15 Essential SaaS Marketing Tools to Hyper-scale your SaaS

What do we want? Growth. When do we want it? Yesterday! Wait… what? Whether it’s you leading the crusade for growth in your SaaS business or the cries for change are coming from up top, the quest for rapid-growth is real.

More and more businesses, SaaS or not, are turning toward SaaS marketing tools to hyper-scale. In 2021, 73% of all businesses plan to make all their systems SaaS, and businesses with over 250+ employees are tipping into triple digits at 100+ SaaS apps. We can’t get enough of the stuff.

Now, we know what you’re thinking: 100+ SaaS apps? That’s a heck of a lot of solutions to sift through. Don’t stress; we come bearing good news and fine fruits. If it’s SaaS marketing tools you’re looking for, we’ve done the heavy lifting. Much like the sacred Norwegian cloudberry, we’ve hand-picked 15 of the sweetest SaaS marketing tools for you to enjoy, and delivered them ripe to your doorstep/screen. 

But how do we know, you ask? We checked in with the experts. We’ve collected smart brains from the likes of Chameleon, Hootsuite, Help Scout, and more, to bring you opinions backed with experience. 
We can’t promise you growth by yesterday. But, with this article, you can dive in head-first to SaaS marketing tools right now. Ready? Let’s get fruity.

15 SaaS marketing tools to onboard in 2021

No matter the size of your team or your business’s financial position, SaaS Marketing is not easy. Your competition is rife—e-commerce sectors we’re looking at you poor things—and you’re either up against wizards as wise as you are, or brand names that have been around and earned their place. 

However, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Great things take time, knowledge, and a few epic SaaS tools to get your business to Rome city status. So, let’s dive into those top SaaS marketing tools that are about to change your world.

Bonus Read: Check out these B2B Content Marketing Tools that will help you boost your SQLs.

1. Video Ask

Created by the mythical creatures over at Typeform, Video Ask is a relatively new player to the SaaS world, but one that’s already being hailed by industry experts already. 

“If you’re looking for better quality leads by using genuine engagement tactics, then Video Ask is a great solution. You can use it in different stages of your marketing funnel. It requires both parties to leave a video reply and keeps engagement high.”

Rabin Nuchtabek, Skedify.

Fiverr, DuoLingo, and Wolt are already using Video Ask to reach and recruit new customers and to help them chase those all-important retention metrics. It’s your business’s way of managing one-to-one, intimate conversations at scale. Who said you couldn’t have a personality just because you got popular? You got popular because you’ve got personality. 

So, maintain your brand voice, keep up your charm, and keep building relationships with people that matter.

2. Slite 

Knowledge is power—and with great power, comes great responsibility right, Spidey? Maybe you’ve got an extensive internal knowledge base for your team, but you’ll be surprised what a knowledge base can do, even for the knowledge dinosaurs in your business.

Some of the best knowledge bases out there empower even the most in-the-know, they strengthen working relationships and help toward your business sentiment.

Slite hits the home-run when it comes to knowledge bases. It’s user-friendly, welcomes collaboration, and can be that perfect source of knowledge to enrich an employee’s experience and workday.

3. Zapier

We can say, with 99% certainty, that if you’ve been in the SaaS world for a while, you’re familiar with Zapier. However, just because it’s popular doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve a place on this list of fine fruits. If you’re in that rare 1% that has not heard of Zapier, we’re about to save you a heck of a lot of time. 

“This tool is applicable for almost all SaaS marketers and SaaS marketing agencies. I know I’m not alone when saying that obtaining dev resources at a software company is an eternal battle (which is fair, few developers join a SaaS company to help hook up your email marketing platform to your CRM.) 

Zapier is that devoted developer that will never leave your side.”

Asya Sharrow, Phenomenon.

Oh, and there’s a nifty freemium plan to get you on your way, too. 

4. Loom 

Fun fact for you: Viewers retain 95% of the information they receive through video format instead of a meager 10% they obtain via text—welp. 

