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Imagine navigating the vast landscape of software as a service (SaaS) without a compass to guide you.
Product marketing has emerged as a pivotal tool to steer your SaaS business towards success.
But what sets it apart from traditional marketing? How can it unlock untapped potential for your SaaS business?
In this comprehensive guide, we will be your compass, showing you the path to product marketing mastery.
Join us as we navigate through the intricacies of SaaS marketing, equipping you with the knowledge and insights to propel your SaaS business toward unparalleled growth in 2024.
SaaS product marketing is the strategic process of bringing your innovative SaaS product to the market. It’s the engine that powers your business toward success.
It encompasses the messaging and positioning of your product and the strategy to differentiate your product’s features and benefits in the market.
It goes beyond traditional marketing efforts by catering specifically to the unique needs of SaaS products and apps – whether it’s the challenges of selling a digital product or driving adoption and retention among users.
Product marketing in SaaS is indispensable for driving demand, adoption, and expansion of your product.
Let’s take a look at how product marketing teams run marketing efforts like a well-oiled machine.
Product marketing in the world of Software as a Service (SaaS) is the game-changer that can skyrocket your product's success.
It is the trifecta of product, sales, and customer success.
If your product marketing isn’t on point, your other marketing efforts will fall short too.
Assembling a top-notch product marketing team is crucial - they’ll know the product inside-out, have a much better understanding of industry trends and competitors and overall be a cross-functional team that serves your product and your sales and marketing efforts.
They bring your product and users together, setting the stage for success by focusing on the middle-to-bottom part of the SaaS marketing funnel while leaving lead generation to the demand generation and brand marketing teams.
Your high-performing product marketing team should include:
With the right team, understanding of the product and market, and collaborations across functions, your product marketing team can unlock the true potential of your SaaS product.
SaaS marketing strategy for consists of two distinct phases: Pre-Launch and Post-Launch.
Let's take a closer look at these.
The general objective of a pre-launch SaaS marketing strategy is to successfully introduce a product to the market and drive free trial acquisitions, utilizing a comprehensive go-to-market plan that encompasses various tactics. Here's how you can do it:
Do you know who your perfect customer is? Your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is a detailed description of your ideal customer - the one who will love your product or service because it's reducing their costs, improving their efficiency, or overall improving their bottom line.
And the best part? Creating a well-defined ICP benefits you too. Besides revenue, you'll get referrals from active users, customer insights, and testimonials, all of which help grow your business.
So, how do you develop your ICP? You need to know who your ideal customer is, where they work, and their day-to-day challenges.You can identify buyer personas through user behavior analytics and user surveys.
Once you've got your target customers down, you can streamline your product marketing efforts accordingly.
Next is mapping the customer journey - all the channels and touchpoints that customers engage with throughout their journey – providing valuable insights into their experience and behavior.
With this, you can gain a holistic view of your customer feedback and make informed decisions to optimize and enhance their interactions with your SaaS product – ultimately leading to increased customer satisfaction, customer retention, and thus more long-term customers.
It's crucial to research and analyze your competitors to figure out how you can position your product. It's also important to consider macro and micro trends that could impact your launch, both now and in the future. By being aware of industry changes and adapting to them, you can set yourself apart from competitors. For example, when GDPR was introduced in 2018, Cognism built compliance into its platform, which became a selling point for them.
But it's not just about knowing your competitors - you also need to understand your customers' alternatives. What other options do they have besides your product or service?
Once you've understood where your product stands in the face of all your competitors, you need to focus on differentiation. What makes your product stand out in your target market?
Your product should be tailored to address the unique needs of a well-defined target audience in a way that surpasses any other solution in the target market.
It's about understanding the pain points of your target audience and presenting your product as the ultimate solution that stands out as a leader in meeting their needs.
And finally, keep an eye on industry trends that could affect your business. These could be trends within your market or broader trends that impact local economies, like the ones we relied on to differentiate ourselves in the fintech industry. In the end, it's all about standing out in the market. So, take the time to research, analyze, and adapt to make your go-to-market strategy a success.
In a world where competition is fierce, effective product positioning is the key to driving the success of your product!
Words have a powerful impact on the buying process, but they are just a part of the bigger picture. It all starts with finding a strategic narrative - Andy Raskin's Promised Land strategic narrative (part of his Greatest Sales Deck I've Ever Seen post) is a great starting point. He also emphasizes how the story is the strategy - and that it should ideally come top-down from the CEO.
This narrative sets the context for why your product or service is needed.
Positioning is about finding your place in the market and clarifying where your company stands among the competition. You want to avoid overlapping with established players in the market and instead find a piece of the market that's of no interest to competitors.
Once you have your strategic narrative and positioning, it's time for messaging. Your message needs to be aligned with your audience's goals and priorities, addressing their desired gain and the pains they want to avoid. It should speak to the jobs to be done and resonate with your target market.
In an Ungated Marketing podcast episode, Wynter CEO Peep Laja emphasized the importance of having a message-market fit so that your message is aligned with your audience's needs. Remember to revisit your strategic narrative every 2 to 4 years and adjust it as the world changes. If you notice that it has become irrelevant, it's time to make some changes.
Strong messaging helps you respond to and lead your customers. When your messaging is intuitive, advertising performs better and leads to a more seamless business experience. Perfecting messaging is key for connecting with your audience and generating authenticity and credibility.
You need to first set up business goals and then decide on metrics based on different business goals.
To start with, you can use the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) framework for your business goals. Then, use key performance indicators (KPIs) that measure specific metrics.
Here are the metrics typically measured for SaaS marketing:
By leveraging appropriate KPIs and OKRs, you can gain valuable insights into your SaaS marketing performance and use a data-driven approach to optimize your strategies and achieve your business goals effectively.
Reaching your targets is like conducting an orchestra. You need all the elements of your marketing strategy to work together seamlessly if you want to create a harmonious symphony. But what specific roles do each element play?
First, you need quality data to target the right people. This is your foundation. Then, you need a marketing plan that allows you to test and optimize your tactics.
When it comes to SaaS marketing strategy, there’s a multitude of tactics, marketing content, marketing activities, and marketing material being executed across various channels – each with its own costs and outcomes.
But it's ideal to focus on one tactic at a time and scale it as your business grows.
You can kick off your SaaS marketing strategy by driving acquisition through organic traffic.
If this works, indicating that there is a viable market to serve – you can then consider using paid traffic to boost the number of qualified leads, trials, and demo requests generated through content marketing.
Once you have that, it's ideal to focus on your SEO-first content strategy. This is likely to help your potential customers find you on Google and power your inbound engine.
Now onto the post-launch stage...
Once your product launches, a successful SaaS product marketing strategy heavily relies on leveraging marketing automation.
First, you've got to understand how the stages in the user journey apply to your product and how the product messaging must change for each stage:
This is the initial stage of onboarding - where you
guide your potential users toward understanding and experiencing the true value of your product.
You’ve got to lead them to the "Aha! moment" and ultimately reach the activation stage.
This is where you introduce your customer base to product features and relevant content that offer additional value.
These secondary standalone features offer a deeper understanding of the diverse functionalities of your product – showing them benefits that go beyond the initial activation stage and maximizing audience engagement.
This stage focuses on retention, loyal customers, and driving account expansion.
At this point in the user journey, your current customers already have a clear understanding of your product’s value and are comfortable using the majority of its features.
The emphasis in this stage is on retaining users and identifying opportunities for account expansion by upselling to premium plans and offering them additional access to premium features or services.
By creating a positive user experience and providing ongoing support, you can foster long-term customer loyalty and drive continued growth for your SaaS product.
Also, check out guide to product demo
Imagine having an army of tireless virtual assistants at your beck and call, diligently handling repetitive tasks with lightning-fast precision.
That's the power of marketing automation.
If you think about the sheer scope of work involved in post-launch SaaS marketing strategies – there’s a ton of repetitive tasks that will grow exponentially as your company grows.
From email campaigns to consistent interactions, marketing automation empowers you to deliver a superior user experience while freeing up valuable time and resources to focus on higher-level strategic initiatives.
It's a win-win solution that's transforming the landscape of modern marketing, and as a SaaS marketer, you should be taking full advantage of its boundless potential. Let’s see how!
Here's an outline you can use to build your own product marketing automation strategy:
Also read: What is marketing enablement?
The SaaS industry is booming, with 99% of businesses using SaaS solutions and a market value of over $145 billion.
However, with increasing competition, it's crucial to find ways to differentiate your brand. As a business owner, staying ahead of the curve with the latest SaaS marketing trends can be your key to success.
Here’s some key trends for SaaS Marketing in 2024:
Detailed and impactful walkthroughs are a make-or-break factor for SaaS marketing. As software solutions, showcasing the product's features in the right way is crucial for establishing credibility. Videos backed by virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have been changing the game for demo videos.
But here's the twist: demos have leveled up even more. Interactive Demos have emerged as a powerful no-code option for companies to showcase their product in use even before the free trial stage. Sales teams can personalize demos for bigger accounts, and interactive demos can also be displayed on your website for all visitors too. Interactive demos effectively engage customers and highlight the value your product brings to them, taking your sales pitch to the next level.
As a SaaS business, you know the importance of covering all the bases for customer excellence. From an outstanding product to efficient customer services, you have processes to regulate. The good news is that automation has made customer support easier than ever. Automation of the customer success process simplifies user acquisition, engagement, and retention.
By providing easily accessible educational content, onboarding for new customers, and responsive chatbots, you can keep clients satisfied and engaged for the long haul. Self-service options are also becoming more prevalent – this Microsoft study says that over 77% of consumers have used self-service online portals for queries.
Implementing a data enrichment strategy provides you with valuable data points to create customer profiles and establish fallback strategies for your SaaS marketing efforts.
Plus, leveraging customer data enables you to personalize your products and processes, which is crucial. Data enrichment empowers you to leverage a data-driven approach to understand your customers better, deliver customized communications, and automate marketing campaigns for improved outcomes.
The success of a SaaS product hinges on its features, and with 70% of CIOs favoring scalable and agile solutions, regularly adding new features is essential.
With a robust feature marketing campaign, you can showcase these enhancements to retain existing loyal customers and attract new ones who are seeking such capabilities. Video marketing would be a great way to go here.
Take a cue from Zoom – by urging loyal customers to download the latest version for all the updates and features, Zoom ensures its effectiveness in promoting new offerings.
A whopping 87% of SaaS companies have experienced accelerated growth by implementing personalization techniques.
Leveraging AI and ML allows you to optimize product offerings, sales pitches, and marketing messages through the sales cycle for higher conversion rates while catering to your readers' preferences.
Coda sets a stellar example of effective market positioning, with:
Hubspot exemplifies the power of content marketing in providing valuable assistance to users with their highly optimized product tailored to their target audience's needs.
One of their tools, the 'Make My Persona' feature, offers an engaging and informative way to create buyer personas when data is limited. This tool:
Onboarding is an important part of SaaS marketing and in-app messaging offers various types to choose from.
Among them, checklists have proven to be highly effective in guiding users toward the activation point in their product adoption journey. Stairwell uses checklists to help users understand how their tool works – enabling them to fully experience its value.
Asana provides a stellar example of in-app gamification.
Whenever a user completes a task in their project management tool, a cute and wholesome magical creature appears to congratulate them.
Not only does it make the user smile, but it also reinforces the habit of using the app by signaling success and achievement.
This fosters brand affinity, loyalty, and increased word-of-mouth marketing – since users are more likely to share their positive experiences with others.
Vladislav Podolyako, Founder and CEO of Folderly suggests:
Daniel Chabert, Founder & CEO of PurpleFire suggests:
Managing Director at Opdotcom and digital marketing expert Serbay Arda Ayzit suggests:
Showcasing your product's key features in action can be incredibly impactful to your product marketing process,
With Storylane, a user-friendly no-code interactive product demo software, you can easily create interactive and engaging demos by simply dragging and dropping visual elements.
Storylane empowers you to:
Demo automation is a critical tool for gaining an edge with your product marketing in the competitive SaaS industry – and Storylane is a game-changing tool to add to your arsenal.
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If you're in the market for demo automation software, you've probably come across Storylane and Navattic. This comparison should help you differentiate between both platforms to guide your purchase decision.
At a high-level, customers prefer Storylane for the product functionality, versatility, ease-of-use, commercial model, and rate of innovation.
Before diving in, here’s a quick overview of core features common to both Storylane and Navattic — really, they’re table stakes for any modern demo automation platform:
And with that out of the way, here are a few ways Storylane stands out from Navattic...
Broadly, there are two formats of interactive demos:
In their own words, Navattic only specializes in top-of-funnel HTML demos. Storylane, on the other hand, is expressly designed for both demo formats — complete with auto-capture, annotations, guides, blurs, zooms, presenter videos, voice overs, and more.
What does this mean for you? With Storylane, you have the flexibility to pick between demo formats based on your needs: image-based guided demos for your website, video demos for email campaigns, HTML demos for sandbox environments, etc.
This flexibility (coupled with the next set of differences) puts Storylane in an unequivocally stronger position when it comes to scaling demos across departments and use-cases.
One of Storylane’s biggest differentiators against Navattic (and pretty much every other vendor in this category) is Lily, our demo automation agent. Broadly, Lily helps in two ways:
Here’s a rundown of what you can do with Lily today:
As for discovery, think of Lily as a conversation product expert with as much information as your best sales person, available 24/7 to guide prospects through discovery and qualification. Coming soon.
Where’s Navattic at with all this? As it stands, they do not support any comparable features.
Next up, we have Demo Hub: one of Storylane’s flagship features to address multiple buyer personas and use-cases in one place with galleries and playlists of demos. Galleries help marketers showcase a library of bite-sized product demos on their website (without overwhelming early stage prospects) while playlists help sales and presales teams share curated demo experiences with later stage prospects.
Navattic does not support any comparable feature to date. As it stands, Navattic’s response to Demo Hub is Demodash, an agency that charges as much as $2000 per demo to create demo centers for their customers.
Another key differentiator is Storylane's lineup of native apps. We’re the only demo automation vendors to support apps for Gmail, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Desktop (Mac).
These quality of life improvements are designed especially for sales teams to personalize and share demos without logging into Storylane (plus, easier change management is always nice).
You might be noticing a pattern here: To date, Navattic does not support this functionality — and given their focus on a limited set of use-cases, nor do we believe that they plan to. More on this next.
Most demo automation vendors sell to a specific function. Saleo sells to sales. Consensus sells to pre-sales. And Navattic? Well they primarily sell to marketers. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach, it can be a limiting factor when you’re looking to scale demo operations across departments and use-cases.
Storylane is specifically designed for horizontal adoption across marketing, pre-sales, sales, and even customer success, product, and development teams. The differences in product functionality highlighted above (coupled with under the radar features such as secure demo sharing and personalized links for email campaigns) are testament to this claim.
As for which demo automation software is easier to use, we’ll let numbers do the talking.
"Storylane makes it much easier to organize content with its tagging system for chapters and sections. While Navattic allows labeling, it lacks searchability and filtering capabilities, which becomes crucial when managing multiple chapters. I particularly appreciate how Storylane structures chapters with their own dedicated build sections. In contrast, with Navattic, when I created an 80-step process, it stretched into one long, horizontal sequence that required constant scrolling back and forth. Storylane's more concise organization makes me much more excited to build out product demos” - A customer when asked about how Storylane compared to Navattic
Upon initial inspection, Storylane is (slightly) more expensive per plan than Navattic. A closer look, however, reveals that we offer several features in our lower tier plans. To name a few:
If you really think about it, this probably translates to better bang for your buck. But what about the whole “unlimited seats” deal? Sounds great, sure — but how sustainable is it really? As your organization (and demo requirements) start to scale, it’s unrealistic to expect the same support for a 5 seat plan as a 200 seat plan. Another reason why Storylane’s value-based pricing makes more sense for the long run.
Edit: Recently, Navattic has also started capping their seats per plan. Goes to show that as a commercial model, the whole unlimited seats approach probably didn't work out as intended.
And there you have it! Both Navattic and Storylane are leading demo automation softwares — but when you break it down, it’s hard to argue against the latter. Storylane's objectively in the clear for most buying considerations: functionality, versatility, ease-of-use, and commercials.
It may not feel like it (especially to us), but demo automation has only been around for a handful of years. As a category, we’re still in nascent stages. Unlike with established verticals such as CRMs or project management tools, it’s on younger companies like ours to innovate and push the envelope in these “early days” of demo automation.
Nitty-gritty comparisons aside, it’s worth sharing that Storylane has been at the forefront of this since day one. With category-first initiatives like self-serve PLG, Demo Hub, and more recently, Lily AI — innovation continues to be at the heart of our business. If you decide to go with Storylane, we hope the question “what's next?” excites you as much as it excites us!
From day one, our mission has been to simplify B2B buying and selling. When we launched in 2021, we recognized that product demos – a key touchpoint in most customer journeys – generated undue friction for buyers and sellers alike. From both a creation and discovery stand point, demos fell flat in terms of ease-of-use, accessibility, and scalability. This gap is exactly what we set out to close with Storylane.
Storylane's growth has always been marked by industry-first innovations. We began by introducing interactive demos in 2022. The goal was to help teams build quick and simple demos for a range of marketing and sales use-cases. Soon enough, this put us on the map as the fastest, easiest-to-use demo automation tool in the market.
Next, in 2023, we became the first self-serve platform in our category. Here, our goal was to democratize access to demo automation for marketing, sales, and presales teams of all sizes. Today, we work with over 3000 companies ranging from early-stage startups to industry giants such as Microsoft, Gong, and Cognism.
Last year, in 2024, we recognized that one demo wasn’t going to cut it. After all, B2B purchase decisions involve multiple buyer personas, use-cases, and product lines. In such cases, it only makes sense to share multiple, context-specific demos with prospects.
