MicroConf Tactics: Not Sure How to Market Your SaaS? Start Here

**Rob Walling** (0:07)
It's the MicroConf Podcast, and this is a Tactics episode where we pull audio from one of our most popular YouTube videos. This one's titled, Not Sure How to Market Your SaaS? Start Here. And I walk through the big five marketing approaches. I think I even talk through a few more, but kind of give a basic one-on-one way to think about if you have a SaaS, here's to market it. And no, the advice is not, jump on Twitter and start building an audience.
Before we dive in to the meat of this episode, MicroConf Connect is our online community. It's filled with like-minded Bootstrap SaaS founders. We have our content vault of hundreds of videos, many of which are not available on YouTube. We have monthly Connect live sessions with mentors and folks who are ahead of you in doing what they're doing. If you join before July 14th, you get access to a live session with Craig Hewitt on founder-led sales. It's a great community in MicroConf Connect and it's highly curated. We make it paid so that only serious people are in there. You go to Reddit, you go to a free community, the quality is significantly less than in MicroConf Connect. You can go to microconfconnect.com to find out more and submit your application. Yes, we actually do reject applicants. It's not just theater.
We really want to keep the quality of the community high, so we have applications and we moderate it heavily.
microconfconnect.com if you're interested. And with that, let's dive in to how to market your SaaS.
There are five marketing strategies for B2B SaaS that I see working over and over and over again. I'm Rob Walling. I've invested in more than 230 SaaS companies, and every week I'm talking to founders, seeing their metrics and watching what actually moves the needle. I call these the big five. But just knowing these strategies isn't enough, especially now. AI is changing how every one of these works. In this video, I'm going to break down each strategy, what's different and what's not different in 2026, as well as how to prioritize based on your product. Stick around to the end for the framework I use to help founders figure out exactly which strategies they should focus on next, even if they're just getting started. Most founders think SEO means ranking on Google. But here's the thing, Google is one of many, many search engines. YouTube is number two. Amazon, depending on the source you look at, is number three or four. And there are hundreds of others where your ideal customer might be searching right now and where they're far easier to rank. Some other search engines include the iOS App Store, the WordPress Plugin Repository, Reddit, Wikipedia, the Shopify App Store, the Adobe App Store, the Chrome Web Store. And to give you an example of how you might rank in one of these search engines, back when I built my last startup Drip, we intentionally built two WordPress plugins and ranked them for terms related to email marketing in the WordPress Plugin Repository. There are tiny seed founders building Chrome plugins to rank in the Chrome Web Store for terms that apply to their ICP. And, of course, the Chrome plugin is an extension of their app. It's not just some random thing, but it extends the functionality of their app. I've seen founders write Kindle books or physical books to rank in Amazon search. The key insight here is to find where your ideal customer is searching. And many of these will be easier to rank in than Google. So you're probably wondering, what's the impact that AI has on all of this? And, you know, there are a few. I mean, the idea that someone can now go build a WordPress plugin with cloud code in a few hours, of course, is going to potentially crowd the repo. But another one is that AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization, is now a thing. Some people call this AISEO or GEO. I've heard all these different names for it. But LLMs, like ChatGPT and Perplexity, are pulling content to answer queries directly. But the same principles that have worked for Google SEO are working for AISEO. Quality content that directly answers questions still wins. Structured content and clear answers matter more than ever. Google still processes hundreds of times more queries than ChatGPT. Traditional SEO is not dead and will not be anytime soon. Strategy number two is pay-per-click advertising.
PPC advertising is the fastest way to get traffic to your SaaS. It's also the fastest way to burn through your budget if you don't know what you're doing. Here's when it actually makes sense and when you should stay away. The major ad platforms are Google, which has AdWords, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Amazon, Captera, and LinkedIn, as well as platform-specific marketplaces. Like if you're in the Shopify app store, they have pay-per-click ads. Ads work when you need speed, when you have budget to test and refine, and you can measure your cost to acquire a customer versus your lifetime value. And when you charge enough each month that you can have a decent, reasonable payback period. So if you get a customer through an ad today and it takes you a year to recoup that ad spend, unless you have a lot of money in the bank, that's not going to work. If you're venture-backed, that can work. But as a bootstrapper, you usually need to have about a three to six month payback period. So if you're charging $20 a month, and that means you have a maximum of $60 to $120 to spend on ads, you are unlikely to find an ad network these days that is that inexpensive, where you can actually get new customers who will stick around for $60 to $120. That's just how ads work. They're quite expensive. As a loose rule of thumb, if I wasn't charging at least, I think like $40 or $50 a month, I wouldn't even consider buying ads unless you can find extremely inexpensive clicks, clicks that are 10, 20, 30 cents. And those clicks have to then convert into customers at a rate that makes sense for this. I'm not saying you can't make it work at $10 or $20 a month, but I haven't seen an ad network and pay-per-click costs in a long time that would allow you to break even on ads unless you're charging a decent amount of money. Ads are not going to work if you're doing B2C plays, for example. You know, when you're charging $4 a month, $10 a month, $15 a month, you are just limiting yourself and you won't be able to run ads with that low of an average revenue per account. The impact that AI has on ads is AI can help you. It can generate ad copy and more creatives for you to split test faster and cheaper, but everyone has access to the same AI tools and it makes competition noisier. The fundamentals still matter more than clever AI copy, targeting of your ads, the offer, the landing page, and human oversight is still critical. AI won't save you from a lack of strategy. New AI native ad platforms are emerging. I've actually recently recorded a video on that. Chat GPT ads are coming, maybe perplexity. We don't know who else is going to add it, but anyone that gets traction and is trying to keep their price low or have a free tool is of course going to monetize those via ads. And the beauty of ads is if you can make them work, it's like a spigot you can just turn on and off. And I grew more than one SaaS company, almost purely based on ads and added tens of thousands of dollars of MRR by investing money, carefully testing and tweaking the creative, the copy and the targeting and investing the time to make it work. Ads are difficult to make work with SaaS, but it's not impossible. Strategy three is cold outreach. Cold outreach has a bad reputation, and honestly, most of it deserves it. But when it works, it really works. The difference between cold outreach that converts and cold outreach that gets ignored comes down to one thing, the signal. The signal is the timing of a prospect plus the fit of your tool. So you don't just need a list of businesses that need what you've built. You need a list of businesses that need what you built plus a signal that they're at the point where they need it now. So one example is in my last startup Drip, we knew that Infusionsoft, they're now called Keep, but they were a big competitor of ours back in the day. And Infusionsoft customers would look at options when their contracts came to be renewed. They all signed one year contracts. So we got a list, an ongoing list, of new Infusionsoft customers. And we pinged them about eight months into their contract knowing that they'd start thinking about renewal. And that was the signal. And we asked them if they were interested in exploring other options and in a lot of instances, they were. So the key insight here is that cold outreach without a signal is spam. And cold outreach with a signal is helpful. In terms of how AI is impacting this, AI tools now handle personalization at scale, right? You can generate custom intros, analyze prospects, create sequences automatically, but everyone has access to the same AI tools. The signal you reach out on matters more than ever. AI can personalize, but it can't create timing. Also Gmail and Microsoft are now rejecting non-compliant bulk emails so your deliverability infrastructure matters more than ever. Strategy number four is integration marketing. This is the strategy I see a lot of founders sleep on. Integration marketing is one of the only marketing approaches that actually makes your product better while also bringing in new customers. And the best part, when it works, it produces leads for years. The way to find integration opportunities are to do thought experiment and to think what steps happened before our product, before someone uses our product, what are we doing? So if we are an app to make podcast show notes, what are they doing before that? Well, they're recording, maybe they're editing, they're inviting guests. There's a bunch of steps that happen before that. And then what steps happen after your product? So after they do show notes, what do they do? Will they post to WordPress or they upload to YouTube or Spotify? And the idea is unless you're going to build those features, the before and after you look for tools that are already doing the before and after, and you reach out to them and ask if they will do an integration with you. Not only that, but we'll promote the integration. That's the key. Don't build the integration unless both sides agree to promote it. Promotion options include a list of at least seven, and these are the seven that I used at my last startup. I would say, hey, these are our seven options for promoting this integration, and we'll do all of them as long as you agree to do all of them. But we'll basically match whichever ones you do. So number one is a blog post. Number two is to email both partners lists. Number three is a tweet or a social post. We have a KB article, an in-app mention, a webinar, and a listing in an add-on marketplace. So one way to approach this is how we did it at My Last SaaS App, and we built something like 30 to 35 integrations in about 18 months, and integration marketing was a key driver of our growth. You start with an MVP integration, and we used to call this a 1 integration. This is where you might make your customers paste in their API key instead of having a full-blown OAuth integration built out. Then you launch, you co-promote it, and you see if it drives leads, and you see if anyone starts using it, because a lot of times, you know, I think we had a couple thousand customers, and we'd have some integrations where only a handful of people were using them. So then we didn't build them out further. We didn't make them better because it wasn't worth the time investment. So then you track which integrations are most popular and are being used and are driving new customers. Then you circle back and you make them better. You do a V20, a V30, you add OAuth, you make the setup easier. You might expand the number of actions that you support. There's all kinds of things you can do to make an integration better. Another marketing approach that I lump in with integrations is partnerships. So this is very similar to an integration, but no code is written. There is no integration. It's just a reciprocated promotion to each other's audiences. And you can do one or more of those seven above. You just recommend the tool as something that your customers should try and likewise with your partner. The key insight is that these assets can produce leads for years. Articles, forum posts, knowledge base articles, and other assets from your partners keep converting long after your launch. The impact of AI is AI makes integrations technically easier to build, faster development, better documentation. MCP, Model Context Protocol, is emerging as a new standard for connecting AI agents to APIs. SaaS vendors increasingly are shipping MCP endpoints out of the box, much like REST APIs became a thing in the 2010s. And by the end of 2026, MCP native is expected to be core product functionality for many launches. But the marketing side, the partnerships, the co-promotion, the relationship building, is still a human game. You still have to get into it as a founder. And the fifth and final strategy of the big five is content marketing. When most founders hear content marketing, they think blog posts. But content can be a book, a podcast, a YouTube channel, even a course that you give away for free. The question isn't the format. It's whether you're building for virality or building an audience over time. They're two very different games. Content marketing is often coupled with SEO, but it can work on just the idea of people sharing whatever you've built. So when you're building content, as I said, you have two paths, right? There's virality, which is you want to hit the top of Hacker News or of Reddit or of some other social news sites that can drive a lot of visitors to your website and hopefully convert into trial. The second approach, though, is audience building. This is slow, steady growth over time. I want to give you a warning here. Building a media brand alongside your SaaS product is only for very well-funded companies or folks who are exceptionally gifted at it. If you really want to do founder-led marketing and build a media brand, then you should. But I think it's only about 10%, maybe tops 20% of SaaS founders should be building a founder-led marketing brand doing things like video, audio, and YouTube, etc. The execution of this depends on what you're building, but most founders start by producing the content themselves, because you just don't have the money. Later, you can hire production help as you scale and as you have more revenue. Of course, the impact of AI on this is it can help you produce more content faster, right? It creates outlines, drafts, repurposes, existing content that you have. So if you recorded a video, you want to turn it into an essay or a blog post, you can use AI for that. But the bar for what stands out is rising dramatically. The AI slop tsunami that we're all seeing is making original thinking, proprietary data and real expertise much more valuable. The human touch still wins here. Original research, customer voices, first-hand experience and opinions. In a minute, I'm going to talk about the framework that I offer to founders to help them choose which of these marketing approaches they should start with. But first, if you're finding this valuable, I haven't written essays in 15 years, and I just started again in the last couple months. I started an email newsletter, really resumed it. I already have tens of thousands of subscribers, but folks are now getting a weekly email from me with original thinking on how to build, launch, and grow their startup, and you should subscribe to my newsletter, robwalling.com/subscribe.