The B2B SaaS Marketing Funnel: Your Strategy Beyond AIDA

Imagine presenting to your board that you have optimised your B2B SaaS marketing funnel so effectively that you have grown your B2B SaaS website’s organic traffic by 32% and, more importantly, your bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) form fills by 8% in just three months. For an established brand, these figures may seem ambitious, but for our client, The Access Group, this was a reality. These results were achieved through a tailored SaaS SEO strategy that focused on what really matters. 

In this guide, we’ll show why relying on the AIDA marketing funnel model may not be enough for your software as a service (SaaS) business and how you can build a bespoke SaaS marketing funnel based on your own requirements to supercharge your B2B SEO strategy with a fresh, modern approach. 

If you’re looking for expert support in building and optimising your funnel, learn more about our SaaS SEO service or contact our team to discuss your goals

If you want to skip ahead, click the jump links to these sections 👇

• What is a marketing funnel?
• AIDA vs. the AARRR (Pirate) SaaS funnel
• The SaaS Marketing Palindrome
• Optimising your SaaS funnel for recurring revenue
• Building your bespoke SaaS funnel
• When to apply your new SaaS marketing funnel
• Get help building a high-performing B2B SaaS funnel?

Let’s recap: what is a marketing funnel?

A marketing funnel is an easy way to visualise a customer’s journey from initial awareness of a product or company to full brand advocacy. It’s a simplified model that shows linear progression through the sales process. In addition, it helps businesses tailor their marketing to their customers’ needs, whilst building trust in their brand. 

The AIDA model in marketing is a foundational framework for marketers that can be hugely effective. However, for a B2B SaaS business, the customer journey may look very different. Unlike a one-time transaction or a B2C SaaS product, B2B SaaS companies often have a protracted sales process that can last for months. There will likely be a large number of decision-makers and other employees who have influence, who also need to be impressed. This requires a bespoke approach that can rise to the challenge of a non-linear buying journey, one based on relationships as much as technical requirements.

AIDA vs. The AARRR (Pirate) SaaS Funnel: A Side-by-Side Comparison

We love the AIDA model when the goal is a simple, one-off purchase, but the SaaS marketing funnel needs to work differently. For a SaaS business, the Action (or conversion) stage isn’t the end of the journey; it is only the start. 

The true goal is to nurture a fledgling business relationship, holding the customer’s interest from the moment they realise they might need a SaaS solution right up until they sign the contract. This can blur the lines between sales and marketing, which could transform how marketing, sales, product, and customer success teams operate. Nurturing a complex sales and marketing journey demands that these separate areas work as one interconnected team. This isn’t even accounting for considering an even longer-term view where the goal is to drive long-term value through upsells and advocacy. 

There isn’t a ‘one-size-fits-all model that will work for every business, although many may turn to the popular ‘Pirate Funnel’ as an alternative to AIDA. It’s called the ‘Pirate Funnel’ due to its whimsical acronym spelling AARRR. I will use both of these terms interchangeably.

The Pirate (or AARRR) Funnel breaks down the customer journey into five key stages.

• Acquisition: The first touchpoint where you attract a new user or lead.
• Activation: The moment a user realises your product might be good for them and completes a key action that signals value.
• Retention: The customer continues to have a great experience and returns to the product.
• Referral: The customer is so pleased that they tell others about your product.
• Revenue: The customer is willing to pay for what you offer, creating long-term value tracked by metrics such as monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and customer lifetime value (CLV).

How does the AARRR funnel fare against AIDA for a SaaS marketing funnel? 

Does the Pirate Funnel work well for B2B SaaS?

The AARRR marketing funnel is a great framework for startups that want to focus on key commercial metrics. Unfortunately for the Pirate Funnel, its greatest strength is also its biggest flaw for a more established B2B SaaS organisation. With complex customer journeys, the top-of-funnel content carries immense weight. It must serve a variety of people with different needs and objectives, from raising brand awareness to solving a customer’s specific problem or answering a specific question.

The Pirate Funnel’s “Acquisition” stage is simply too broad to account for this complexity and nuance. It also can’t break down the multiple touchpoints or the crucial process of identifying a marketing qualified lead (MQL) or a sales qualified lead (SQL). This lack of granularity in the B2B SaaS funnel is why we need to think a bit bigger. 

The SaaS Marketing Palindrome: Building Your Strategy From Awareness to Action

In the previous section, I explained that the AIDA and Pirate funnels are great for start-ups, but they aren’t as helpful for a SaaS supplier that has to adapt to a lengthy sales process with multiple decision-makers. 

There is another reason why these models are fundamentally flawed when working with large B2B enterprises: they view the customer journey through the lens of the business. These models centre the product, simplify the marketing approach, and provide top-level metrics for success, which is great for lean start-ups. 

Let’s turn this upside down. What if we centred the SaaS customer? By paying attention to the real-world pain points of teams, an SEO strategy that supports this customer could look radically different if the goal is to create early advocates. To understand this concept, let’s look at an example breakdown of ‘the customer’ into key roles:

• The End User: The person who encounters the problem on a day-to-day basis. They may have no decision-making sway, but their advocacy and influence are recognised.
• The Middle Manager: A leader who understands the problem and can see its greater impact, beyond just inconvenienced team members. They are focused on meeting targets and streamlining processes.
• The Senior Leader: An executive with a full view of the commercial impact of a solution and the authority to invest in their team.

In its purest sense, the person who signs the contract is the customer, but your best salespeople might not even be your employees. They are the customers’ end users or middle managers who have the strongest idea of what they need. Your SaaS marketing funnel needs to be tailored to address this employee advocacy as a crucial pre-sale consideration.

Once you reframe the complexity of the customer, you realise that it’s unlikely any single individual will cleanly move down the funnel. They may jump in at another stage or move through some sections multiple times. A funnel is still a helpful way to visualise the process, but this concept breaks the funnel into these key sections:

It’s a lot of stages that break down to create the acronym, “AEICIEA”, which is a palindrome. We will call this funnel: the SaaS Marketing Palindrome funnel.

From Lead Gen to Customer Retention: Optimising Your SaaS Funnel for Recurring Revenue

In the previous section, we talked about building a B2B SaaS marketing funnel dubbed “the SaaS Marketing Palindrome funnel” that centred the customer and showed how eventual end users could be powerful advocates for your sales team if you approach your SaaS SEO in a strategic way. 

Whilst this funnel is great for guiding a prospect to a sale, it doesn’t solve a key problem: what happens after the contract is signed? Does marketing just stop? A funnel’s linear model doesn’t account for where the customer goes once they reach the end of the funnel, and so, the flywheel could be a great solution to this issue.

The marketing flywheel model: an antidote to the funnel’s flaw when applied to B2B SaaS

A flywheel, in an engineering context, is a heavy wheel that is hard to get moving but, once it’s spinning, can maintain its own momentum. In a B2B SaaS marketing context, you can absolutely move from a funnel to a flywheel, but it requires full business buy-in, as it will require customer service, technical implementation support, and product owners to cooperate. 

Jeff Bezos demonstrated this concept when building his little e-commerce store, which you might have heard of it, Amazon. The idea is that one positive action (e.g., selling products at lower prices) leads to a second positive action (greater volume of sales), which unlocks a third (a greater selection of products), which drives more sales, and so on.

All businesses should want to be trusted and have an impeccable reputation. In the previous example, we viewed end users as potential brand advocates and considered marketing to them early on in the journey. In the flywheel, brand advocates are not just spreading a positive message; they are the social proof that your SaaS product does more than work. It makes doing a job so much easier, which makes them happy. 

Why use a marketing flywheel for B2B SaaS?

The reason a flywheel is so critical for a SaaS business is that you rely on recurring revenue, not one-off purchases. Unlike a retail business that may have to quickly pull marketing levers to hit a bank holiday sales target, a SaaS business can have a better idea of what money is due and when, which should offer a greater level of consistency with cash flow, which is why SaaS has been popular with investors. 

This recurring revenue metric is what makes a flywheel so valuable, especially since the cost to acquire a new B2B customer is so much higher than the cost of retaining one. A marketing flywheel thrives upon consistency that B2B SaaS needs and vice versa. 

Whilst B2C subscription services like Netflix or Spotify can afford some customer attrition, B2B companies can’t. The market is smaller, and the stakes are much higher when a damaged reputation can sink even the best marketing team’s hard work. 

How would a B2B SaaS marketing flywheel work?

The flywheel model places the customer at the centre, and the entire concept relies on momentum to keep the customers at all levels (end user to C-suite) engaged and delighted by your communications. 

It works through public and private advocacy. Your most powerful marketing is not a voucher code, like it is for a B2C subscription product. It is an unsolicited review, a case study, or a professional recommendation from a customer who genuinely loves your product because it makes it easier for them to do their job, or their team is verifiably more productive.  

The theory is that a happy customer has everything they need to sing your company’s praises, and their advocacy will attract new business to you at a much lower cost.

Can you turn The SaaS Marketing Palindrome funnel into a flywheel? 

Yes, we can add an 8th step called ‘Adoption’. This is where new users become product champions; it’s their job to become power users and internal experts on their new software, and these people need to be empowered to promote internal training and the benefits of using the software. They shouldn’t have to create their own bespoke guides on how to use your product using AI tools or dropping screenshots into a Word document. 

At this stage, the marketing team needs to work closely with support from product teams, technical or customer service teams in delivering on-brand support content that helps the end user be more productive. 

Building Your Bespoke SaaS Funnel: A Framework, Not a Formula

In the last section, we discussed the downsides of working with a funnel for your B2B marketing and looked at a flywheel model as an alternative. A flywheel model is brilliant for B2B SaaS companies, but it is hugely dependent on other teams in your business having the capacity to support post-sales marketing fully. 

Every SaaS business is different, with there never being just one type of ideal customer. Your internal structures, company culture, product complexity and typical sales timelines will also be different to your competitors. Your funnel (or flywheel) needs to reflect the reality you are working with, not an ideal-world scenario where every other department rushes to support marketing. 

Funnels, flywheels and frameworks are all tools to guide your thinking, so don’t get distracted by competitor activity or marketing experts outside of SaaS suggesting that there is anything that you should be doing when they don’t have the full view you and your team have.

Now that we understand why we have to create a tailored approach to the B2B SaaS marketing funnel, how might we look to independently build our own?

1. Start by identifying the customer

Earlier, we talked about how the concept of the customer is far wider than the person who ultimately signs the contract. This could be the end user, middle managers and senior leadership. Many marketing teams will look to understand their buyer personas, but don’t underestimate the influence of the end user and their willingness to champion a solution that they believe will improve their working day. 

Here are three points that you could factor into this exercise: 

• What are the different issues of each of these people who fall under the umbrella term of ‘customer’? Who is affected by the problem that you solve, and how can you help them in that moment and beyond? This is information that can be included in your marketing personas. 
• How do your customers share information? Through social media? Through links on internal chat platforms or another way entirely? Don’t make it hard for them to share your content, particularly when you’re helping them troubleshoot a solution. 
• Don’t forget that anyone could enter the funnel at any time and that if you assume prior knowledge or exposure to your brand, you could quickly disadvantage yourself. 

This is a shift in mindset because we are reframing ‘what do we want to tell people?’ to asking ‘who can we help?’. It’s a subtle shift but if you are ready to upgrade from a marketing funnel to a flywheel model, this requires the customer to be at the centre. 

2. Map content types to funnel stages and buyer needs

In step one, we identified our customer and thought about what creates friction in their day. We have considered how B2B SaaS products help them and what topics or issues sit adjacent to this.  Next, we can look to map types of content to all of our stages of the funnel. 

Two key points to think about are: 

• A strong B2B SEO strategy supports the full journey and customer lifecycle, and the end user customer may be using search for help longer into the relationship than just the sales journey. 
• You may need to audit existing content. It’s not just about finding keywords with the highest search volume to increase your organic traffic metrics. It is incredibly helpful to understand whether your existing content repertoire is over or under-weighted in certain parts of the funnel, and so, the table below may help with this.  

3. Get aligned with all stages of the funnel

Have you heard the expression, “If you always do what you’ve always done, then you’ll always get what you always got.”?

Typically, marketing has owned the top of the funnel and sales owns the bottom of the funnel. We already know the journey is more complex so how can we stop doing what we’ve always done? 

First, you need to be ready to stop thinking about the “hand off” to other departments. Content creation never stops being anyone’s responsibility or problem. You may have a different owner for creating content at different stages of the B2B SaaS sales funnel, but every team can add value. For example, when creating content in the education phase, keyword research could take you down a generic or ‘wrong’ path but, information from the product or client success team could ensure that the content you want people to find in search adds so much more value because you have situational and contextual information. 

Stop looking at content as assets simply owned by marketing. With more teams consulted and informed, this could lengthen approval processes for marketers but by following a RACI matrix, you can better align teams, produce superior content and give your customers a more cohesive experience. Learn more about the benefits of SaaS content marketing in our helpful guide.

4. Design your funnel for loops, not lines

When we discussed the complexity of the B2B SaaS buying journey earlier, we acknowledged that buyers rarely move in a perfectly linear fashion. They may loop back, pause, or even re-enter the process at entirely different stages, and there may or may not be hand-offs between different team members. 

Let’s consider some scenarios where this might happen: 

• A user who was in the Evaluation stage might suddenly loop back to Education if new team members are brought into the decision or if they have learned of a new requirement.
• A company that was in Consideration may pause their search for a quarter due to budget constraints. Designing a strategy that accounts for this fluid behaviour may be crucial to your success. 

There are an unlimited number of scenarios, but this is where Paid marketing tactics, email marketing and using your CRM to its full effectiveness can use marketing content to draw the customer back when they are ready to engage again. When you think in loops rather than lines, your marketing ecosystem can be far more resilient to the unpredictable nature of B2B buying. 

5. Measure what matters

If you have got to this point, you have probably done a lot of work already so you need to be able to prove the value of this work when you implement your SaaS SEO strategy. 

For content that serves the Awareness phase, if you judge this by how many micro or macro conversions you get, you may have set this phase up for failure. You may find it valuable to create a bespoke report in GA4 or Looker Studio that looks only at this traffic or excludes it from the rest of the website because the session metrics may look inflated in comparison to the rest of the site, with a much lower conversion rate. We might be happy to report on visibility metrics, rankings as well as returning visitors. 

For the Education phase, we may find more value in understanding the depth of the visit for the content we have created. It might be helpful to know where visitors go on your website after landing, and what on-page elements the user is engaging with. 

Further down the funnel, sales might provide prospects with tracked links to on-site content, but we could look to bridge the gap and report on how these pages are being found. 

As a team, it’s up to you to decide what actions define success. 

The Right Time to Act: When to Apply Your New SaaS Marketing Funnel

If you have used the jumplinks to join me near the end, welcome! To bring you up to date, we have talked about the complexity of the B2B SaaS customer journey and established that SaaS companies require a bespoke SEO strategy with a tailored approach to the marketing funnel due to long sales journeys and multiple stakeholders. In the last section, we made recommendations for how you can build your own marketing funnel. 

Creating a bespoke marketing framework is a significant undertaking, but it could transform how potential and actual customers view your business as well as your content. If you’re adding value to real humans then maybe search will reward you with higher visibility too. 

How do you know if it’s time to move on from your current approach and design a new funnel? Do you have the information and the resources to do this? Here are a few things to consider:  

Do your funnel metrics tell the whole story? 

Imagine this, you’re tracking top of funnel (TOFU), middle of funnel (MOFU) and bottom of funnel (BOFU) metrics, but something feels “off”. Maybe performance metrics have drifted over time.

You’ve spotted clues such as:

• Strong traffic but low demo conversions.
• Your marketing qualified leads (MQLs) aren’t converting to sales qualified leads (SQLs)
• Sales complain that leads coming to them aren’t “qualified.”
• Prospects are moving through the process slower. 

You might have seen these as performance issues, but they may be a structural problem instead. These could be the clues that tell you there is a potential mismatch between what your content is doing and what your audience actually needs at that moment. One example of this would be that your content is still focused on ‘top-down’ sales when the new buying process is being driven by end-users advocating from the bottom up.

Alternatively, look outside of your own sales process, have there been market changes such as a new competitor wowing the market or regulatory changes that are disrupting business as usual search behaviour. 

