SaaS marketing frequently interacts with several marketing branches at once, so having a SaaS marketing certification can help you juggle SEO, inbound marketing, cold emailing, content creation, copywriting, social media, video marketing and other tasks that might be challenging for someone new to this field.
To succeed as a SaaS marketer, you must be able to comprehend each branch’s inner workings and pick up fresh insights from thought leaders in your specialized field. This is where marketing training courses and certification programs naturally integrate into your company’s business plan.
What Is SaaS Marketing?
A particular type of marketing called SaaS marketing aids in promoting and raising awareness of software as a service product. SaaS marketing aids in introducing a product to the market, helps in positioning a product and aids in raising awareness of a SaaS company. To satisfy the unique requirements of client business, companies can additionally modify their SaaS application and updates.
“SaaS companies often offer their products using on-demand cloud apps with access for their clients.”
SaaS businesses are constantly searching for new strategies to boost memberships and advertise upgrades since they often base their subscription fees on how much data a consumer consumes or how many people a company adds to its plan. SaaS marketing aims to increase brand recognition among current consumers and assure market exposure to attract new clients.
SaaS Marketing vs. Other Types of Marketing
SaaS marketing is distinct from traditional forms of marketing since it focuses on intangible and frequently sophisticated items. Consumers often like goods that they can simply comprehend and physically inspect before making a purchase decision.
“Given the differences between SaaS and traditional goods, SaaS marketers must keep certain things in mind when they create their marketing plan.”
Audience
Although SaaS providers may target certain end users with their products, their primary market is businesses, particularly the decision-makers who are unlikely to use the software themselves. The goal is to convince executives that the product can provide their business with a competitive edge.
Longer Customer Journey
A client’s route from the moment they learn about a product to the moment they decide to buy it is known as their customer journey. With SaaS, you may anticipate a lengthier customer lifecycle because it can entail more presentations to inform your potential consumer about the service and more convincing to persuade them of the benefits of an intangible product.
Pricing
SaaS is well suited for tiered pricing, which entails providing many versions of the same product at various price points. The cost of an iteration increases with how many features are included, giving a SaaS provider a competitive advantage. One of the most common is the freemium model, in which you can offer some of your basic features for free and charge for a premium or advanced versions.
Certification Options in SaaS Marketing
There are tools to guide you in the proper direction, whether you’re a startup owner, a marketer who’s new to developing SaaS content, or you simply have an excellent concept for a SaaS firm. More and more businesses are providing training on their own SaaS products and the software industry as a whole as it expands.
This indicates several options for you to get knowledgeable about not only SaaS marketing but also the software industry. There are many ways to become a SaaS certified marketer, partly because instructional resources—which you will discover are a mainstay of SaaS marketing and are sometimes free—are available in abundance.
Many SaaS firms also provide entry-level training courses to assist customers in comprehending the challenges their product addresses because digital goods are often complex and tailored to the pain points they address.
Like with any talent, numerous professionals in digital marketing can guide you as you develop a valuable content strategy. Even if you only sometimes follow what others do or what they say doesn’t always apply to your product, seeing how various businesses construct their strategies may be beneficial.
Below, you can find some of the most recommended SaaS marketing certifications that will give you the knowledge and skills to market your product better and communicate its value to your target audience.
1. Fundamentals of Digital Marketing by Google
And the training offered by Google is the first step you must take to enter the world of digital marketing. This is one of the superb courses for novices who wish to concentrate on digital marketing because Google’s experience supports it.
Google’s Fundamentals of Digital Marketing, which has 26 modules and offers certification at the end of the course, delivers on what it promises: real-world examples, practical advice and exercises, and clear definitions to keep your head clear as you first begin to comprehend the fundamentals of digital marketing that will benefit your business or career.
These are the key learnings most valuable to prospective SaaS marketers from this course:
- Knowledge of SEO,
- Perform keyword planning activities,
- Understand how to make a search-friendly website,
- Set social media objectives,
- Learn various advertising types (e.g., social media ads and search ads),
- Track your success with analytics and SaaS metrics.
