5 Excellent SaaS marketing campaigns to inspire you

Mailchimp’s clever campaign

Kicking off the list is a 2017 campaign for the marketing and email automation company Mailchimp. Like many of the best campaigns, it took a good idea and spun it out into pure marketing gold.

The story begins three years earlier, when Mailchimp was sponsoring the true-crime podcast Serial. At the time, it ran a 20-second ad before each episode in which one voice—sounding confused—mispronounces the brand name “Mailkeemp”.

Unexpectedly, this element of the ad turned out to be a hit. In fact, it proved to have spontaneous meme value; at the height of its popularity, hundreds of tweets a day were being posted with the hashtag #MailKimp.

So when it came time to consider the next stage of the campaign, it made sense to capitalize on that success. Which is exactly what Mailchimp did.

They developed a brand marketing campaign around the concept of the mispronunciation of their name. The stroke of genius was this: At no point in the campaign was “Mailchimp” itself actually mentioned.

Instead, nine separate misspellings that rhyme with “Mailchimp” each had a dedicated video illustrating them, along with a poster. The ads relied on piquing the viewer’s curiosity and encouraging them to figure out for themselves what they were all about.

The videos were slick and targeted their messages using wry humor. So for example, we could enjoy the striking sight of a man working in a postal depot looking slightly startled as a shrimp in his sandwich regales him in song (MailShrimp).

Or, in what could arguably be described as a surrealist masterpiece, a little girl’s birthday party being interrupted as miniature inmates escape from her piñata after she breaks it open (JailBlimp).

If you’re curious, you can watch some of the videos here.

The campaign was so successful that it won one of the coveted Cyber Grand Prix awards at the 2017 Cannes Lions, the Oscars of the marketing world.

Monday.com’s witty posters

Workflow management platform Monday.com launched in 2014, but it didn’t enjoy success in the US until around five years later. What changed? 

Well, it secured a $150 million round of funding in 2019 and used it to launch an eye-catching ad campaign focused on potential clients in the States.

While around two-thirds of Monday.com’s ad budget has recently been dedicated to online video marketing, a substantial chunk of the 2019 budget went on decorating transit hubs in New York and elsewhere with posters like this:

When savvy SaaS marketing integrated campaigns like this hit home, the impact can be spectacular. The posters were placed in prime city locations perfect for reaching the kind of B2B clients the company needed to target to get a foothold in the market. And the results did not disappoint.

By 2021, Monday.com had grown to take an 8% share of the market and its client list was increasing over twice as fast as those of competitors like Asana and Smartsheet. No surprise, then, that when it went public in June that year, the response to the IPO was phenomenal.

The share price leaped from $155 to $174 on the first day of trading, valuing the company at a market cap of $7.6 billion. Not bad for a business almost entirely unknown in the US three years earlier.

Wistia’s video campaign

If your product is something that can be used for marketing itself, that puts you in a great position. 

Take Wistia, for example. When the video hosting company wanted to promote its new webcam and screen recording tool Soapbox, it tried something new. It hit upon the superb idea of making its own video documentary series about…making videos.

This wasn’t just some dry how-to video, though. Instead, Wistia took its cue from the kind of entertainment format popularized by the likes of Buzzfeed’s Worth It, where presenters try similar things at three different price points and compare their experiences.

The company got LA-based production company Sandwich Video on board to make three videos, each with a very different budget. Namely: $1,000, $10,000, and $100,000. Keeping it simple, the series was called One, Ten, One Hundred.

It was such a smash hit that it was nominated for a Webby Award in the Branded Entertainment Series category. The series has also been listed on Amazon Prime, demonstrating its success at transcending the marketing–general entertainment barrier.

In many ways, this campaign represented one of the best SaaS content marketing examples we’ve seen. It was innovative, yes. But it was also directly relevant to the target audience and hugely entertaining, both of which are extremely beneficial when it comes to driving engagement.

Since that first success, Wistia Studios has continued creating its own video series. These include Low Views, High Impact, exploring the importance (or not) of going viral, and Show Business, a guide to creating effective video content.

SaaS marketing campaign ideas to consider 

So, what does all this mean for you and your business? Well, the first thing to remember is that you don’t need to win a Cannes Lion or a Webby. But you can certainly learn from the best marketing campaigns and integrate some of the ideas they use.

Content marketing

First up is content marketing. In the modern business environment, content marketing is one of the primary ways of driving traffic to your site and developing leads.

There are a number of elements to content marketing that all work together to create impact. It starts with the content itself. It’s crucial that it offers value to the reader or viewer. If you churn out uninspiring content, no-one will be interested, which defeats the whole purpose.

Secondly, you have to make sure your content gets in front of your audience. This means you need rock-solid SEO in place and a strategic SaaS link building plan, so your pages show up near the top of the organic search rankings.

You may be wondering why this is important. Can’t you just buy paid search ads instead? The truth is paid search does have its place in some company marketing campaigns. However, for building brand awareness in the long term, there’s nothing to beat ranking high in organic search.

When you release top-quality content regularly, you’re building a library. Over time, this means your site’s authority increases and your brand enjoys a boost in trust and engagement.

Feature marketing

Feature marketing involves putting a concentrated focus on particular features of a product. This makes it an excellent choice for SaaS businesses, since adding new features to your product is a common approach in the SaaS sector anyway.

It’s different from brand marketing, which is a more broad-based attempt to increase your visibility in the market. With feature marketing, you advertise specific features of your offering to try to attract new customers and retain existing ones.

Putting this into practice involves finding ways to highlight and draw attention to new features as they become available. Crafting feature-focused landing pages is a good way to do this. These should explain exactly what the feature does and how clients can take advantage of it.

Use eye-catching images and instruction videos where you walk the viewer through the feature step-by-step. The idea is to engage them to the point where they want to find out more, so ensure the page includes a meaningful call to action. (This kind of approach pairs well with content marketing, for obvious reasons.)

Another reason why this kind of marketing works well for SaaS operators is that tipping off your existing customers that new features have been added tends to be straightforward.

While a chocolate manufacturer would have to resort to old-school methods like emailing a list or using paid ads to alert consumers to its new Super Choco 3000 bar, SaaS companies can simply add the feature in-app and invite clients to unlock it. 

Ideally, you should provide a trial version of the feature where you take your clients on a guided walkthrough to demonstrate how it works.

Video marketing

As we saw from the superb example set by Wistia, video marketing packs a real punch when done well. So it’s no surprise that it’s already found favor with a large number of companies.

According to a November 2022 survey by video explainer experts Wyzowl, 96% of respondents said they considered video to be an important part of their marketing strategy. So the truth is that if you’re not using video marketing, there’s a good chance your competitors are.

The survey delves into some interesting details. For example, it asked respondents who weren’t using video marketing why that was the case. It’s striking how the list of reasons reads like a collection of excuses.

Fully 30% of those replying said they simply couldn’t find the time. Now, that’s understandable. When you’re running a business, you don’t always have the resources to put into something like video production, which many people think of as an elaborate process.

But other responses are less convincing. The idea of video being too expensive, for example. The Wistia campaign demonstrated that excellent videos can be produced on a relative shoestring, after all.

If you’ve been skeptical so far about the value of video marketing, it might be time to take another look.

Marketing by association

Marketing by association simply means basking in the reflected glory of other successful brands by highlighting your connection with them. This can be a great shortcut to building brand authority and developing trust with your client base.

If you already have some big-name clients, the simplest way of doing this is to ask them for testimonials and display their brand logos on your site. That way, you can persuade potential customers that if your service is good enough for the big players, it’s probably good enough for them too.

Even if you don’t already have big brands as clients, you can still benefit from positive associations if your product offers a number of integrations with popular apps. It’s a similar idea. In linking your platform with other successful ones, you can take advantage of the trust dividend that flows from them.

Community-building

Another route you can take is to focus on community-building. This could mean curating forums or social media spaces where clients and experts come together to talk about your product and how to use it to its best advantage.

This kind of resource can be very useful for customer retention. If your clients have ready access to expertise that can help them out with unexpected issues, that has two benefits. 

First, they’ll get their tricky issues resolved quickly and easily, and second, it reduces the direct customer support required from your teams.

There are other kinds of community-building, though. Just as we saw with Userlist’s Help Founders campaign, community-building can have much more of a focus on a kind of mutual-aid approach to business.

As well as creating goodwill in general, this kind of initiative often functions as a powerful brand marketing campaign and is worth considering as part of your overall SaaS marketing plan.