Pair qualitative information from other areas of the business with performing/non-performing metrics, and this will help you understand if there is a narrative shift that necessitates designing or rethinking your SaaS product funnel. 

Do you have more or new information about the buying process?

When your SaaS business first launched, everything was new. The sales process and marketing funnel was built on best guesses, educated assumptions, and a few untested processes guided by experience at other companies. This is a normal part of growth. But as a business scales after heavy investment in product development, it’s easy to get stuck in silos and rely on outdated assumptions because the pressure is on and the stakes are high. 

If you believe there is a mismatch in content serving your prospect or customer, the easy thing to do is to reach out to colleagues in other departments. It’s a simple and collaborative way to deliver the insights you need. 

If your company supports ‘coffee chats’ across departments or you have company chats or a structure that helps you connect with colleagues, you can ask questions to find out: 

• Have your sales team shared new insights about who really influences deals?
• Are you seeing more product-led growth signals, such as end users reaching out directly?
• Has your buyer journey changed due to shifts in procurement, budgets, or tech consolidation?

If anything in your sales process has changed, but the marketing funnel hasn’t updated in kind, it could be that your content isn’t speaking to the key customer moments any more and it’s time to open the dialogue internally. 

Is everyone aligned on metrics and terminology? 

The whole point of OKRs is that everyone is supposed to move forward together and it can be disheartening when you feel like you are reporting great results but you get pushback. This disconnect is another signal to take a step back and re-clarify what you and your team understand key metrics to mean. 

It could be that there is disagreement or misunderstanding about what constitutes a marketing qualified lead (MQL) or a sales qualified lead (SQL). As teams scale, evolve or shift focus, these definitions can drift and cause friction across business functions because people are talking at cross-purposes. For example, marketing may define an MQL as content engagement but sales may not acknowledge an MQL until a sales call is booked. Both definitions are valid but if you aren’t aligned on your technical or reporting metrics, this will impact on your relationships and performance. 

If you are looking to update or completely overhaul your marketing funnel, this is the perfect opportunity to realign key definitions and expectations

Are you scaling fast?

SaaS is uniquely powerful because once your product is established (or reaches a minimum viable reputation), it can scale quickly.

But scaling fast brings its own set of challenges for marketers, and without careful attention, your SaaS marketing funnel can become a liability rather than an asset. Read through these potential issues and look to meet them head on. 

Complexity – The linear funnel breaks down really quickly when the customer journey is long and the product is complex. As you scale, you add more team members, more departments, and more customer touchpoints and it becomes a really brave decision to make the call to stop and re-evaluate. 

Silos – Rapid growth means that silos are likely to form. Teams become larger and communications break down. Teams may not be able to communicate or be educated on internal processes and before you know it, individuals are going rogue creating their own material. 

Outgrowing infrastructure – SaaS businesses can start pretty lean and so investment in infrastructure may take time to develop. This can make it hard to have sight of up to date information such as a tech stack that can handle complex marketing automations.

Inconsistent customer experience – The above issues can result in an inconsistent customer experience which as we know from the marketing flywheel model, these experiences slow momentum for the business.

“Busyness” trap – It’s not just all of the practicalities of scaling, there is a psychological challenge too. The inconsistent customer experience means that instead of teams being able to market proactively, they are busy fighting fires and the time and ability to “zoom out” can have a huge impact. However, recognising that it might be time to take a step and re-evaluate your SaaS marketing funnel could be the first step to making a huge difference for your performance and your customers. 

If you recognise these challenges in your business, it’s likely time to pause, audit your funnel, and ensure your B2B SaaS marketing funnel is built to support the scalability your whole company is working towards. 

Need Help Building a High-Performing B2B SaaS Funnel?

Your marketing funnel is more than a diagram, it’s the system that connects strategy to outcomes. But in SaaS, where markets move fast and complexity only compounds with scale, that system can quickly fall out of sync. If your funnel no longer reflects how your buyers actually buy, or how your teams operate, it’s time to rebuild. 

Reimagining your funnel isn’t just a fun marketing exercise, you need it to grow so take the time to reassess, realign, and redesign it for how your business works in reality. 

If you need specialist support on your B2B SaaS SEO strategy or anything covered in this blog, reach out to our team.