Eminent researchers believe that the world economy is headed for a recession in 2023. The global recession will decline the valuation of startups. Also, the huge funding crunch will make it challenging for startups to sustain business growth. Entrepreneurs and founders can overcome the funding crunch only by achieving profitability.

They will try to survive the funding crunch by accelerating customer acquisition and increasing sales revenue consistently. Likewise, they will try to maintain a positive cash flow by curtailing upfront and ongoing costs. Hence, startups will explore ways to promote and sell their products/services aggressively without escalating marketing costs.

While making a startup marketing strategy in 2023, you should focus on interacting with existing and potential customers using multiple channels and touchpoints.  But your digital marketing strategy for startups must curtail costs and increase returns by combining a slew of low-cost and budget-friendly marketing tactics.

15 Tactics to Consider While Making a Startup Marketing Strategy for 2023

1. Website Optimization

You can divert visitors to the start-up’s website using many digital marketing tactics. But the digital marketing strategies cannot convert visitors into leads and customers if the website does not deliver an optimal user experience. You need to ensure that users can access the startup’s website seamlessly on desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets.

At the same time, your strategy should focus on improving the key factors affecting the website’s user experience – speed, usability, content, security, and credibility. Also, you have to implement the latest search engine guidelines to increase search engine traffic to the website organically. Hence, your startup marketing strategy must make user experience optimization an ongoing process.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is one of the digital marketing tactics that help businesses reduce customer acquisition costs significantly. In addition to reaching out to a wider audience, SEO tactics boost a website’s online reputation and credibility. Your startup marketing strategy must boost the website’s search visibility using on-page, off-page, and technical SEO techniques.

However, you must remember that Google and Bing these days update their search algorithms frequently to boost search experiences. Hence, you must keep the SEO strategy flexible enough to accommodate the changes required to boost customer acquisition. In addition to using different forms of content, you must optimize the content for textual search, image search, voice search, and video search.

3. Social Media Promotion

The average time spent by internet users on various social networking platforms has increased to 2 hours and 29 minutes in 2022. Hence, your startup marketing strategy must include an organic social media plan. You can promote the startup on social networks organically by posting and sharing a variety of content – posts, stories, memes, photos, and videos.

However, your strategy must focus on posting the right type of content on the right social networking platform at the right time. In addition to posting content regularly, you need to optimize the content and engage with the target audience. Audience engagement is essential to enhance your brand recognition and visibility and produce user-generated content.

4. Influencer Marketing

Many individuals and enterprises have become social media influencers by establishing reputation and credibility in a specific sector. They help businesses promote their products and services on social media through posts, mentions, and endorsements. Your startup marketing strategy must consider this distinct form of social media marketing to promote products/services to a wider audience.

You can leverage this marketing tactic fully by long-term partnering with the right influencers. The partnership will result in the publication of authentic influencer content according to your marketing strategy. However, you must allow creative freedom to enable the influencer to create content that keeps the audience engaged and deliver your marketing message.

5. Content Marketing

In addition to connecting startups with the target audience in a cost-efficient way, content marketing boosts the performance of SEO and social media marketing campaigns. Your marketing strategy for 2023 must make the creation, distribution, and promotion of multi-form content an ongoing process.

But the startup can win customers’ trust and build long-term relationships with them only by producing relevant, valuable, and consistent content. Hence, this marketing tactic requires startups to produce high-quality content by deploying seasoned content creators. Your strategy must leverage real-time data to produce content that the target audience wants and prefers.

You must publish and promote the content strategically to ensure that the target audience can consume the content using their preferred channel and devices. At the same time, you should identify the high-performing content and focus on optimizing the underperforming content by monitoring the performance of each form of content.

6. Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the tried and tested digital marketing strategies. Over 87% of marketers distribute various forms of content organically using email marketing. In addition to connecting with the target audience, email marketing helps startups keep recipients engaged and influence their purchase decisions.

While making a startup marketing strategy, you should opt for email marketing as a low-budget marketing budget to build, nurture, and sustain customer relationships. But your email marketing strategy must focus on sending the right message to the customers at the right time. Also, you can get better results by combining email marketing and SEO.

7. Video Marketing

This marketing strategy requires startups to incur video costs. Also, startups have to spend more to improve video quality. But you must remember that 54% of consumers want brands to publish video content regularly. Hence, a startup cannot meet the expectations of consumers without investing in video marketing.

However, your marketing strategy for startups must focus on controlling video marketing costs by adopting best practices like keeping videos short, producing videos in-house, procuring economical equipment, and spending time on pre-production. At the same time, you must increase ROI by implementing a slew of video marketing strategies.

8. User-Generated Content

Consumers find user-generated content more authentic and impactful than brand-generated content. Your startup marketing strategy can influence the purchase decision of consumers by using brand-specific content created by consumers in various marketing campaigns.

You can boost brand loyalty and brand growth in a cost-efficient way by posting positive reviews on websites, social networks, and online forums. However, your strategy must make it easier for consumers to create brand-specific content by providing clear instructions.

9. Hashtag Campaigns

Hashtag marketing is a form of social media marketing. As the name suggests, this marketing tactic enhances the visibility of content on social media by embedding hashtags. Your startup marketing strategy should consider hashtag campaigns to create brand awareness, build communities, and promote products/services.

But you can make the hashtag marketing strategy impactful only by selecting the appropriate hashtag for a campaign and posting content featuring the hashtag. You also have the option to use multiple hashtags according to precise marketing goals. At the same time, you need to ensure that the target audience can interact with the hashtag seamlessly.

10. Referral Programs

This marketing strategy drives customer acquisition and sales conversion by encouraging and incentivizing existing customers to recommend products/services. While making referral programs for startups, you should focus on converting happy and loyal customers into brand advocates.

The existing customers will help the startup acquire new customers by recommending products/services to their friends, coworkers, and family. But the startup can persuade existing customers to recommend only by giving incentives like a surprise gift, option to upgrade, or attractive discounts.

11. Cross-Promotion

This marketing tactic emphasizes brands promoting each other’s products/services by marketing partnership. A startup can promote its product/service in a cost-efficient way by forming marketing partnerships with similar or relevant businesses.

The strategy will make another business promote the startup’s product/service to its customer base. But the startup has to promote the product/service of the partner to its customer base in return. Hence, cross-promotion creates a win-win situation for both partners without escalating marketing costs.

12. Business Awards

Many governmental and non-governmental organizations these days recognize the outstanding achievements of startups by giving awards. These awards enhance the reputation and credibility of winners in a short amount of time.

A startup can use the award as a cost-efficient marketing tool to attract new customers and retain existing customers. It can impress and influence visitors by displaying the awards on its website. But a startup can leverage this marketing tactic only after winning business awards.

13. Network Events

In addition to enhancing brand awareness, network events create opportunities for entrepreneurs to make connections in the industry. Startup founders can leverage this low-cost marketing tactic by organizing local events as well as attending network events.

While attending business networking events, entrepreneurs should showcase their expertise by participating in genuine discussions. At the same time, they must build business connections by sharing their contact information and staying in touch with other participants.

14. Personal Branding

Many entrepreneurs and founders have become celebrities in a short amount of time thanks to Social networking platforms and business reality TV shows. Likewise, many founders enhance brand recognition and customer acquisition through personal branding.

While making marketing strategies for startups, you focus on branding both founders and startups. Your personal branding strategy for entrepreneurs should focus on highlighting their struggles, past experiences, success stories, failures, and future plans.

At the same time, you should enhance the founder’s personal brand by distributing a variety of digital content – articles, blogs, videos, podcasts, case studies, and infographics – across customer communication channels and touchpoints.

15. Low-Budget PPC Campaigns

PPC is not one of the low-budget digital marketing strategies for startups. But no startup can garner instant results without running paid advertisement campaigns. While making a startup marketing strategy, you should focus on controlling costs by running low-budget PPC campaigns.

Leading search engines and social media enable you to control PPC campaign costs in a variety of ways. For instance, you can control PPC marketing costs by targeting the best keywords, opting for manual bidding, and targeting limited locations. However, you must monitor and refine the PPC campaign performance regularly to get better results.

Final Thought

While making a startup marketing strategy in 2023, you can overcome budgetary constraints by combining a slew of low-budget digital marketing techniques. But your strategy can increase ROI only by focusing on two important factors – digital marketing automation and digital marketing performance measurement.

Digital Marketing Performance Monitoring

Your digital marketing strategy for 2023 must define the metrics or KPIs for monitoring digital marketing performance. The KPIs will show the performance and outcome of digital marketing campaigns in numbers. Hence, it becomes easier for you to know which digital marketing techniques are working and which are not.

You can make the strategy more effective by increasing budgetary allocation for high-performing digital marketing campaigns. Also, you can achieve predefined marketing goals by improving the performance of underperforming digital marketing campaigns by making data-driven decisions.

Digital Marketing Automation

You curtail the manpower and resources required to run multichannel digital marketing campaigns only through automation. The digital marketing tool will help you control staffing costs by automating routine communication and marketing activities. Also, you can use the tool to generate, nurture, and retarget leads more efficiently.

At the same time, the software will provide you with actionable insights by analyzing large volumes of customer and marketing data collected from various sources. You can generate automated reports to boost digital marketing performance by making the right decision at the right time. Hence, you can power up the startup marketing strategy for 2023 by investing in the right digital marketing tool.

In addition to being intangible, Software as a Service (SaaS) products are being updated by the provider frequently. Also, potential buyers perform elaborate research by analyzing the information gathered from diverse online sources. Leading businesses these days promote their cloud-based software solutions by sending quality and targeted content to leads throughout the buying cycle.

In addition to answering questions asked by leads, the targeted content influences their purchase decision gradually during the decision-making process. Leading cloud service providers these days deliver the right content to the lead at the right time through multiple SaaS marketing channels. Also, they drive customer acquisition and retention by launching various SaaS marketing campaigns.

Hence, entrepreneurs, managers, and other decision-makers need to measure the performance of their marketing campaigns and activities using a slew of SaaS marketing metrics. The widely used SaaS marketing metrics can be divided into three broad categories – acquisition metrics, funnel metrics, and monetization metrics.

• Acquisition metrics help decision-makers to identify and compare the channels through which leads find the SaaS product and become subscribers. Marketers use a slew of acquisition metrics to monitor and understand the activities of website visitors before they become leads or contacts.
• The decision-makers use funnel metrics to assess lead nurturing activities and monitor the lead’s journey in various stages in the sales funnel. These SaaS marketing metrics help marketers to influence leads by delivering informative, personalized, and targeted content about the SaaS product.
• Monetization metrics help decision-makers to measure customer lifetime value and decide how to sustain profitable growth by increasing customer lifetime value consistently. Many entrepreneurs use monetization metrics to measure ROI on SaaS marketing expenditure and differentiate marketing efforts based on ROI.

Decision-makers can measure the performance of SaaS marketing campaigns and activities only by combining the appropriate acquisition, funnel, and monetization metrics. The combination of varying metrics helps them boost SaaS marketing campaigns by taking informed decisions by analyzing real-time data collected from various channels.

Identifying 21 Crucial SaaS Marketing Metrics for Entrepreneurs and Marketers

Here are the most important acquisition metrics, funnel metrics, and monetization metrics for SaaS marketers.

Crucial Acquisition Metrics for SaaS Marketers

1) Website Visitors/Website Traffic

The success and performance of SaaS marketing campaigns directly depend on the number of website visitors or the size of website traffic. A SaaS provider can generate more leads and increase the conversion rate only more and more people visit the website. This acquisition metric helps an entrepreneur know how many visitors or how much traffic the website gets over a certain period. Most entrepreneurs use the metric to measure an increase or decrease in monthly website traffic.

2) Source/Medium of Website Traffic

As mentioned earlier, marketers these days divert traffic to the SaaS product website through various marketing channels – organic search, paid search, social media, emails, and website referral. But the number of website visitors varies across the source or medium of website traffic. Marketers can make informed decisions only by knowing the amount of traffic diverted to the website by each source. This acquisition metric helps them to compare various web traffic sources based on the amount of traffic driven by it. 

3) Time on the Website

Most SaaS marketing campaigns influence the target audience by posting and sending relevant and informative content. SaaS marketers must know if the content is effective in driving lead generation and lead conversion by keeping the readers engaged. This acquisition metric helps marketers to assess the effectiveness of the content based on the amount of time visitors spend on the website. Visitors spend more time on the website when the content keeps them engaged by providing actionable and insightful information.

4) Bounce Rate

This SaaS marketing metric helps marketers to calculate the percentage of visitors that leave the website or bounce back to the referral website without taking any action – clicking on a link, filling in forms, or visiting other web pages. No business can run successful SaaS marketing campaigns without reducing the bounce rate. Marketers have to implement specific strategies to maintain a low bounce rate. They also need to revamp the landing page to ensure that every visitor gets the expected value.

5) Behavior Flow

This acquisition metric helps SaaS marketers to understand the behavior of website visitors based on the way they interact with the website. Widely used web analytics services like Google Analytics helps marketers to calculate this SaaS marketing metric by generating behavior flow reports.

According to Google Analytics Help,

“The Behavior Flow report visualizes the paths users traveled from one screen, page or event to the next. This report can help you discover what content keeps users engaged with your site. The Behavior Flow report can also help identify potential content or usability issues.”

6) Visitor to Lead Conversion Rate

SaaS businesses embed a slew of options in their product website to convert website visitors into leads. Some businesses request visitors to become newsletter subscribers by sharing their email ids. At the same time, many businesses require website visitors to share their contact information to download digital content like ebooks. That is why; SaaS marketers need to measure the percentage of website visitors that become leads using this acquisition metric.

7) Trial/Demo to Customer Conversion Rate

As the name suggests, this metric measures the percentage of leads who become customers by making payments after using the SaaS product on a trial basis or receiving a demo. A high trial/demo-to-customer conversion rate depicts that the SaaS products meet both needs and expectations of free trial users. On the other hand, a lower percentage makes it essential for the business to optimize the cloud-based software and ensure that marketing messages are aligned to the SaaS product.

Crucial Funnel Metrics for SaaS Marketers

8) Email Subscribers

Many people these days access the website with the sole intention to gather information. They are not interested in buying a SaaS product. But they want to access information shared by the business through newsletters and emails. They share their email ids with the intention to receive informative emails and newsletters. The decision-makers can use this funnel metric to differentiate email subscribers from leads or potential customers.

9) Leads

This SaaS metric helps marketers to identify the website visitors who are interested in the SaaS product offered by the business. In addition to becoming email subscribers, this category of website visitors shows their interest in the SaaS product by filling in the form posted on the website’s product or Contact Us page. Marketers can convert the leads into customers by implementing lead nurturing strategies.

10) Marketing Qualified Leads

SaaS businesses these days distribute informative and promotional content through multiple digital channels. Hence, leads engage with the content through specific communication channels. The SaaS marketing metric helps marketers to understand how leads engage with the content distributed by the business. Also, marketers can use the SaaS marketing metric to identify and differentiate qualified leads based on the pages visited by them and the content downloaded by them.

11) Sales Qualified Leads

As the name suggests, this funnel metric helps marketers to identify the leads who want to buy the SaaS product.  The sales qualified leads to convey their intention to buy the SaaS product in a variety of ways – requesting a free trial, booking a product demo, and downloading product information. Marketers should focus on converting these sales-qualified leads into subscribers.

12) Sales Opportunities

The customers do not negotiate with companies offering B2C SaaS products or low-cost B2B SaaS products. But they start conversations and negotiations with the sales team after receiving a quote and before buying a high-value SaaS product. This funnel metric helps SaaS marketers to identify opportunities in the sales funnel to convert sales-qualified leads into customers or subscribers.

13) Customers

Businesses offering premium SaaS products can use this funnel metric to calculate the number or percentage of leads who have subscribed to or signed up for the cloud-based software or service. But businesses offering freemium SaaS products have to use the metric to differentiate customers who have made payments to access premium features from customers who are accessing only complementary features.

14) Conversion Rate

The leads become customers at various stages in the sales funnel. This important SaaS marketing metric helps decision-makers to know the number or percentage of leads converting into customers at every stage in the sales funnel. The information helps marketers to identify the factors that drive conversion at various stages in the sales funnel. Also, they can leverage the actionable information to improve conversion rate in every stage of the sales funnel.

15) Free Trial/Demo Requests

Most SaaS companies these days allow leads to use and evaluate the cloud-based software or service by requesting demos or free trials. Seasoned marketers know that most customers these days try and evaluate multiple SaaS products before making a payment. Hence, they need to check if the free trials and demos are effective as a SaaS marketing strategy to drive sales conversion and sustain revenue growth.

Crucial Monetization Metrics for SaaS Marketers

16) Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

SaaS businesses have to spend money on running multiple marketing campaigns. Hence, they calculate the ROI on marketing expenditure based on the cost of generating a lead or the cost of converting a lead. This monetization metric can be calculated for a specific period by dividing the overall marketing expenditure by the number of leads generated/converted.

17) Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

SaaS businesses can sustain profitable growth only by reducing customer acquisition costs and increasing customer lifetime value (CLV). Marketers determine the lifetime value of a SaaS customer based on the value of her relationship with the company or business. The lifetime value of individual customers differs. But marketers can calculate CLV accurately only after calculating the average revenue per customer and the customer churn rate.

18) Customer Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost Ratio (CLV: CAC)

This important SaaS marketing metric helps decision-makers to compare the cost incurred to acquire a customer to the lifetime value of the customer. Entrepreneurs use this single metric to measure and compare the performance of SaaS marketing campaigns based on two important metrics – CAC and CLV. The metrics help them to differentiate high-performing marketing campaigns from poor-performing marketing campaigns. At the same time, marketers can track this metric to identify the marketing campaigns that need to be finetuned or optimized. 

19) Customer Churn Rate

Often customers cancel subscriptions and switch SaaS providers due to a variety of reasons. The entrepreneurs can retain customers and drive revenue growth only by tracking the percentage of customers who cancel their subscription to particular SaaS products over a specific period – month, quarter, or year. Entrepreneurs and marketers can boost lead generation and conversion activities consistently only by keeping the customer churn rate low.

20) Revenue Churn Rate

The monthly recurring revenue (MRR) of a SaaS provider reduces each time a customer cancels or downgrades her subscription plan. Entrepreneurs can increase recurring revenue by making informed decisions only by keeping the revenue churn rate. Also, they need to divide revenue churn into multiple categories based on specific reasons –  cancellation, downgrades, bankruptcy, and competition. But marketers often consider revenue churn rates due to cancellations and downgrades.

21) Net Promotion Score

Many marketers these days use the net promotion score (NPS) as an additional SaaS marketing metric to measure customer satisfaction rate. They calculate NPS by asking customers a simple question – how likely will you recommend our SaaS product to others? A large percentage of customers are likely to recommend the SaaS product to others if the NPS stands between 9 and 10. On the other hand, marketers have to find answers to the question – of why customers do not recommend the SaaS product to others – if the NPS is between 0 and 6.

Every cloud service provider these days promotes SaaS products by launching multiple digital marketing campaigns and through multiple marketing channels. Hence, the decision-makers can measure and boost marketing activities only by combining three different types of SaaS marketing metrics. However, it is always important for entrepreneurs, managers, and marketers to combine the right metrics to measure all important aspects of SaaS marketing campaigns.