Matt Webb
2 Jun 2026
Are you missing a trick by not investing budget into these channels?
Ask most B2B SaaS founders where they are investing their marketing budget and you will hear the same answers. Google Ads. LinkedIn. Content marketing. Maybe some SEO if they are feeling patient.
Those are not bad channels. But they are also the channels every one of your competitors is on, which means you are paying a premium to compete for the same attention, in the same places, at the same time.
The founders who build the most efficient pipelines are rarely the ones who outspend on the obvious channels. They are the ones who find the places where their buyers are already spending time and where almost nobody else has bothered to show up.
Here are the channels we see consistently underused by B2B SaaS companies, and why they are worth a serious look.
Community-led growth
There are communities for almost every professional problem that exists. Slack groups, Discord servers, Reddit threads, niche forums, private Facebook groups. Your buyers are in them right now, asking questions, sharing frustrations, and looking for recommendations.
Most SaaS founders treat these communities as advertising channels. They join, drop a link to their product, and wonder why nobody responds warmly. That approach does not work and it does damage. Community members can spot a promotional agenda immediately and it poisons the well quickly.
What does work is genuine participation over time. Answering questions with real depth. Sharing useful frameworks without asking for anything in return. Being the person in the community who consistently gives more than they take. When someone in that community eventually asks "does anyone know a good tool for X", the person who has been showing up consistently is the one who gets recommended.
This takes patience. It is not a channel that produces results in week two. But the leads it generates are warm, they come with social proof baked in, and they cost you nothing but time.
Where to start: Identify two or three communities where your ideal customer profile is active. Spend thirty minutes a day for a month contributing genuinely. Track any inbound that comes from it before deciding whether to scale the effort.
Strategic partnerships and integrations
If your product integrates with another tool your customers use, that tool's user base is a pre-qualified audience for you. They already have the problem. They are already using part of the solution. You are one conversation away from being the missing piece.
Most SaaS companies think about integrations as a product feature rather than a marketing channel. The partnership team, if there is one, focuses on technical compatibility. What gets missed is the co-marketing opportunity that sits on top of it.
A joint webinar with a complementary tool. A co-written guide that both companies distribute to their lists. A featured spot in each other's onboarding emails. A combined case study that shows what customers achieve when they use both products together. None of these require a big budget. They require a relationship and a willingness to create something genuinely useful.
The compounding effect here is significant. You are borrowing the trust that the partner has already built with their audience, which gets you further in one conversation than a cold ad impression ever could.
Where to start: List the five tools your best customers use alongside yours. Identify which of those companies has an overlapping but non-competing audience. Reach out with a specific co-marketing idea rather than a vague "let us collaborate" message.
Podcast appearances
Podcasts in B2B are not a new idea, but most SaaS founders either dismiss them as too slow or assume they need to be on the biggest shows to make it worthwhile. Both of those assumptions are wrong.
A niche podcast with 2,000 dedicated listeners in your exact target market is worth more than a mainstream business show with 200,000 listeners who mostly are not your buyers. Niche audiences are loyal. They trust the host. And when the host introduces you as a guest worth listening to, that trust transfers.
The other thing most founders get wrong is treating podcast appearances as brand awareness plays. A well-structured appearance should have a specific offer for listeners. A resource they can download. A free audit. A private community they can join. Something that gives a motivated listener a reason to take the next step immediately rather than vaguely remembering you existed.
Podcast appearances also have a long shelf life. An episode you record today will continue to be discovered and played for years, generating awareness and the occasional inbound lead long after you have forgotten you recorded it.
Where to start: Search Spotify or Apple Podcasts for shows covering topics your buyers care about. