SaaS marketing has to be the ‘sassiest’ marketing out there to crack. Because imagine asking your clients to pay you monthly for something they can’t even touch! But no matter how difficult it is, there are some brands that still deliver some of the best SaaS marketing campaigns out there.
You must have seen multiple fun and impactful marketing campaigns but how many of those were from SaaS brands? I am guessing none that you could recollect. It’s not your fault though, SaaS marketing is a little trickier and of course way tougher to make ‘fun.’
Mostly SaaS marketing is associated with SEO content and paid ads, but that is just the tip of the iceberg.
So today, I am going to give you a little shock, some entertainment, a lot of inspiration from and alot more than just the tip of the iceberg with the top SaaS marketing examples.
Best SaaS marketing campaigns that will inspire, shock, and make you giggle all at once!
Some SaaS businesses truly nailed it when it came to creating impactful marketing campaigns and we are going to discuss who those brands are.
So, brace yourself, because we are going to discuss business feuds, crazy collaborations, and unimaginable creativity!
Cred – Great for the good
Cred, an Indian fintech brand worth USD 2.2 B, that offers credit card management services, rewards and other aspects related to it. One of the SaaS marketing campaigns from Cred, known as Great for the good, went viral in the market and created a frenzy.
Through that one campaign they saw 700% more downloads of the Cred app. Everyone on the internet went crazy on the internet and it earned praise even from several brands.
But what was so special about that campaign? Well, the campaign featured one of the cricket legends of the world, Rahul Dravid, behaving extremely and getting angry.
It sounds very ordinary, but if you are a cricket fan, you would know that Rahul Dravid is one of the calmest players out there and no one, I repeat, no one, has ever seen him lose his calm.
An advertisement, featuring him in a different light other than his natural behavior is what made the nation go gaga over it. From SEO copywriting to visual curation, everything in this campaign was top-tier!
Freshworks – #Failsforce
If there was a SaaS marketing campaign, that got a brand multiple new customers, but also hurt a competitor brand, and yet earned support of multiple people, then it would be Freshworks’ Failsforce campaign.
Salesforce is a CRM provider which I am certain you are aware about. It is kind of a big name in the CRM industry and back then (more than half a decade ago) it was one of the very few good solutions in the market that everyone depended upon.
But, since the CRM market was an oligopolistic market back then, Salesforce was apparently taking advantage of it. Hey, don’t come at me, I am not saying that, several small and medium business owners felt that. They were not content with the high end pricing of the solution, and were expressing their resentment.
Well, Freshworks saw this as an opportunity, and they decided to support these small and medium businesses owners.
But how they did it is the fun part!
Freshworks, is a business automation company, founded in Chennai- India, in 2010 with the vision of helping businesses with easily accessible and usable tools. But that is not what Salesforce was doing and thus Freshworks decided to give a voice to the small business owners.
“We also wanted to let Salesforce know what SMBs thought. We wanted to come to San Francisco, to the glinting Salesforce Tower, and give a voice to the customer.”
Freshworks
They did exactly what they said! They went straight to San Francisco, in front of the Salesforce tower, and they had a huge blimp flying with ‘#Failsforce’ on one side, and ‘Hit Fresh’ on the other.
I was 17 back then, and when I say my mind was blown away I truly mean it! I am sure even Salesforece did not see it coming and I am sure deep down they must have appreciated this insane marketing campaign.
Along with the blimp, Freshworks was also going live on Facebook with the users who switched from Salesforce to Freshsales CRM and were sharing their experience.
This one SaaS marketing campaign war is going down in history books for sure! Until then, Freshworks was not even in the same league as Salesforce because salesforce has hit USD 10 B mark, while Freshworks only hit USD 100 M mark. But all of a sudden, Salesforce had a new rival.
MailChimp – Did you mean MailChimp?
Imagine if your name is John and I pronounced it as Rohn, and not once but on multiple occasions.
What would that feel like?
I’d leave that on you to answer, but however you felt, MailChimp felt 10X of it because even after providing a solid email marketing solution in the market, they lacked brand awareness and their brand name was often mispronounced.
However, they turned it into their favor. They used these mispronounced names and made 9 different projects that rhymed with ‘MailChimp.’
They made full fledged short films, fun music, even named some snacks, and entered the fashion industry too with the name ‘nailchamp.’
But the kind of buzz it created for them after that, made it all worth it! As per the data they earned 988M media impressions and 67M organic searches. There was a lot more, but I guess this was more than enough for a SaaS brand.
But either way, they killed it with this SaaS marketing campaign and proved that they are not just one of the SEO examples to learn from but also creative marketing examples to take inspiration from.
