SaaS marketing isn’t straightforward. Considering most SaaS brands have no physical presence, they are marketing to a select set of customers, and their product is constantly evolving. SaaS marketing is different from any other form of marketing that the world is heard of.
Yet, technology brands have performed exceptionally well in terms of creative effectiveness across several creative awards. The past decade has witnessed some of the Best SaaS marketing campaigns, whether it was “Did you mean MailChimp?” which won Cannes Lion in 2017, or Wistia’s exceptional work with “One, Ten, One Hundred,” which was nominated for Webby Award.
SaaS Marketing Campaigns & Examples To Inspire Your Next
In the article, we cover some of our favorite SaaS marketing examples across different categories covering both large and emerging SaaS brands. We hope this article inspires you to implement some of the best practices to your own marketing efforts.
1. Wistia
Wistia has been making video series and podcasts for a few years now. The brand’s in-house production studio, Wistia Studios, has a mandate for each show. The studio mandate gives the in-house team guidance in terms of the concepts they can follow, how it aligns with their brand values, the anticipated cost of production, etc.
Over the last few,years, Wistia’s team had built a scoring system that allows them to prioritize ideas and greenlight concepts that are the the best fit for the company. One, Ten, One Hundred is among the brand’s most popular video series.
The four-part documentary series was created to promote Wistia’s new webcam and screen-recording tool, SoapBox. In the film, Wistia’s in-house team challenges Sandwich Video, Los Angeles-based production company, to develop three videos at three different price points: one for $1,000, one for $10,000, and one for $100,000.
The show was nominated for Webby People’s Voice Award for Branded Entertainment Series in the video category. The 100-minute documentary series is now also listed on Amazon Prime. Ever since the series’s launch, Wistia is now betting on video content with series like Brandwagon, Low Views High Impact, (Out of) Office Hours.
The company has now launched its first podcast series, Talking Too Loud. They have Chris Savage, CEO of Wistia hosting the series. But they soon learned that the podcast hosting platform they used did not suit their expectations and lacked functionality.
So in true Wistia fashion, they’ve created their own podcast platform. Wistia’s podcast platform tackles many problems that their in-house teams had to tackle when creating their podcast. Including reaching and retargeting people, collecting e-mails from listeners, and using audio heat maps to understand engagement.
2. MailChimp
MailChimp created a lot of buzz a few years ago with its ‘Did you mean MailChimp’ campaign a few years back. The brand realized that most users mispronounced their brand name, “MailChimp.” Developed nine different mini-campaigns to reach potential customers. But they didn’t tell customers it was Mailchimp and let them figure out on their own.
The campaign went on to win Grand Prix at Cannes Lions back in 2017 and generated over 67 million organic searches and $3.52 million in earned media value. Many industry experts still rate MailChimp’s campaign among the best SaaS marketing campaigns ever produced.
Today, MailChimp is busy marketing its lineup of short-form unscripted and scripted content along with business partners such as Vice Media, Scout Productions, WME, etc. Earlier this year, they released MailChimp Presents, which the company described as a business entertainment platform. The brand has also launched many originals, including Basics, Second Act, 99 Issues, Wifi Finders, to name a few.
When asked about the rationale behind the development of MailChimp Presents, Mark DiCristina, the company’s head of brand, and Mailchimp Studios, said, “Creating this original content came out of a lot of iteration and experimentation. We can make ads all day long. But creating stories about entrepreneurship is a much different conversation. We see this content being a great vehicle for attracting people to Mailchimp who have never heard of us and maybe don’t need us yet.”
MailChimp has over 11 million users and with this content they ideally want to inspire other business to create more e-mail campaigns.
3. Slack
Slack relies on word of mouth to grow its brand. For a brand that raised $1.26 billion in financing a couple years ago, Slack doesn’t do much in advertisement. You’d know this if you were looking at the traffic sources on Slack’s website. Almost 95 per cent of the traffic to the Slack website is direct traffic.
Nor do they do much in terms of content marketing. Instead, they rank for keywords relevant to their third-party ecosystem. They rank on Google’s 1st page for a number of keywords that point directly to Slack’s app landing page. Much of their sites traffic comes from direct links. This means most users type in the website URL in the address bar.
When a company produces content, it relies on storytelling to bring out its core benefits. In fact, when Stewart Butterfield, the founder of Slack, was asked what advice would he give himself, this is what he had to say, “If there’s one piece of advice I could go back to give myself, it is concentrate on that storytelling part, on the convincing people. If you can’t do that, it doesn’t matter how good the product is, it doesn’t matter how good the idea was for the market, or what happens in the external factors, you don’t have the people believing.”
This obviously shows when you look at some of the brand’s latest works. Slack has dabbled in the podcasting space with shows like Variety Pack and Work in Progress.
4. Monday.Com
Starting with a handful of marketing employees in 2015, Monday.com has come a long way. The brand has a product-led growth marketing strategy and operates without a sales team. Instead, the organization depends on a direct response advertisement funnel to grow its business. They have changed their prices to ensure the buying remains a single-person choice. The basic price starts at $8 per seat per month, which makes it an impulsive purchasing decision.
To cater to its audience, the organization uses channels like Adwords, Facebook, Instagram, Capterra, Outbrain, and Bing to reach its audience. Monday.com hypertargets the audience by creating look-alike audience using profiles of existing customers.
Monday.com’s popularity can also be attributed to its shorter response time. Leah Walters, Head of Communications at Monday.com, points out that their average turnaround time is less than 7 minutes, 24/7, regardless of how the customer reaches them.
The organization has unveiled its first ad campaign with billboards in New York City in 2019. The billboards ask, “What’s on Monday.com? “And the stations address the question with vibrant imagery that displays the top 28 use-cases of their platform such as a “project management tool” or a “time monitoring tool.”
5. SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey relies on word of mouth to reach out to its customers. The product has built-in virality that encourages potential users to register without paid ads. Consider how you signed up for SurveyMonkey it was most likely when you saw the logo on the survey form that your buddy asked you to sign up for. For a company that has been around for almost 20 years, I’m sure you’d barely see any of the brand’s advertising. Expect for the latest commercial featuring Serena Williams.
“Powering the curious” is SurveyMonkey’s goal. They talk about curiosity at work, surveys, and more on heir content hub. SurveyMonkey is currently focusing on building integrations with other products, such as HubSpot and Salesforce, to support its suite of products. Their product line today stretches beyond marketing to HR, and Customer Experience.
6. TypeForm
TypeForm has being the go-to platform for many people to create web forms and surveys. But the company has doing some exciting work with its Video Conversation Platform, VideoAsk. The platform helps users to create short video clips that can be hosted on their website. The use of videos could range from generation-leading, interaction to recruiting.
Typeform has produced a short immersive film to demonstrate that how you users use VideoAsk. The interactive film, Locked In, allows you to make choices for the characters in the video. Like the Netflix movie, BlackMirror: Bandersnatch. VideoAsk uses add conditional logic to connect different videos based on the choices you make. The brand has also built several integrations with tools like Calendly, HubSpot, and Acuity Scheduling. We are certain that VideoAsk’s work this year will certainly feature among the best SaaS marketing campaigns that people have seen this year.
Typeform just released their brand new video series, Meaningful. The series Interviews company founders about what it takes to create a meaningful brand. Apart from videos, Typeform is also constantly updating its content hub with testimonials and success stories about how different organizations use the Typeform platform.
7. InVision
InVision is an outstanding brand in many respects for one business completely runs remotely and, secondly, they have successfully managed to take heavyweights from the industry like Adobe. But more importantly, what they have managed to do is be the rally point for all the designers.
Whether Inside Design, the organization’s content hub, or the design resources that the in-house team creates. InVision has created helpful content for designers. The brand’s podcast, Design Better, is in its fifth season. If you are interested in learning more about Invision’s marketing approach, we have an entire article dedicated to it.
Final Thoughts
Turns out there’s a lot more to learn about how SaaS brands handle their marketing. But outside mapping MQL and LTV, some of the most popular brands are master storytellers. They know how to communicate their value to end users.
That’s the same reason why we feel more than ready to open our wallets when the subscription is up for renewal or want to stay even when the price goes up. We hope you can benefit from some of the best SaaS marketing campaigns and apply some of the learnings to your own marketing activities.