Well, for all you video marketers out there, Loom’s functionality allows you to create, host, and share video tours and tutorials of your product, sales pitches—personalized or not— promote new features, product releases, and turn some of your stale blogging content into more engaging video content. 

It’s a great resource if you’re on a budget and want to build relationships at scale. 

5. Answer The Public 

If you’re going down the inbound content marketing route, then you’re on to a winner. Feel free to take us with you; it’s a good trip! Content marketing costs around 60% less than traditional outbound methods but has shown it can generate three times the amount of leads. 

Check out the top 15 content marketing agencies in the UK.

We spoke to Kirsty Finlayson, Head of Marketing at Chameleon, to understand what tools she relies on to build a solid Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy for the business. Amongst Ahrefs and Surfer SEO, Kirsty recommended Answer the Public. It’s a fantastic SaaS tool to help you outrank the competition.  

“For finding content ideas, Answer the Public has saved me so many times. If I can’t think of a topic and am drawing blanks, I can just type in the keywords, and it will give me a plethora of ideas to go with.” 

6. Marketo Engage

Adobe’s Marketo Engage puts your demand generation marketing efforts into one place, end-to-end. As SaaS marketers, we’re juggling a lot of moving parts, and even the best of us can only keep so much in the air at any given time. 

Marketo Engage brings your audiences, channels, touchpoints, and data sources under one roof during a customer lifecycle. This extremely smart tool uses AI to help build audiences and personalize content as well as campaign creation and cloning. 

What’s more, it integrates with the marketing apps you’re already using: Social media channels, CRM tools, G-Suite, the works.

“Successful marketing automation needs a wealth of interaction and product data to be work for you. Marketo Engage turns your data points into conversion campaigns and applies a clear ROI to your efforts.”

Fung-Lin W, DigitalOcean. 

7. HotJar

Culture crush alert, you’ve been warned. HotJar breaks down how users are experiencing your website without overwhelming you with numbers. 

Let’s face it; we’re not all fans of spreadsheets. As great as they are, they can get a little overwhelming. Hotjar looks out for the more visual SaaS marketers among us and delivers user data in an informative and digestible way. 

“Hotjar allows you to look at recorded website visitor’s sessions and heatmaps, to figure out what’s working on your website, what needs improvement, and how you can build strategies for higher conversion rates in the future.” 

Sergi Garcia, Red Points.

Psst. We love you HotJar, txt back plz. 

8. Active Campaign 

Active Campaign came up a fair few times in our quest for the best of the best SaaS marketing tools—and with good reason. If you’re looking to up your SaaS email marketing efforts, then Active Campaign is where you need to be. 

“There are dozens of professionally designed email templates, audience segmentation options, and dynamic content blocks that help create email campaigns that are personal and effective. Plus, you can create custom audiences to follow-up with using a multi-channel marketing effort like social or google ads.”

Vassilena Valchanova, Valchanova.me.

9. Piktochart 

We all know the wonders that visuals can do to a piece of content. We also all know the pains of running a keyword search in Unsplash and seeing the same faces holding phones, working in coffee shops, or pointing at screens in glass-walled offices. 

We would like to take a moment to say thank you to those stock models. You served us well, but your time has come, we’re with Piktochart now. This visual content maker allows you to turn any piece of data, or particularly text-heavy reports into visual items that your readers will love. 

Plus, it doesn’t take a designer to make something beautiful. The drag-and-drop format means the tool is a doddle for any creative. It’s essentially “design for dummies.” Now, go and create magic, you can thank us later. ✨

10. Clearbit 

Described as the marketing data engine for all of your customer interactions. Clearbit allows users to personalize marketing interactions with potential clients by combining 250+ public and private data sources, scoring that data, and putting it through a two-stage verification process. 

Your SaaS business can then use that data and contact information to build out email and advertising campaigns that win the leads you need.  

“Clearbit makes for a more personalized customer experience, from top to bottom of the funnel, The SaaS tool allows you to optimize your funnel, up conversion rates, and remain personal in the process.”

Rabin Nuchtabek, Skedify.

