B2B SaaS Marketing: Why We Keep Shooting Ourselves in the Foot
Albert Einstein once said: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” If that’s true, then most SaaS marketers (myself included at times) are completely insane.
We keep running campaigns with the same tired formulas, measuring the wrong things, buying another shiny tool, and then sitting in quarterly reviews pretending to be surprised when the CEO asks:
“That’s nice, but… where are the customers?”
It’s not that we don’t work hard. We’re busy. Too busy. But often it feels like sprinting on a treadmill: a lot of sweat, zero forward movement.
That’s because SaaS marketing has a few recurring blind spots. The good news? Once you see them, you can avoid them.
Here are the nine I see most often. And what the rare, smarter marketers do instead.
Table of content:
1. Features Are Our Comfort Blanket
2. Vanity Metrics: The Candy Diet
3. Copying HubSpot Is Like Wearing Your Dad’s Suit
4. Content Nobody Reads = Digital Landfill
5. The Tool Addiction
6. Personas Made of PowerPoint Slides
7. Quarter-to-Quarter Thinking = Marketing Tinder
8. Generic Messaging: The “Seamless, Scalable, Intuitive” Graveyard
9. Reporting That’s All Numbers, No Story
The Bottom Line
1. Features Are Our Comfort Blanket
Marketers love features. They’re safe. Easy. Tangible.
“AI-powered dashboards.”
“Real-time collaboration.”
“Seamless integrations.”
But customers don’t buy features. I think they buy outcomes.
Slack didn’t sell “channels” when it blew up. It sold “the end of endless email chains.” That’s the outcome.
Juicero, on the other hand, famously sold a $400 WiFi juice press that squeezed packets you could squeeze by hand. A “feature” that solved nothing. They snatched millions from investors, but no one seemed to care.
Antidote: Theodore Levitt once nailed it: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.” Stop selling the drill. Sell the hole.
2. Vanity Metrics: The Candy Diet
Clicks, likes, impressions. They feel good. Like eating Skittles for breakfast.
But if your team is celebrating “engagement up 25%” while churn is quietly creeping higher, you’re not fueling growth — you’re giving the company diabetes.
Clubhouse is the cautionary tale. Massive early downloads, insane engagement metrics. But retention? Nonexistent. The sugar high wore off, and it collapsed.
Antidote: Smart marketers measure boring-but-critical things: churn reduction, sales cycle length, expansion revenue.
3. Copying HubSpot Is Like Wearing Your Dad’s Suit
Too many startups copy HubSpot’s playbook: webinars, ebooks, nurture flows.
The problem? HubSpot has a marketing army and a budget bigger than your ARR.
Copying them is like showing up to prom in your dad’s oversized suit. Yes, technically it’s “formal.” But you look ridiculous.
Notion took another route. It leaned on community and user-made templates to spread the product. People didn’t hear about Notion through a funnel. They heard about it from friends, from shared templates, from communities where it just worked. That approach fit their size and gave them momentum.
Antidote: Borrow ideas. But tailor them! Better a $100 jacket that fits than Armani three sizes too big.
4. Content Nobody Reads = Digital Landfill
eBooks, whitepapers, case studies — polished, gated, and forgotten.
That’s the digital landfill of SaaS: a pile of unloved PDFs.
Remember Quibi? They spent $1.75 billion to flood the world with “premium content.” Slick, high-budget, and utterly ignored because nobody wanted to watch 10-minute Hollywood clips on their phones. A content graveyard on steroids.
Contrast that with Drift. They didn’t just create content; they created a movement — “conversational marketing.” Suddenly, everyone was talking about them.
Antidote: Treat content like Netflix treats a new season drop. Tease it. Amplify it. Make it binge-worthy, not buried.
5. The Tool Addiction
There’s always a new toy. GA4 or an AI writer that promises to “do your job for you.”
And every time, we think: “This will fix everything!”
It never does. Tools multiply what you already have. If your strategy sucks, tools help you suck faster.
WeWork is the extreme version of this mindset. They threw millions into glossy tech platforms and flashy apps to mask what was essentially… a glorified office rental company. You can’t tool your way out of a broken model.
Antidote: Strategy first. Tools second. Always.
6. Personas Made of PowerPoint Slides
Marketers worship personas. But most are fake. Look at this: “Marketing Mary, 35, drinks lattes, hates inefficiency.”
Ask: “When’s the last time you talked to a real customer?” Cue silence.
Juicero failed here too. Nobody asked: “Do people actually want this?” They assumed, designed personas, and burned investor cash.
Airbnb avoided this trap. Their brand line “Belong anywhere” came from listening deeply to actual guest stories, not inventing “Traveler Tom” in a slide deck.
Antidote: Two to three real interviews a month. ICPs should be transcripts, not stock photos.
7. Quarter-to-Quarter Thinking = Marketing Tinder
SaaS marketers often think like speed daters: short-term flings, performance ads, quick leads.
But SaaS growth compounds. Brand is compound interest. Community is compound interest.
HubSpot (the good lesson here) invested for years in the “Inbound Marketing” movement. It looked slow. But it became their moat.
And Quibi is the opposite. They tried to buy love overnight with $1.75B in ads and celebrity partnerships. Two quarters later, they were gone.
Antidote: Balance the funnel. Invest in tomorrow, not just this quarter’s marketing qualified leads.
8. Generic Messaging: The “Seamless, Scalable, Intuitive” Graveyard
Visit any SaaS website and you’ll find the same empty words: scalable, seamless, intuitive.
It’s like walking into a bar where every guy introduces himself with: “Hey, I’m nice.” Nobody believes it.
Slack, in contrast, said: “Be less busy.” Three words. Human. Clear. Distinct. Nobody else could’ve owned it.
WeWork, on the other hand, called themselves a “tech company” and filled decks with visionary buzzwords. It didn’t fool anyone for long.
Antidote: Write things competitors couldn’t say without looking absurd. Distinctiveness > adjectives.
9. Reporting That’s All Numbers, No Story
Marketers love dashboards. Fancy ones. But metrics ≠ meaning.
CEOs don´t want 30 graphs. They want something like this: “Traffic dropped 12% because these three blogs lost rankings. Fix: rewrite and republish.”
Everything else is decoration.
Antidote: Every report must answer: So what?
The Bottom Line
Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
- Bad marketers talk about software. Good marketers talk about people.
- Bad marketers chase numbers. Good marketers chase meaning.
- Bad marketers copy. Good marketers translate.
In my opinion, SaaS marketing isn’t about stuffing leads into funnels. I believe it’s about making someone’s day easier and having the guts to cut through the noise with clarity, humor, and humanity.
Because nobody wakes up excited to “buy SaaS.” They wake up hoping they can get through Monday without another fire drill, avoid an angry email from their boss, and have enough energy left to read bedtime stories to their kids.
That’s what we’re really selling. And the marketers who know all of this? They’re the ones who win.
