B2B SaaS Tools for Acquiring and Retaining High-Value Users

According to Grand View Research, the SaaS market is estimated to exponentially grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11% between 2022 and 2028. This immense growth of the SaaS market can be attributed to the rising trend toward the deployment of cloud software applications as well as widespread digital adoption. As a result of the increasing amount of competition in the B2B SaaS space, marketing teams are challenged to update and refine their SaaS marketing strategies in order to stay ahead of the curve. 

What is SaaS marketing technology?

SaaS marketing technology encompasses subscription-based tools that enable businesses to better market their business to relevant, high-value consumers. Some examples of SaaS marketing tools include CRM softwares, SEO trackers, and product feedback solutions. 

As marketers, the challenge of working with B2B SaaS companies often lies in being able to clearly communicate the benefit of the SaaS tool to the purchasing customer — be it through a successful GTM strategy or other lead generation efforts. SaaS marketing technology and tools help marketers create the ideal digital marketing strategy to capture the differentiating value proposition of the SaaS tool and effectively communicate that value to the right customer, at the right time, through the right channel. 

What tools should I use to market a SaaS product? 

To grow you or your client’s SaaS business, here are our vetted and approved list of SaaS marketing tools to help you improve conversion rates, view real time analytics, and improve customer experience for both rapid acquisition and long-term retention. 

1. Hubspot

Known as perhaps the best free CRM software on the market today, HubSpot CRM is a comprehensive marketing automation platform that enables your sales team to generate more leads, convert those leads into qualified sales opportunities, and ultimately close the deal. The tool provides sales and marketing teams with all the real time data they need to effectively sell a B2B SaaS platform.

You can use HubSpot to:

1. Monitor the effectiveness of your marketing efforts by combining sales intelligence and business intelligence (BI) into one system. 

For example, you can see which of your content updates are resonating with which audiences and which channels are working best for you. You can then optimize your spending on those channels accordingly to make the most of your marketing budget.

2. Measure how productive each sales person’s pipeline is. 

For example, you can remove the least productive reps from your CRM.

3. Run lead generation campaigns and measure the results. 

For example, if you use HubSpot CRM to generate leads, you can use the characteristics of low-cost leads under, say, $500 (called “latent demand”) to figure out how much market share they will give your company in terms of new customers.

2. Salesforce

Salesforce is a powerful B2B sales platform that offers a wide range of CRM, lead management, and automation tools to help you create more business opportunities at every touchpoint of the deal. Designed for small businesses looking to grow quickly, Salesforce helps you get to customer success faster by streamlining your business processes. 

Salesforce offers:

1. Lead management tools that help you convert your leads into business. 

For example, they make it easier to create email campaigns, send automated reminders, and measure the effectiveness of your lead management techniques.

2. Data-driven insights to continuously improve your business operations. 

For example, it has an integrated database of more than 50 million queries to help you forecast your key growth metrics so you can better meet your revenue goals and ensure optimal profitability.

3. A collaborative team function that allows employees to work with each other and share ideas for various projects related to growing the company’s customer base.

3. Semrush

SEMrush is a comprehensive B2B SEO platform that measures the effectiveness of your online marketing campaigns in terms of their ranking and traffic. This is done through a comprehensive analysis of your website’s backlinks and natural keyword rankings. 

Rated a 8.9/10 on TrustRadius, SEMrush’s popularity as a SaaS marketing tool is in a large part due to the idea of increasing the visibility of websites in search engines — a facet that SEMrush excels at by providing a comprehensive search query knowledge base. 

Here are some ways SEMrush can help you improve your rankings and increase traffic to your website:

1. It has an organic traffic estimator that allows you to estimate how much traffic each keyword will bring when used as a search term on Google, Bing, etc.
2. It creates detailed analytics that allow you to see which pages are bringing the most traffic to your site and which are not performing as well.
3. You can track the backlinks pointing to your website and measure the quality of those links. This allows you to assess their impact on your online presence.
4. It generates a list of low-cost, high-conversion keywords that you can use in blog posts, videos, or product descriptions.

4. Sprout Social

More than 25,000 businesses use Sprout Social’s powerful social media management and optimization platform to build and manage their online presence and engage with customers on social media. This is a great tool to use for managing social media conversations on major platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.

Sprout Social also offers the following features that can help you develop a holistic marketing strategy:

1. A social media listening tool that allows you to track mentions of your brand, your products, and your competitors across all social media channels. 

This way, you have your finger on the pulse of industry trends and news affecting your business and your competitors.

2. A keyword research tool that allows you to see how many times a particular keyword is used each month on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.
3. An engagement platform that measures the performance of each of your posts, with all the analytics you need to determine which posts are doing well and which are not.

5. Mixpanel

Understanding user behavior is critical to building a successful marketing strategy, and Mixpanel, a B2B analytics tool, helps you do just that. The company’s free version is built around the idea of collecting, analyzing, and leveraging data about web traffic. You can use it to track dozens of different actions on your website.

Here is what you can do with Mixpanel:

1. Determine what types of user interactions are affecting your site’s conversion rate and measure your content marketing efforts.
2. Break down user behavior into different segments to develop an effective strategy to increase conversion rates. 
3. Examine the data to find out if visitors are coming from a specific website or using a specific search engine – and which of them are more likely to make a purchase decision.

6. Appsflyer

Appsflyer has been recognized as a “Mobile Attribution Leader” by G2 and TrustRadius. The company’s mobile attribution and marketing analytics platform provides comprehensive performance measurements and a marketing automation suite to track the entire user conversion process: from awareness to acquisition to in-app purchase or approval.