After much anticipation, we launched Demo Hub; another category-first innovation designed to share multiple demos as galleries or playlists.
We’ve done well to get to where we are today — but we know there’s still a ton of scope to simplify B2B buying and selling for everyone involved. We realize that:
And so, in our attempt to address these all-too-common gaps in the buying experience, we're thrilled to announce Storylane’s boldest innovation yet: Lily, your demo automation agent.
Lily is a demo automation agent built for both buyers and sellers. She represents a fundamental shift in how we’ll be thinking about demo creation and discovery going forward, bringing in an agentic approach to Storylane’s existing line of demo automation products.
1. Create with AI: Simply capture your product with Storylane's browser extension and leave the rest to us. Lily will create and optimize demos in a single click — complete with product-specific guides, annotations, and voiceovers.
2. AI Avatars: Pick from dozens of avatars — or make one of yourself. Share a script and generate studio-quality presenter videos in seconds. No camera, edits, or redos needed.
3. AI Voiceovers: Speak your audience’s language — literally. Generate studio-quality voiceovers in over 60 diverse voices and 25 languages.
4. AI HTML Editor: Customize demos on the fly to meet your prospect's unique needs. Edit text, images, and graphs with just simple, code-free prompts — Lily does the rest.
All this? Just the beginning.
In March, Lily will evolve to support autonomous, contextual demo discovery for buyers. Imagine prospects exploring your product, right on your website, through intelligent conversations with Lily — getting exactly the information they need, when they need it — without any of the friction associated with traditional sales touchpoints.
In short, Lily will be a 24/7 tour guide — equipped with as much product knowledge as your best sales rep — to support buyers with contextual, self-serve product discovery.
As we launch Lily, we're more committed than ever to our founding mission: eliminating friction in B2B buying and selling. We believe agentic demo automation represents the next frontier in B2B sales enablement, moving beyond static product demos to intelligent product experiences.
To our customers who've been part of this journey – thank you. Your feedback and trust have been instrumental in shaping not just Storylane, but the future of demo automation. And to those considering how to make their demo experience more effective and engaging – welcome to the era of agentic demo automation.
The future of product demonstrations is here, and we couldn't be more excited to help you tell your product's story in ways never before possible.
This time last year, we spoke about product-market fit and our journey to democratize demo automation. 2024 was about building upon that vision and momentum – and wow, what a ride it's been!
Over the past 12 months, we grew our revenue by 2.5x, expanded to over 16k teams, shipped a new feature every four days (yes, you read that right), and hosted our very own awards show. But let's back up a bit and explore how it all unfolded.
From day one, our goal has been to eliminate friction for software buyers and sellers with accessible demo automation products. In 2024, we doubled down on this commitment with over a hundred (100!) product releases, both big and small. Here are some of our favorites:
On the PLG front, we implemented convert CTA buttons, an advanced demo editing toolkit (blur, crop, screen layout, etc), as well as deeper analytics and lead attribution functionality, among others. All in all, the tremendous efforts from our product and engineering teams translated into serious business growth.
In our previous review, we were thrilled about tripling our growth and establishing Storylane as a leader in the demo automation space. Looking back at 2024, we're humbled and so, so excited to see this momentum continue.
Each one of our customers validates our vision and pushes us to innovate further. This year, we're particularly proud to welcome industry giants such as Microsoft, Pearson, Nasdaq and Silicon Valley Bank to our growing list of enterprise customers. Needless to say, we feel the love ❤️
Go-to-market was all kinds of fun in 2024. There’s just way too much to cover, but here are a few highlights that helped us stand out in an increasingly competitive demo automation category.
A few more initiatives that helped us make a lot of noise: Demo Dundies (our spin on conventional webinars, themed around The Office’s Dundies), product marketer affirmation cards (a deck of painfully relatable affirmations for our friends in product marketing), and Demo Kitchen (our recipe book inspired series of customer case studies).
As our team continues to grow, we've maintained the supportive, high-performing culture that's been our foundation for four years. This year, we welcomed our first People Success hire and celebrated team achievements with offsites in Bengaluru and Bali.
If you thought 2024 was exciting, wait till you see what we've got in store for 2025! We're all set to take demo automation into sci-fi territory with first-of-its-kind AI functionality. We can’t spill all the beans just yet but picture this: an AI demo agent to polish, scale and show you personalized demos.
To our team, customers, and the entire Storylane community - thank you for being part of this journey. We're just getting started, and we couldn't be more excited about what's ahead. Here's to another year of pushing boundaries and helping you create amazing demos!
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