Monday.com – What is monday.com?
Who said billboards are not relevant anymore? Because a modern day SaaS brand that provides intangible and digital products used the old school marketing method of billboards and display boards and took brand awareness to a whole new level.
In 2019, monday.com, a project management tool, invested it all in making their brand what they are today. They started a drive to market their brand both online and offline. Online they ran YouTube ads, most of which were not skippable and offline they had billboards everywhere, including the subways in New York.
They were there in everyone’s face and honestly it did annoy people a bit but it got them talking about them too. As they say, no publicity is bad publicity. They spent 95% of their company’s revenue on marketing and that worked!
It might have irked a few people but hey, they got you talking about them because their frequency of showing up in your daily life was insane. You would see their ads literally everywhere, and that truly worked in their favor especially from the perspective of a B2B brand.
In the end, who cares if they annoyed a few people, they got found by their ideal customers and that was their goal.
Grammarly – #HelpingYouConnect
Grammarly is one of the content writing tools that is also a household name now. Every content creator, content team, marketing team, even your bosses are now using Grammarly.
And why not?
The tool is so handy, easy to use, and hey, it is very beneficial!
But other than the tool, what else Grammarly is setting examples of is building the best SaaS marketing campaigns. Their campaigns always have a story to tell and these stories appeal to the audience at an emotional level.
Moreover, each one of these campaigns are a fun watch, and they leave you wanting to try the tool. One such campaign is #HelpingYouConnect – Closing the distance. Through which they spread the message that you can connect with your teammates and even your managers without hesitation using the right grammar and tone in the texts that you write to them.
I think that was one brilliant campaign to get everyone to use Grammarly at the workplace too. Their target users not only felt connected to the campaign but they could also see how they can utilize the tool to excel in their work lives.
Adobe – #AdobeCreateForward
Adobe did not become the market leader in the creative industry just like that. They are loved by everyone for a lot more than just their tools, like creative campaigns.
One such campaign of theirs is #AdobeCreateForward. In this campaign, they asked the users to take inspiration from an artist, create a piece and tag them to build a piece to create an art by taking inspiration from someone else until the chain closes at the first creator.
They leveraged instagram for the campaign and through this they built an entire community of ‘Adobe Artists.’
[Source – Instagram #AdobeCreateForward].
It got them a lot more sign ups, recognition in the community, and of course they were able to brand themselves as an essential suite of tools for creators. Most of all, all the engagement generated was organic so that earned them some brownie points as well.
From what I see this was one of the best SaaS marketing tactics where there was everything to gain and nothing to lose.
Zoom x Oracle Red Bull Racing
Formula 1 racing was a new found favorite sport of the audience in the early 2020s and so was Zoom! Zoom is a video conferencing company that made tables turn and kept the work going for multiple businesses during the Covid-19 days
Zoom was one of the platforms that established the foundation of remote working and made it seem possible by branding themselves and being found using multiple types of SEO.
But, they wanted a lot more than that. They wanted to put themselves on the world map not just as a video conferencing app but also wanted to be known for their other features.
What better way of doing so by collaborating with a champion sports team?
When it came to SaaS marketing campaigns, they understood the assignment and they went all in. They partnered with the Oracle Red Bull Racing team to showcase their new products like chat and Zoom Events and they got quite a lot of traction through the campaign.
Because who would have thought that Zoom and Formula 1 racing could vibe together.
Typeform – Locked In & Meaningful
Typeform is one of the platforms that helps you create surveys and feedback forms to get an insight into your customers or how your brand is performing. Their solution is unique in the sense that the ‘next question’ posed to the user is based on their answer to the last question.
But is it not just their solution which is unique, it is their SaaS marketing campaigns too. They created a creative movie Locked In, in 2019, to showcase how your decisions determine what happens next – which was one of the most fascinating marketing campaigns that I have seen on the market.
[Source – Typeform Youtube]
They did not have to rub their product in your face, yet they conveyed the message and promoted their promotion. And they did it again in 2022 with another one of their campaigns called Meaningful.
In this campaign they sat with the entrepreneurs and discussed the struggles, the ups and downs,and the decision making aspects of building a business.
Again, a brilliant SaaS marketing example where they promoted the product without actually promoting it.
Dropbox – For all things worth saving
Emotions are one thing in marketing that gets you the best results in every industry. Dropbox understood that and leveraged that to humanize their brand.
Who would have associated Dropbox, a cloud storage platform, to be in any way associated with the memories? Dropbox was infamously famous for being a very ‘business oriented’ platform and this one campaign changed it all. The ‘For all things worth saving’ campaign.
It showcased that it is not just for businesses and integrating with other platforms, it is for you to store your memories as well. The SaaS campaign management was top-tier and it was evident from the way it appealed to the audience.
[Source – Dropbox Youtube]
Not gonna lie, it was kind of surprising to have an emotionally hitting campaign coming from a SaaS brand. It was even more surprising to see how a brand leveraged the benefits of SEO, which is a very technical way of marketing and side-by-side, also understood the importance of human emotions.
Shopify – Let’s make you a business
In 2019, Shopify decided to give wings to many entrepreneurs who did not know where to get started when it came to their business. They launched a marketing campaign called – Let’s make you a business which has a series of videos targeting small businesses, women entrepreneurs, and also inviting entrepreneurs of all ages.
Along with that, they also ran several print and TV advertisements and they even leveraged the vacant storefronts to highlight that every business can be on Shopify.
They used billboards and photo walls to showcase the journey of building a business on Shopify. Their idea was to be able to be found by everyone. They wanted their name to be the first one on an entrepreneurs’ mind the moment he plans to launch a business and clearly, they made it happen.
SurveyMokey – Ask the audience
SurveyMoneky is a SaaS company that helps you create surveys and questionnaires for your users to know their opinion about what they want.
The brand has built several fun SaaS marketing campaigns around it, but the one that instantly hit the spot for many businesses was – Ask the audience. What was special about this one was that it hit the pain spot of the businesses.
The campaign was about how you can revive your lost business by asking what your users want. In this advertisement they have showcased how a movie hall that was not getting enough visitors, revived their business by asking the movie junkies about what they want to watch.
This campaign was smart in the sense that it hit a pain point without promoting their product in a salesy manner.
Airtable – This is how
In 2022, Airtable, a project management platform, launched a national campaign for the first time with the mission to showcase how their tool can be used in real-life situations. The campaign got a whooping 1.2 million views which clearly can be considered as success in the SaaS marketing campaign world.
The campaign called This is how, brought the vision of Airtable to life through billboards, and a YouTube video series depicting the flexibility of Airtable in various environments.
FYI, this was also the campaign that made us aka ZeroAdo leverage the tool for our various project pipelines. So that was definitely one of the winning SaaS marketing examples to learn from!
Apple – Mac vs PC
I have kept a nostalgic one in my pocket too for you to savor.
Apple’s Mac vs PC campaign was insanely interactive, funny, and impactful. IN this campaign, Apple had two actors cast as PC and Mac. They made a total of 66 such small video advertisements where the artist representing PC was old and uptight while the one representing Mac was young and trendy.
The campaign was so cool, it established Mac as what we see today!
Although this campaign was not actively promoted from the SaaS POV, yet it had several nuances within these series where they pointed out how the Mac’s operating system is better than PC.
For instance, in one of these advertisements, the old uptight PC gets hanged and needs to be restarted every now and then while the young guy was running and talking smoothly throughout.
This was one of the most brilliant SaaS marketing campaigns in 2011 and the best part about it was that it was extremely hilarious. But Microsoft Windows based PCs did lose a lot of their customers to Apple and that is exactly what Apple intended to do.
ClickUp – Everything that monday.com did, but better!
If you know about ClickUp, then I am not surprised, but if you do not, you are about to find out. ClickUp is another one of the project management brands in the market that is making headlines for their SaaS marketing campaigns.
Well, in short they are doing things a lot like monday.com did back in the day because just like them they are also everywhere! YouTube ads, billboards, Google Search, they are everywhere you go – and they are doing everything possible in marketing including SaaS content writing, SEO, paid marketing, social media and what not!
What’s different about them is that they are not just promoting themselves but they are also dethroning their competitors and telling you why you should not go for them in a fun manner.
For instance, checkout one of their campaign videos where they “fire Jira,” another project management softwares. They bluntly shared all the things that are apparently wrong with jeera and why people need to opt for ClickUp instead.
I mean how much more creative can it get?
ClickUp is an example of an ongoing SaaS marketing campaign that is making it big in the market. I am sure they are going to do a lot more than this and we will see them take over the market soon enough!
SaaS market examples to remember for the ages and to learn from
All the campaigns we read about right now were not individual campaigns. A lot of work went behind all of these and many marketing channels were leveraged together to make it work,
Every brand has put their best foot forward to make their mark and as we see it today, they have done that! If you want to make that kind of impact too, then get started with your SaaS marketing and take the first step towards it with SaaS content marketing and SEO, one of the most sustainable growth channels.
If you do not know how to get rolling with it, then connect with the experts at ZeroAdo, we help you make your business a brand with our SEO and integrated marketing services.
