The SaaS space has seen non stop excitement in recent years, and it’s not for nothing! According to Gartner, SaaS remains the largest portion of the public cloud services market, which reached $152 billion in end-user spending in 2021, which rose to $176 billion in 2022, and is forecasted to rise by a whopping $208 billion in 2023.

I mean—every industry is always talking about the need to get a bigger piece of the pie…and it’s looking like there’s a lot of pie to go around in the SaaS space! Of course, that shouldn’t stop growth teams from still trying to get bigger pieces of it.

Growth teams know all too well that in order to remain a top player in the market of available SaaS products, it’ll take more than having a super smart team with a wealth of tools and tech at their disposal. That’s because one-size does not fit all when it comes to marketing strategies, especially in this fast-paced environment in which approaches are growing more sophisticated across the board.

As such, SaaS companies, especially B2B SaaS companies, need to be ready and fully equipped to target customers that will prove to be the most profitable for them in 2023 and beyond. Yes yes, all customers are good customers, but wouldn’t you rather target those that demonstrate greater lifetime value, and will help your company achieve greater scalability and sustainable profitability? We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: profitability is not the opposite of growth!

Now before we dive into the marketing trends to expect for 2023, let’s take a look back at the trends that took over 2022. After all, much of what’s to come in 2023 is an extension of what we’ve seen in 2022.

Rundown of marketing trends that took over 2022

There have been a slew of marketing trends that made teams ramp up their strategies accordingly throughout 2022. For instance, video ads became a hot topic. A survey by Wyzowl about Video Marketing found 86% of businesses use video as a marketing tool and 93% of marketers feel video is an important part of their marketing strategy. That makes sense when you think about how platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, etc. are outperforming YouTube with bite-sized content.

Having a customer-centric mindset has also proven to be vital for optimizing retention rates. A study by Zendesk found 57% of the customers said the quality of service and experience they received from companies strongly influenced their loyalty—which is far more strategic than hit and runs.

And this leads me to the influence of AI and ML in marketing campaigns, which (spoiler alert) is continuing onto 2023 and beyond. As these technologies started making a bigger splash in the marketing realm through the course of 2022, as SaaS companies started utilizing AI and ML for running data-driven marketing campaigns, hyper-personalization, creating dynamic pricing, predictive analytics, detailed consumer profiles, and more. 

Now excuse me for the shameless plug here, but this uptick in the usage of AI and ML technologies was a large reason why our own products fared so well through the course of 2022. Our codeless platform allows marketing and growth teams to shift to LTV-based growth, by seamlessly integrating into their data, and predicting users' future value and intent. Those predictions can be used to support:

• Adjustment of bids according to predictions
• Optimized budget allocation, across channels and campaigns‍
• Acquisition of high-value users at scale by feeding ad networks with predictive signals
• Fueling and optimization of channel campaigns using predictive audiences

It has quickly become more important than ever for SaaS companies to prioritize growth efforts. Even McKinsey found that over 90% of software companies, especially SaaS companies fail if their growth rate is 20% or less. And this is where the trends for 2023 come in!

3 SaaS marketing trends to expect in 2023

According to research from Sumatosoft, predictions suggest that 85% of corporate apps will be SaaS-based by 2025, and the SaaS market value is predicted to grow in 2023 to $208.1 billion, 17.5% over the growth of the market in 2022. That’s a lot of action that’s set to unfold!

Here are some of the upcoming trends that'll help your team stay on top of the game.

Increased usage of tools for very specific uses

We all know that supermarkets contain a wide variety of products. Department stores also carry a wide variety of products. But at the end of the day, there’s no denying that bread from a bakery beats supermarket bread any day. Also, shoes from a shoemaker would beat the department store’s selection any day. The same applies with marketing solutions.

Sure, there are plenty of solutions out there that do a ton of things, serving as a one-stop-shop for all your marketing needs. And hey, they’re awesome because they are convenient in that sense. However, they are clearly more focused on adding more bells and whistles, instead of really fine tuning features to meet and exceed market demands. 

Take predictive UA, for example. For your intents and purposes, the best predictive UA solution will be one that was built from the ground-up for the needs of marketers. Not for the BI or R&D team. This is why you best steer clear from predictive UA solutions that were built for data scientists or for technical teams. Go for one that measures success with marketer-friendly prediction metrics, such as precision and recall.

These are the kinds of sensitivities I’m talking about. Because just as with any relationship, it’s the little things that really matter. As such, it is recommended that you double-check to ensure that any solution you’re considering can uniquely support your team and business model.

Greater ways to take on user retention

There’s typically a huge gap between customer expectations and fulfillment. Customers expect companies to provide a positive experience in order to stay loyal to them, while the companies themselves are trying to acquire new customers. So what now? 

Well, the best way for SaaS companies to increase user retention is by decreasing churn, while also targeting new users with high LTV. With that in mind, now would be a good time to map out a churn mitigation strategy, in a manner that would lift ROI exponentially by optimizing LTV predictions—all of which is made super approachable with the backing of AI technology. 

Speaking of churn, I really recommend you take a look at one of our recent posts, which dives into four misconceptions surrounding churn. You would be surprised over how much money you might be leaving on the table, due to these misconceptions!

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Plug and play is here to stay

Data driven SaaS companies are wholeheartedly embracing low-code, and no-code technologies to (quite obviously) make life easier for them so they can get initiatives up and running in no time. 

I mean sure, in a perfect world, internal solutions would be developed within minutes, and be up and running without any problems. But the world isn’t quite perfect. Software development for internal usage costs far too much in terms of resources, time, and of course finances. When factoring the preliminary project stage, application development stage, and post-implementation operating stage—the creation of internal use software isn’t always feasible. 

As far as growth marketers and user acquisition managers are concerned, plug and play solutions are a lifesaver, because they help speed up the process to get on the path to exponentially greater ROI, without the need to worry about any mishaps on the backend that would need immediate attention.

As a growth leader, it is crucial for you and your team to stay on top of the evolving SaaS marketing trends and reap maximum benefits from them for 2023 onwards. With increased focus on ways to work smarter while maintaining the proper balance between human and machine intelligence—you’ll continuously get a bigger piece of the pie for the long term!