Solved: Best Inbound Marketing Strategies for SaaS Today?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some of my initial thoughts on your question about SaaS lead generation. It's a question I see a lot, and the answer isn't what most people expect.

You're asking what's working *today* for inbound, comparing blogs to newer strategies. It's the right question to ask, but I think it focuses on the wrong part of the problem. You could have the best blog or the most engaged community in the world, but if what you're offering at the end of it doesn't solve a burning, urgent problem, it won't matter. You'll just have a lot of readers, not customers.

My experience, especially from running hundreds of paid campaigns for B2B software companies, has taught me one thing: the channel isn't the problem. The offer is. Before you spend a year and a fortune on content that might go nowhere, I'd strongly suggest you take a different, more direct approach. Let's get into it.

The Inbound Marketing Treadmill: Why Blogs Are Often a Trap

Let's be brutally honest. The idea of "inbound marketing" as it's often sold is a beautiful dream. You write helpful articles, people find you on Google, they love your content, and they magically become customers. For some, years ago, this worked. But today, for most early-stage SaaS businesses, it's a slow, expensive, and demoralising path to nowhere.

Think about it. You're competing against established players with entire teams of writers and SEO experts, who have been building their domain authority for a decade. You'll need to produce an enormous volume of high-quality content just to get a foothold. We're talking years of effort and investment before you see a meaningful return. I've seen too many founders burn through their runway writing blog posts that nobody reads, chasing keywords that never convert. It's what I call the Inbound Treadmill - you're running as fast as you can just to stay in the same place.

The fundamental flaw is that it puts the cart before the horse. It assumes you already know exactly who your customer is, what their deepest frustrations are, and what message will resonate with them. But if you're still figuring that out, content marketing is like shouting into a void. You're guessing. Paid advertising, on the other hand, forces you to confront these questions immediately. It's a real-time laboratory for testing your core business assumptions. When you're spending your own money on every click, you get very focused, very quickly, on what actually works.

This isn't to say blogs and SEO have no place. They do. But they are scaling tools for when you've already found product-market fit. They are fuel for a fire that's already burning, not the spark to start it. The spark comes from truly understanding your customer.

Your ICP is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic

Forget the generic customer profile your last marketing hire put together. "UK-based Fintech companies with 50-200 employees" tells you absolutely nothing useful. It's a sterile demographic that leads to bland, generic ads and content that speaks to no one. To stop burning cash and start finding real customers, you must define your customer not by who they are, but by the specific, urgent, and expensive nightmare that keeps them up at night.

Your Head of Sales client isn't just a job title; he's a leader staring at a stalled pipeline, terrified of missing his quarterly target and facing the board. For a compliance SaaS, the nightmare isn't just 'managing regulations'; it's 'a surprise audit uncovering a critical breach that could result in a seven-figure fine and career-ending reputational damage.' Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state. It's a moment of acute pain.

Once you've isolated that nightmare, you can build your entire strategy around it. Your job is to become the world's leading expert on that single problem. Where do people experiencing this pain go for advice?

• -> Do they listen to specific podcasts on their commute, like 'SaaS Connect' or 'The Top'?
• -> What industry newsletters do they actually open and read, like 'Stratechery' or a niche Substack?
• -> What communities are they in? Is it a specific Slack group, a subreddit, or a Facebook group like 'SaaS Growth Hacks'?
• -> Who do they follow on LinkedIn or Twitter? People like Jason Lemkin or David Sacks?

This isn't just 'market research'; it's the blueprint for your targeting, your messaging, and your offer. This intelligence tells you where to find your customers and what to say to them. Do this work first, or you have no business spending a single pound on ads or writing a single word of content.

You Must Delete the "Request a Demo" Button

Now we get to the most common point of failure in all of B2B marketing: the offer. The "Request a Demo" button is quite possibly the most arrogant and ineffective Call to Action ever invented. It presumes that your prospect, a busy and important decision-maker, has nothing better to do than schedule a 30-minute meeting to be sold to. It's high-friction, it offers zero immediate value, and it instantly positions you as just another commodity vendor clamouring for their attention.

