SaaS Marketing Software For Early Stages

If I were to work with someone who just launched a SaaS platform, found Product Market Fit (PMF), and was looking to scale their efforts out to find more potential buyers, this is the software I would use.

First off, I wouldn't jump into the more complicated tools, everyone likes the flashy tools to understand account intent or programmatic advertising but at the very beginning, it's all about building an automated demand generation engine, then you get into the fancy tools to ensure that the engine is passing the right leads to sales at the right times.

The Good Stuff

First impressions are key, building a website that allows you to put your best foot forward is a must in the SaaS world considering how competitive these platforms are and in most cases, once you land a Series A, your competition will have the resources necessary to make everything look great. You can build a highly functional website using software like Webflow , Prismic , or Contentstack . If you want to outsource, Webstacks is the best-in-class SaaS website development company.

Want to understand who is visiting your website without them filling out a form, Clearbit gives you the ability to understand what companies are visiting your website.

Next, you need a great CRM, this will not only allow you to manage your marketing efforts but also sales and customer support experiences. Think of your CRM as your central source of truth, you can also build reporting dashboards that can be shared on tv screens throughout the office so everyone knows how things are performing. Salesforce and HubSpot are industry staples but you could also use Close or Pipedrive . If you're using SalesForce, a great tool to automate contact and account data is LeanData , it's more efficient and allows you to visualize entire record types instead of using Process Builder.

Product messaging distribution is key if you want to get your messages out in the world. To do so, you'll need something that integrates tightly into your CRM so you can trigger the right message at the right time throughout the buyer's journey, HubSpot , Pardot , Adobe Marketo , Intuit Mailchimp , Drip , and Constant Contact are great choices that have great deliverability and allow you to report on email promotions and nurtures.

Social media is a big channel these days and adds a lot of complexity as audiences in each channel can be dramatically different, what appeals to someone on TikTok can be entirely different than here on LinkedIn. Manage all your posts using software like Hootsuite , Later , or Buffer .

Video marketing is the best message medium, as most people have the attention spans of a goldfish, and unless your content is engaging, it's most likely getting ignored. Wistia , Loom , and Vidyard are great for hosting videos and driving video engagement data back to your CRM. Zoom and BigMarker are great for hosting and managing webinars. If you want a great AI platform to scale out videos, Synthesia is a great choice.

A good image tells a thousand words, or so they say. Canva , Figma , and AdCreative.ai will allow you to create your banner ads and website imagery.

Sales and marketing presentations can be done with a bit of flash and speed using Pitch or Beautiful.ai to ensure people aren't bored watching another deck presentation.

Sourcing and enriching contact and account data shouldn't be time-consuming. Clearbit , ZoomInfo , Winmo , and Lusha are great for finding the right people to engage with.

When wanting to book meetings, ignore the chaos of back-and-forth emails trying to understand availability, instead use Chili Piper or Calendly and just share a link and call it done.

Understanding how everything is performing is going to be key. Capturing and understanding data can be done using Fullstory , Amplitude , or Lucky Orange .

Lastly, marketing attribution is a must with all the channels you'll be engaging on. Your ability to understand what prospect targeting, channel distribution, and product messaging is working is going to be key to scaling your efforts, HockeyStack , Heap | by Contentsquare , Funnelytics , and Dreamdata are great for visualizing mass data points throughout your buyer's journey.

With all the moving parts of your company brand from logos, presentations, fonts, and colors, keep it all organized using Frontify .

There are tons of other software platforms you can add once you start building up your ARR but at the beginning, most of them aren't needed until you have a proven foundation that can handle volume and converts that attention into opportunities before you start to think of ways to scale.

What are some other popular SaaS platform choices for SaaS companies in the early stages? Share in the comments below.