2. Conversion Copywriting 101 by Copyhackers
Writing compelling copy is crucial for B2B SaaS businesses. You must use methods other than conventional marketing and copywriting to draw in new clients or keep existing ones. You may learn how to write copy that will increase your conversion rates by taking Copyhackers’ Conversion Copywriting 101 course.
You will master the fundamentals of high-converting text in this course, which you can use in any B2B SaaS digital marketing subcategory, including email marketing or social media strategy. With this certification, you’ll be able to comprehend, recognize, and enhance your website’s or advertisements’ copy, as well as customize the ideal copy for your marketing strategies to answer the demands and issues of your buyer personas.
Some of the most valuable learnings in this curriculum are:
- Understand conversion copywriting and how it differs from conventional copywriting,
- Learn writing copy for different awareness stages in your sales process,
- Learn how to build web copy that interests your customers,
- Learn the difference between highly conversional and average headlines,
- Understand the power of testimonials and ways to use them as social proof.
3. Blogging for Business by Ahrefs
Ahref’s Blogging for Business course is excellent for learning to produce a deliberate and SEO-friendly blog post for businesses since it offers a step-by-step manual for generating converting articles. This course can help you get your over 100K monthly views to your blog content and transform thousands of your fans into paying clients. It takes around 5 hours to complete all 11 modules and 40 lessons in Blogging for Business.
There are still a lot of helpful marketing resources and knowledge that can be used for your business, such as keyword research, discovering content ideas, developing a content calendar, etc., even though certain sections of the course are specially designed for individuals who utilize Ahrefs’ products.
These are the areas you can expect to cover in this course:
- Learn how to scale your SaaS SEO writing,
- Understand ways to increase web traffic,
- Learn how to handle SERPs better,
- Master the techniques to accelerate the customer acquisition process with content.
4. Social Media Marketing Certification by HubSpot Academy
Social media has a significant impact on every aspect of our life. In a single day, we communicate with many individuals, upload our favorite books, and send greetings to our loved ones. It is inevitable that B2B companies, specifically your SaaS marketing team, will also be involved in this relationship.
The goal of HubSpot’s Social Media Marketing Certification course is to teach you the best techniques for dominating your social media marketing campaigns, attracting potential clients, engaging current clients on a new level, evaluating your SaaS marketing strategy, and making the necessary adjustments to highlight your B2B SaaS company’s distinctive features and compelling narrative.
From this marketing certification program, you can expect to:
- Learn how to develop an effective social media strategy that is aligned with your SEO strategy,
- Understand ways to build an inbound strategy that can engage and convert your customers on social media platforms,
- Learn how to leverage SaaS social media strategies for your business goals.
5. Conversion Rate Optimization Course by Backlinko
A strong SaaS digital marketing strategy encompasses a variety of departments, including social media, copywriting, advertising, blogging, and conversions. The Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) course from Backlinko is a comprehensive manual that will take you from the basics of CRO to the more sophisticated advice and exercises.
It appeals to a larger audience since it provides a beautiful balance of material for beginners and a more sophisticated approach. There are six modules in the course, plus an additional chapter on advanced approaches. It seeks to instruct you on how to raise revenue and customer retention by optimizing conversion rates.
With Backlinko’s certification program, you will have a better understanding of:
- Basics of CRO,
- Ways to perform A/B testing,
- Design optimizations techniques that increase conversions,
- How to create high-converting landing pages for SaaS companies,
- CRO for e-commerce brands,
- Ways to test and optimize CTAs that work with your customers.
6. Inbound Marketing Certification by HubSpot
By highlighting the advantages of your SaaS product and appealing to the ideal client profiles you have carefully curated for your SaaS firm, SaaS marketing strives to establish long-term connections with customers.
The apex of B2B marketing is inbound marketing, which collects every small nuance to increase brand recognition, produce leads, and lower churn rate. You may learn the techniques to draw in new clients from HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Certification course, from determining the perfect client profile to the actual point of encounter.
These are the key learnings from this recommended SaaS platform:
- Learn how to build lasting relationships with your B2B SaaS customers,
- Understand how to attract the ideal customers,
- Learn all about buyer intent and ways to deliver an exquisite personalized experience,
- Techniques to build inbound sales strategies for SaaS firms.
7. B2B Sales for Startups by Udemy
B2B Sales for Startups on Udemy, which has received high ratings from over 5,000 users, is the best option for anyone who wants to get a taste of B2B SaaS marketing using the “Sales Valley” technique. The methodology aimed at sales manages that is featured in this online course refers to the tactics and methods employed by Silicon Valley start-ups to improve results for sales teams and build commercial relationships early in their development.
This course intends to assist you in developing commercial partnerships and lead nurturing, focusing on startups. It contains helpful knowledge and strategies if you wish to comprehend the sales cycle for tech companies and get a peek at the inner workings of various deal structures.
You can also expect to learn about:
- Ways to manage a successful meeting,
- Techniques to successfully close deals,
- All about cold emailing that works,
- How to handle objections to your solution and use them in your favor.
8. ProductLed Accelerator
The initiative is concentrated on developing goods that offer a compelling free course that tempts users to upgrade. Several of the largest SaaS firms in the world, including Dropbox, Slack, Grammarly, and many more, use what is known as the product-led growth strategy.
Since its introduction in 2020, this certification program has been taken by over 600 students, including CEOs, VPs of Products, and directors of Customer Success. Team members from Microsoft, HubSpot, Mixpanel, and Adobe have utilized the Accelerator to fine-tune their project management approach for launching new products or changing the focus of already-existing, successful products from sales-led to product-led.
You may unite your team during these four weeks, promote communication among them, and get everyone on the same page. By doing this, you can ensure that your whole company supports your product marketing strategy.
These are just some of the areas that this course covers:
- Learn best growth hacking practices that work for other SaaS businesses,
- Understand what user success means for your business and product,
- Learn the right product management model for your SaaS business and how to make a choice,
- Ways to optimize your monetization strategy.
9. Content Marketing Course by Grow and Convert
A content-focused SEO service called Grow and Convert has assisted SaaS startups, including Smartlook, Buddy Punch, and Leadfeeder, in expanding their operations.
The course includes pre-recorded films that show you how to apply the ideas you study. The creators, Benji Hyam and Devesh Khanal, also provide live monthly coaching calls where you can raise questions, get input on your content marketing strategy, and generate fresh ideas.
This program is perfect for a content marketing agency but also for SaaS companies that want to learn all about how to:
- Detect keywords that have the potential to drive qualified traffic,
- Write quality content that captures attention of their customers better than competition,
- Utilize various strategies to continuously drive traffic to your articles,
- Scaling content marketing tactics that work,
- Recommended ways for you as a content marketer to measure product conversion and optimize them for better results.
10. Growth Series by Reforge
A curriculum like this is not available online or even in MBA programs. The Growth Series provides decades of professional expertise in only six weeks by distilling the hard-won concepts, techniques, and insights from tech’s greatest executives. This curriculum teaches you how to address challenging growth issues and get results for your business. It relies on actual examples from category-defining organizations in areas including user psychology, habit building, and acquisition.
You will learn everything you will need to know about:
- Customer retention and engagement
- Acquisition
- Monetization
- Growth models
- User psychology
11. Growth Marketing by CXL
You will discover the strategies and procedures that top growth leaders have used to expand businesses like Lyft and InVision in this comprehensive certification program offered by CXL. You will be able to carry out campaigns for ongoing and exponential growth.
At the end of the course, you’ll be able to manage a growth team and process, execute a high-velocity testing program that produces results, and define OKRs and reasonable targets. Regardless of the sector you operate in, you can put procedures, tools, and strategies into place that help your organization develop.
These are just some of the areas this course covers:
- Learn how to perform quantitative and qualitative research,
- Understand industry-agnostic processes and frameworks for growth,
- Learn qualitative skills (e.g., behavioral psychology, copywriting, and user research),
- Learn technical skills.
12. T2D3 Masterclass
The objective of any B2B SaaS firm is T2D3 growth. Every investor wants to find the next “unicorn,” but doing so in five years is difficult and uncommon. That doesn’t happen by accident when your annual revenue triples for two years in a row, then doubles again three years later to reach $100M ARR. Each business that followed that curve experienced a similar path, which serves as the foundation for this book.