Your offer has one job and one job only: to deliver a moment of undeniable value—an "aha!" moment that makes the prospect sell themselves on your solution. It must solve a small piece of their nightmare for free, right now.

For SaaS founders, you have an incredible advantage here. The gold standard offer is a free trial (with no credit card required) or a genuinely useful freemium plan. Let them get their hands on the actual product. Let them experience the transformation for themselves. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a simple formality. You're not generating "Marketing Qualified Leads" (MQLs) for a sales team to chase down; you're creating "Product Qualified Leads" (PQLs) who are already convinced and are now asking you how they can pay.

One of our B2B software clients struggled for months with high lead costs and few sales from a "Request a Demo" page. We worked with them to build out a frictionless, self-serve free trial. We changed the ad destination to the trial sign-up page. The result? Within a few months, we were generating 4,622 new trial registrations at just $2.38 each. The business transformed because the offer changed.

If for some reason you can't offer a free trial, you are not exempt from this rule. You must package your expertise into a tool, a resource, or an asset that provides instant value. For us, as a paid ads consultancy, it’s a free 20-minute strategy session where we audit a prospect's failing ad campaigns live on a call. We solve a real problem for them, for free, which earns us the right to talk about solving the whole thing. For a data analytics platform, it could be a 'Data Health Check' tool that flags the top 3 issues in their database. You must give value before you ask for anything in return.

The Simple Math That Unlocks Aggressive Growth

Most SaaS founders I talk to are obsessed with the wrong metric. They're constantly asking, "How low can I get my cost per lead (CPL)?" The real question you should be asking is, "How high a CPL can I afford to pay to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer to that question is found in its counterpart: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

If you don't know this number, you are flying blind. You can't make intelligent decisions about your ad spend, your channels, or your growth strategy. Let's break down the calculation. It's simpler than you think.

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What's the average amount you make per customer, per month?
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? (i.e., after costs of goods sold, like server costs, support, etc.).
• Monthly Churn Rate %: What percentage of your customers do you lose each month?

The formula is straightforward:

LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

For example, let's say your ARPA is £200, your Gross Margin is 85%, and your Monthly Churn is 5%.

LTV = (£200 * 0.85) / 0.05

LTV = £170 / 0.05 = £3,400

This means that, on average, each new customer is worth £3,400 in gross margin to your business over their entire lifetime. This number changes everything. A healthy LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio is typically around 3:1. This means you can afford to spend up to £1,133 (£3,400 / 3) to acquire a single new customer and still have a very profitable business. Suddenly, that £50 lead from LinkedIn doesn't seem so expensive, does it? It looks like an absolute bargain.

This is the maths that separates the companies that scale from those that stagnate. It allows you to bid more aggressively, dominate your key channels, and acquire the best customers before your competitors even know what's happening. It frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap, low-quality leads and allows you to focus on acquiring real value.

Now, We Can Talk Channels: Choosing Your Weapon

Once you've nailed your customer's nightmare, crafted a frictionless offer, and understood your LTV, and only then, can you have an intelligent conversation about advertising channels. All your work upfront now makes this part easy. The question is no longer "should I be on LinkedIn?" but "where are the people with this specific nightmare spending their time online?"

For most B2B SaaS, it boils down to three main contenders:

1. Google Search Ads: This is for capturing active demand. People are literally typing their problem into the search bar. This is your lowest hanging fruit. You target keywords that signal intent, not just information. For example, instead of "what is cloud cost management", you target "aws cost optimisation software". The traffic is highly qualified but can be expensive and limited in volume. This is often where we start to get quick wins. For one medical job matching SaaS, we used a combination of refined Google Search campaigns and Meta ads to take their CPA from a staggering £100 down to just £7.
2. LinkedIn Ads: This is for precision targeting when you know the exact job titles, company sizes, and industries of your ICP. The targeting is unmatched in B2B, but it comes at a premium. The cost per click is high, so your offer and landing page need to be flawless. It's fantastic for reaching specific decision-makers with high-value offers. We've seen great success here generating leads for niche software, achieving a CPL of just $22 for senior B2B decision makers. It works, but you have to be prepared to pay for the quality.
3. Meta (Facebook/Instagram) Ads: Many B2B founders dismiss Meta as a "B2C platform". This is a huge, costly mistake. The targeting isn't as precise as LinkedIn for job titles, but its algorithm is incredibly powerful at finding people who behave like your existing customers. By using lookalike audiences based on your trial signups or paying customers, you can reach a massive, relevant audience at a fraction of the cost of LinkedIn. For many SaaS products, especially those with a broader appeal or a lower price point, Meta is the secret to scalable growth. I remember one B2B software client who was convinced Meta wouldn't work. We got them 5,082 new software trials at just $7 per trial. You can't ignore that kind of performance.

The right choice depends entirely on your ICP. Are they actively searching for a solution (Google)? Is their identity tightly linked to their job title (LinkedIn)? Or are they part of a broader professional community that Meta's algorithm can identify (Meta)? Often, the best strategy involves a combination of all three, using each for a different stage of the funnel.

Writing a Message They Can't Ignore

Your research into your customer's nightmare now pays off again. You don't need to be a creative genius to write compelling ad copy. You just need to reflect their pain back to them in a way that shows you truly understand it. Forget listing features. Nobody cares about your 'AI-powered synergy'. They care about their problems.

There are two simple frameworks that work time and time again:

1. Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS):

• Problem: State their nightmare directly. "Another unexpected £5,000 AWS bill just landed in your inbox?"
• Agitate: Pour salt on the wound. Make them feel the pain. "Your engineers are pointing fingers, your CFO is demanding answers, and you have no idea where the money is going. It feels like you're trying to patch a leaking ship with sticky tape."
• Solve: Introduce your product as the clear, obvious solution. "Our platform gives you a clear view of your cloud spend in minutes. Find your first £1,000 in savings today. Start your free trial."

2. Before-After-Bridge (BAB):

• Before: Paint a picture of their current, painful reality. "Imagine opening your cloud bill with a sense of dread. It's 30% higher than last month, and it's another fire you have to put out."
• After: Show them the dream scenario. "Now, imagine opening that bill and smiling. You see exactly where every pound is going, waste is automatically flagged and eliminated, and you're hailed as a hero by the finance team."
• Bridge: Position your product as the bridge that gets them from the 'before' state to the 'after' state. "Our FinOps platform is the bridge that turns cloud cost chaos into predictable control. See for yourself with a free, no-obligation trial."

Notice that neither of these talks about features. They talk about transformation. They sell the relief from the nightmare. This is what gets people to click, and this is what will seperate your ads from the generic nonsense your competitors are running.

My Main Recommendations for You

So, to bring this all together, here is the step-by-step process I would recomend you follow instead of jumping straight into a long-term, high-risk content strategy. This is the exact process we use to get results for our B2B SaaS clients.

Getting Expert Help

I know this is a lot to take in, and it's a very different approach from the conventional "start a blog" advice. But from my experience, this is the path that leads to rapid, predictable, and scalable growth for SaaS companies. It's about being strategic, data-driven, and focusing on the things that actually move the needle.

Trying to navigate this on your own can be tough. There are dozens of variables to test, platforms to master, and expensive mistakes to be made. This is where working with a specialist can make a huge difference. We've been through this process with dozens of B2B SaaS companies and we know the pitfalls to avoid and the levers to pull to accelerate growth.

If you'd like to chat through your specific situation in more detail, we offer a free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session. We can take a look at what you're doing now, and give you some actionable advice on how to implement the framework I've outlined here. It's a great way to get a second opinion and a clear sense of direction.

Hope this has been helpful and gives you a new perspective on how to tackle lead generation.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh