A SaaS marketing strategy starts with what one buyer costs to reach

If you are building a SaaS marketing strategy, start with one number: what Google charges to put your product in front of somebody searching for it. We pulled those prices on 29 September 2026. A click on payroll software cost about $128. A click on crm software cost about $39.

That number tells you which channels you can afford at each stage of a buyer's search. This post shows the prices by category, what the same buyer costs earlier on, and how to turn that into a B2B SaaS marketing plan. We are OnlineGrowthMarketing, and we produce founder-led video for SaaS companies, so we will say plainly where that fits and where it does not.

What does a SaaS marketing strategy need to decide?

It needs to decide where in the buyer's search you show up, and whether you pay for that spot or earn it.

A buyer who types help desk software has already decided to buy something. They are comparing. A buyer who types a question about the problem your product solves has not decided anything yet. Both people can end up as your customer. They cost very different amounts to reach, and they need different channels.

Most guides on this topic list a dozen channels and suggest picking a few. That is fair advice with nothing to choose by. The price of a click is the thing to choose by, because it tells you what the market thinks each stage of the search is worth.

What does it cost to reach a software buyer on Google?

It depends heavily on the category. These are US figures from Google Ads data, pulled on 29 September 2026. The search counts are for August 2026, the latest full month.

We left out the search counts for project management software and crm software. Both jumped to 550,000 in May 2026 and sat at about 201,000 after that, several times their levels a year earlier. We could not explain that jump, so we did not print it. The click prices for both are steady and we kept them.

The spread is the point. Reaching a payroll buyer costs more than three times what a CRM buyer costs. If you sell a $30-a-month tool in a $120-a-click category, paid search at the category stage will lose money for a long time. If you sell a five-figure annual contract, the same click can be cheap.

What does the same buyer cost earlier in their search?

Usually much less. Before somebody searches for a category of software, they search for how to do the job by hand. We pulled those searches on the same day and matched each one to its category.

In the first four rows, the earlier search costs somewhere between a seventh and a quarter of the category search. how to calculate payroll taxes ran about 1,300 searches in August, so it is not a tiny audience either.

The last row is there on purpose. how to do payroll costs $51, much more than the other early searches. Somebody typing that is about to run payroll this week, so advertisers treat them as nearly ready to buy. An early search is cheap when the person asking is still learning. When the question means they have to act soon, the price climbs toward the category price.

Which marketing channels work for B2B SaaS?

The ones that reach your buyer at a stage you can afford. Here is how the common channels line up against the search stages above.

You do not need every row. The next section works through how to pick two of them from what a customer is worth to you.

What is a good marketing strategy for B2B SaaS?

Pick one channel for the early stage and one for the comparing stage, and match both to what a customer is worth.

Start with the arithmetic. Take what one customer pays you over the life of the account. Compare it to the click prices in your category. If a customer is worth a few hundred dollars, category clicks at $90 will not pay back, and your comparing-stage channel should be a free tier or a marketplace listing. If a customer is worth tens of thousands, paid category search is cheap and should probably run from the start.

Then choose the early-stage channel. For most B2B products this is content that answers the problem question, in writing or on video. It costs time and it takes months to show up in signups.

B2B software is usually bought by a group, over weeks. Several people on the buyer's team will read about your product before anyone signs. Content they found while learning the problem is what they remember when the comparison starts.

Where does founder-led video fit in a B2B SaaS marketing strategy?

At the early stage, where the buyer is learning the problem and has not yet picked who to trust.

A founder explaining the payroll tax mistake that costs small companies money is answering the $20 search. Months later, when that buyer's team types payroll software into the $128 auction, they already know your face. That is the job we do. We record you once, and after that we make and publish a video of you every week. You approve each script before anything is made.

It is also the channel most SaaS founders could run on their own, and some should. Our post on SaaS marketing when you are the marketing team covers that decision honestly, including when to keep your money. The detail for software companies is on our page for SaaS and app founders, and the prices are on our pricing page: $200, $600 or $1,200 a month, with no call required. If you want to see how retainers compare across the market, our social media management cost guide lays out the ranges with sources.

How do you check these prices for your own category?

Open the Keyword Planner in Google Ads, which is free with an account, and enter two lists. The first is your category terms, the words a buyer uses when comparing tools. The second is the questions somebody asks before they know tools exist, phrased as how to plus the job.

Write down the cost per click for each and put them side by side, the way the tables above do. The gap between the two lists is how much cheaper it is to reach your buyer early. The size of the category price tells you whether paid search at the comparing stage can ever pay for itself.

Prices move. Everything in this post was pulled on 29 September 2026, and we will re-pull before we reuse any of it.