Growth may occur from a variety of different things. You can grow into a new market, serve an existing one better than your competitors, diversify your services and monetize them for a particular clientele, or enter a new industry. Some tactics will be largely reliant on a marketing and sales team, while others will be more dependent on product innovation. T2D3 will provide you with frameworks for choosing your personal best route.
This masterclass will provide you with knowledge about:
- Frameworks that prepare you for the market and deliver,
- Recommended practices for building and scaling your SaaS business,
- How to budget, hire, measure, and ways to become successful.
How Long Does It Take To Get a SaaS Certificate?
Depending on the course’s curriculum and how much you’re prepared to invest, SaaS certifications require varied periods. For instance, Udemy provides a free 2-hour SaaS course that advertises itself as being laid out in such a simple way that even without previous marketing knowledge, you can grasp the concepts easily. They acknowledge that they cannot cover everything in that period of time.
On the other end of the scale, some of the programs on our list are full, six-week training courses that give decades of career expertise while distilling the most valuable concepts, methods, and ideas from the most excellent experts in IT. However, there are choices in between, so you may locate anything that matches your spending limit, objectives, and time frame.
How Much Does It Cost to Get Certified in SaaS Marketing?
You may learn about the varied security features of SaaS solutions with the aid of certification and training. You can utilize all of the functions of the software without having to think about security concerns. Also, you may begin access management to guarantee that only authorized personnel can use specific applications.
A comprehensive online digital marketing program might cost anything from $25,000 to $45,000. The typical price for an online certification program that lasts a few weeks is from $3,000 to $5,000, depending on the course.
“For in-depth instruction in digital marketing, some highly well-liked online courses are priced up to $75,000 or $80,000.”
However, the nine certification programs that made our list are more price-friendly, and they will provide you with enough SaaS marketing knowledge that can help you introduce your product to your potential customer and create engaging content around it to make sure they become your loyal customers.
For instance, Blogging for Business by Ahrefs is entirely free and is more comprehensive than most of the expensive programs you might find online when searching for the best certification options in SaaS marketing.
You will also find that the certification programs by Hubspot are completely free of charge, and they even provide an option to add the certification badge to your LinkedIn account. Not bad, right?
Is Certification in SaaS Marketing Worth It?
A new digital education revolution is underway. Nonetheless, many opportunistic students must realize that these courses are not the key to success. You must work hard and be self-motivated, but you must also be aware that you might fail in getting your ideal career or fulfilling the other promises that have been made to you.
The worst-case scenario is that you invest hundreds of dollars in digital education only to discover that the skills you acquire are useless. The internet contains terrifying tales of innumerable hopeful students duped by phony gurus and experts. Digital marketing boot camps or courses are more frequent in online education as it gains popularity and corporate acceptance.
For those interested in acquiring such certification, as business owners looking to scale their SaaS company, there is no doubt about the value it holds. Choosing a certification program over articles, guides, and how-to videos ensures that you understand the process of creating valuable marketing strategies for your SaaS business instead of knowing a little bit of everything but feeling quite unsure about how it fits the bigger picture.
Learning about SaaS marketing will also help you employ the right marketing talent for your business. After all, if you don’t know the difference between an outstanding marketer and an average one, it will be challenging to stand out from your competition with moderate efforts.
Because internet marketing is their lifeline to clients, IT companies and startups always search for expertise. This is mainly because the majority of them are online-only companies. As a skilled digital marketer is equally as valuable as a project manager, graphic designer, or web developer, founders and CEOs are demanding to have one on their team.
These are the factors that you will need to keep in mind when choosing the certification program:
- The duration of the course
- The comprehensiveness of the program,
- Digital marketing skills covered,
- Reviews from other course users.
The Bottom Line
During the past few years, taking marketing courses and earning certifications has been essential to staying current with industry trends and learning new skills. You can not just raise brand recognition but also need to draw in the right consumers for your SaaS business, and this is why certifications and related courses can help you with.
These courses, which have been well-received by numerous users and reliable sources, simplify your work. To gain the whole picture, it is advised to take many courses from several fields, whether it is focused on improving your sales efforts or understanding better the approach to marketing in your niche.
Digital marketing classes may be a fantastic method to enhance your abilities and career and scale your SaaS firm. Just make sure you do your homework and get a certified education that satisfies your demands if you want to make the most of it.