11. Lemlist

Let’s face it, none of us like a cold caller. If we don’t recognize a phone number, we’re likely to not even give it a chance. Yet, we don’t tend to tarnish cold email outreach with the same brush. 

Research shows cold email send-outs average an open rate between 15-28%—it’s a massive opportunity for any business, SaaS or not. 

Lemlist is a SaaS tool that gives your business the best opportunity possible to get open rates, CTR’s, and conversion rates. Personalize subject lines and preview text (which contribute toward 30% of someone’s opening decision) and build warm relationships with prospects. 

“Lemlist is a great SaaS tool for outbound sales campaigns and even contributing toward your link building strategy.”

Daniil Kopilevych, Aware now. 

12. Sprout Social 

We all know the power of social media. We know that social can take our SaaS business to new heights, especially with a strong SaaS marketing strategy in its pocket. We also know that it’s a full-time gig; what was once just Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, has grown to an all-consuming social giant—it’s a lot to manage. 

Now, there are a ton of social media management platforms out there, and admittedly Sprout Social is not the cheapest. However, you get what you pay for, and Sprout is by far—in our opinion—the most advanced and user-friendly social media management platform going. 

Optimize your campaigns, listen to brand sentiment, plan, schedule, and capitalize on a content strategy that’s as rocking as you are. Plus, learn from your efforts with in-depth analytics tools and demand gen metrics to inform future campaign strategies. 

13. Google Tag Manager 

“For me, Google Tag Manager is the only way to know what initiatives are successful and which are not—by tracking and measuring them. 

Google Tag Manager makes it easy to add small snippets of code to your site to connect various channels and platforms. It’s another easy-to-use tool that helps marketers circumvent the lack of dev resources they have available.”

Asya Sharrow, Phenomenon.

Integrate easily, increase your team’s agility, and understand your digital marketing efforts on the fly. Airbnb managed to improve their vendor data collection by 90% with the Google tag manager. Plus, it’s not going to break the bank—in fact, it’s free. 

14. The Tray Platform 

A solution built to not only aid your integrations but automate every process in between. It can streamline processes and workflows and drastically help accelerate your SaaS product marketing efforts. 

“Level up your marketing automation tools, batch events together, and automate your tech stack with drag and drop features. It allows anyone to turn into “citizen automaters” without needing to know a lick of code.”

Fung-Lin W, DigitalOcean

15. Unbounce

We’ve all wanted to handle our campaigns from point A to B, and we’ve all reached frustrating bottlenecks when it comes to access to team members and resources. 

As marketers, especially in startups, we’re expected to wear many hats. Occasionally, we’re expected to wear all the hats. If you’ve got the time, then that’s okay. But, luxuries like designers and engineers are often not available to us. 

Well, luckily for us, there are some great SaaS marketing tools to help us along the way. Unbounce is exactly that. You can create custom landing pages for your campaigns without having to code. Run A/B tests on your LPs and optimize your work as you go. Say goodbye to bottlenecks, and hello to a hat that looks great on you.

Looking for SaaS inbound marketing agency? Check here.

It’s not all just Google Analytics  

The Software as a Service world is led by some big brand names that you hear often and there for a reason. The likes of Hubspot, MailChimp, Slack, Salesforce; they’ve made it because they are streamlined, optimized, and automated. They were some of the earliest adopters of the newest SaaS tools, and it may be time to jump out of the GA nest, too. 

As SaaS content marketing agency, we’re hell-bent on avoiding churn, hosting clean onboardings, customer relationships, and paying subscribers. What we need to remember is: it all starts with hello. 

How we deliver our brand and our product to new customers, from day one, will determine who hangs around for day two, three, and forevermore. Lead generation and demand generation, aren’t just getting prospects through the door; it’s getting them to sprint through it and into the arms of your sales team, knowing full well what they can expect. 

So, make the jump, pick the fruit, take a new SaaS tool for a whirl and see what it can do for your marketing efforts. Say hello efficiently, smoothly, and joyfully. Oh, and while you’re there researching some of these tools, make a note of the journey you go on—you never know, their strategy could prove useful to you too. 😉