come through, but very low top-of-funnel volume for most B2B SaaS.
• Much stronger for B2C and consumer products. Some B2B companies do it well, but ROI is often hard to justify unless you’re very committed to it long-term.

Social and display ads

• Great for promoting top-of-funnel assets: webinars, lead magnets, events. Harder to make work for direct acquisition in B2B SaaS unless your ACV supports it.
• Meta’s algorithms are genuinely powerful if your audience lives there. Same math concerns as search ads apply.

Content marketing

• More of a practice than a single channel. It powers and amplifies almost every other channel on this list: SEO, email, social, speaking, and more.
• Applies to most businesses. What makes it work is being very clear on which channels you’re using to distribute the content.

Email marketing

• Still one of the best-performing channels when done well. Cost is relatively low and conversion rates are strong for inbound-built lists.
• Cold email is a numbers game with lower returns, and inboxes are crowded. Needs a clear trigger or qualification signal to be effective at scale.

Affiliate marketing

• Better suited to more mature businesses with established brands. Affiliates generally don’t take risks on newer companies.
• Works best in industries where referral links are culturally normal. Your mileage will vary significantly by industry.

Offline ads / traditional media

• Relevant at scale or for very specific consumer applications. If you’re seeing airport ads for a SaaS, they have a massive budget.
• Not a realistic early-stage channel for most bootstrapped founders.

Existing platforms / integrations

• Highly contextual. If your product can plug into a high-traffic platform ecosystem (like Shopify or Salesforce), the discovery and distribution benefits can be significant.
• Consider platform risk, but don’t dismiss this if the ecosystem is strong and active.

Forums (Reddit, etc.)

• Incredibly effective for some businesses and irrelevant for others. Depends entirely on whether your audience is active in forums and whether they ask questions there.
• Can be one of the cheapest channels imaginable. Requires ongoing time investment, not a “set it and forget it” approach.

Marketplaces / directories

• Depends on adoption: how actively is your audience actually using that marketplace? If they use it a lot, it’s worth having a presence.
• Capterra and G2 are heavily used in many industries. Do the research before investing.

Product-led growth (PLG)

• A go-to-market strategy as much as a channel, but it is a channel: the act of finding your site and signing up is its own motion.
• One of the most effective and cost-efficient approaches for the right products. But it needs feeding. If you build it, they will not just come.

Engineering as marketing

• Two distinct applications: targeting technical audiences by showcasing your engineering depth through docs, GitHub, and community presence; or building tools, calculators, or microsites that help buyers make decisions.
• Cool when you have bandwidth. Don’t recommend it for most early-stage bootstrappers who already have a full plate. Vercel is the canonical example done right.

Speaking engagements

• One of my absolute favorites for most SaaS businesses. Most industries have conferences and events where you can be in front of your exact ICP. More valuable than a booth.
• Also includes podcasts and webinars where you’ve been invited to speak (as opposed to ones you host, which is content marketing). Very cost-effective for the audience reach you get.

Industry media and trade publications

• Highly contextual to how verticalized your market is. Can be great for awareness building in specific industries.
• Don’t expect perfect ROI upfront. Best treated as a testing ground if you can afford to experiment.

Conferences

• Great if you have a sales strategy before you walk in. Don’t show up with a booth and no follow-up plan.
• The math needs to work: $15,000+ ACV makes conference investment much more defensible. Some conferences cost $100,000 for a booth (looking at you, Dreamforce). Scale your investment to what the numbers can actually support.

Offline events

• Hosting dinners, local meetups, or invitation-only gatherings. Excellent for closing deals and building relationships, not great for reach or scale.
• Best for higher ACV products. Not something I’d prioritize until you’re more established, but very effective when the timing is right.

Cold outreach

• One of the cheapest channels to run. Works best with a compelling offer, a very clear trigger for outreach, and strong qualification.
• Spray-and-pray cold email is increasingly ineffective. Tools like Apollo and Clay have made list-building easy, but personalization and timing still matter enormously. Convert rate expectations: 1 to 3% at best.

Account-based marketing (ABM)

• Basically enterprise marketing applied to any segment. Start by identifying your highest-fit accounts, then deploy a multi-channel campaign (often including direct mail) that’s too interesting to ignore.
• Mangomint scaled to $25M ARR with a dialed-in ABM and direct marketing strategy. Requires creative execution. If you’re going to be boring, skip it.

Viral marketing

• Capturing lightning in a bottle. Hard to predict, hard to engineer consistently. Can happen for any business, but I wouldn’t rely on it as a strategy.
• Dollar Shave Club didn’t plan to go viral. When it translates to SaaS sales is a whole separate question.

Community building

• Better for retention than acquisition, especially in the early stages. Requires at least one full-time person to sustain.
• Not something I recommend before $1M ARR. Works best when your market actively wants to connect with peers online. HubSpot’s Inbound community is a great example, and they built it years after they were already established.

Partnerships

• Can be powerful, but requires the partner to be just as focused on your audience as you are and actively engaged.
• Partnerships fall apart when the program isn’t structured, there’s no dedicated partner manager, or the partner’s audience is too broad to be relevant. Worth investing in around $3M to $4M+ ARR.

Business development (biz dev)

• Deep, strategic product partnerships. Think rev share arrangements, data partnerships, or embedded product integrations. SparkToro and Datos is a good example.
• Higher lift to establish, but can create durable, compounding distribution. More relevant as you grow.

PR / unconventional PR

• Traditional PR (TechCrunch, Forbes, major publications) is tough to land until you’re established.
• Unconventional PR, things like a speaking tour, consistent podcast appearances, getting mentioned alongside known players, is more approachable and relatively low cost (mostly your time). Consumer SaaS and B2C benefit more from traditional PR than B2B SaaS.

Putting it all together

If this list felt overwhelming, that’s actually good news. It means you’ve been absorbing the context. Because here’s what you’re going to do with it: you’re going to whittle it down to one to three channels.

That’s it. One to three.

When you do the actual work of understanding your audience deeply: who they are, how they buy, what their ACV tells you, where they go at each stage of awareness, the right channels become pretty obvious. The list stops being overwhelming and starts being a filter.

Most of the best-performing SaaS companies I know aren’t on every channel. They’re very, very good at the two or three that actually reach their buyers. They’ve done the work to understand their market and they’ve committed to the channels that match.

That’s the real playbook. Not chasing someone else’s success, but figuring out what works for your business, your customers, and the price point you’ve built around.

If you’re not sure where to start on any of this, that’s exactly what we do at DemandMaven. Book a call and in 45 minutes we can identify your most sustainable growth opportunities together. ✨