Appsflyer provides users with a single dashboard to streamline their user acquisition, retention, and monetization efforts with all the performance measurement data they need. This dashboard allows marketers to:

1. Measure and analyze the performance of any campaign or ad channel across all targeting devices and geographies.
2. Capture how long it takes to acquire new users and how they interact with your app and website.
3. Identify the best performing apps to use as a template for launching an app or website.
4. Determine which of your campaigns will generate the highest customer lifetime value (CLV).
5. Create campaigns that target the users most likely to make a purchase decision for your app or website, using real-time market data to help you optimize your strategy for maximum revenue potential.

7. Wynter

Wynter is a B2B Buyer Intelligence tool that helps you find out what B2B buyers in your target market are thinking and how your messages are resonating with them. You can use Wynter to find answers to questions like: What are your target audience’s biggest pain points, what do your target customers want, where exactly is the gap between customer frustration and what your competitors are doing, and what are the wins your target audience wants to achieve.

You can use Wynter to guide and improve your copywriting and messaging strategies by:

1. Tailoring your message to your market
2. Understanding the customer’s jobs-to-be-done
3. Improving the response rates of your outbound emails
4. Speeding up your feedback loops

8. TrueNorth

TrueNorth is the Growth Marketing Platform that allows you to focus, align and track your marketing in one place so that everyone and everything is working towards your marketing goals. This platform centralizes your goals and serves as a guide to your team for the right direction, how to get there to scale effectively, what you plan to do to move forward quickly, and results and insights to improve decision making.

With TrueNorth, you can calculate the effectiveness of different marketing campaigns before you launch them. This allows you to compare campaign creations, verify you are on track to meet your goals, and launch campaigns with confidence. 

Key features of TrueNorth include:

1. Project the ROI of campaigns before they go live.
2. Create and manage campaign ideas from one place.
3. Calculate the outcome of campaigns and prioritize based on the projected results.
4. Allocate budgets based on predicted results from campaigns to better understand where your marketing investments are best spent.
5. Track spend alongside results and optimize budgets to maximize performance as your campaigns mature.
6. Show stakeholders and executives the impact of campaigns by mapping ROI to the KPIs that really matter.

9. Intercom

Intercom is a platform that automates customer support and lead generation for SaaS companies. Tthe SaaS customer journey is long and varied, ranging from initial visits to email signups to purchases, support requests, and more. Intercom helps SaaS companies manage these interactions across the entire customer journey and gather information that can help improve the quality of long-term relationships. This starts with lead generation, where you can use Intercom to reach website visitors with a chatbot widget. Sometimes all it takes is the right question to trigger an action, and you can automate your bots to only trigger after a delay or certain user actions.

Intercom’s key features include:

1. On-site chatbots that provide instant responses.
2. Live chat to connect users with human support agents.
3. Product tours to guide customers through their first steps.
4. Lead qualification through intelligent bots and redirection rules to ensure your site visitors have the best experience.
5. Instant FAQs to deliver specific articles that solve up to 29% of customer queries.

10. VWO

Every SaaS company needs a good set of conversion optimization tools, and VWO provides much of that in a single platform. With VWO, you can run A/B tests and measure their impact anywhere. You can import and aggregate all the metrics you care about and measure how they are affected by your experience. VWO FullStack is the company’s software testing and optimization suite that lets you run experiments within your applications without noticeably impacting performance.

VWO’s key features include:

1. Optimizing software products and testing variants to improve user experience with VWO Fullstack.
2. Product/feature deployment in stages or for different user types.
3. Onboarding optimization between SaaS product selection and actual usage.
4. Heatmaps to gain insight into user activity on your site and optimize their journey to maximize conversions.
5. Funnel optimization to maximize conversion rates and nurture leads throughout the buying process.
6. On-page surveys to gather feedback from website visitors to gain insights on key product elements and new changes.

11. UserVoice

UserVoice is a single, centralized product feedback solution for SaaS companies that gives you everything you need to collect, aggregate, analyze, and track feedback from customers and internal teams. While there are several user feedback software options on the market, there are not as many that cater to SaaS companies looking for a single platform to collect feedback on their software product and website.

Here is what you can expect to gain from UserVoice:

1. Collect user feedback about your website and software products.
2. Turn feedback from any channel into insights for smarter product, marketing and business decisions.
3. Quickly understand your customers’ needs, identify customer demand, and prioritize features and product improvements.
4. Compile data into segments based on different user types and your marketing goals to understand what feedback is most important.
5. Keep everyone on the same page about product strategy by creating and sharing an always-on roadmap for your company.

12. Hotjar

Trusted by 1,148,546 websites in 180+ countries, Hotjar is a website heatmap tool that allows marketing and product teams to access visual insights that inform opportunities for optimization. By installing a Hotjar tracking code on a site, you will be able to view heatmaps that give you an at-a-glance overview of how people interact with a page: see how far users scroll, what buttons they’re clicking, and what content gets ignored. To go a step deeper, Hotjar also provides user-specific individual recordings that let you experience exactly what the user is doing on the site — including mouse movements, page visits, and clicks. Both the heatmaps and recording functions are incredibly user friendly, and provide key user information in an intuitive, visual way to help marketers discover, consolidate, and communicate user needs.

In terms of specific use cases, Hotjar can help marketers:

1. Identify high-impact changes based on real user behavior
2. Spot problems with your site experience 
3. Deliver small, incremental improvements with pinpoint precision to drive significant impact 
4. Build a compelling case for your ideas with real user insights

Leverage the right tools to work smarter

Successfully marketing a B2B SaaS platform amidst a highly competitive space to a highly selective group of customer is no easy feat — but having the right tools certainly makes it easier. From Hotjar’s heatmps to Mixpanel’s data visualizations, these SaaS marketing tools can help you better understand your target audience and identify opportunities to better meet your customers’ needs. 

If you’re looking for a growth partner to work with you to effectively leverage these tools and drive your business to new heights, we’re always here to help.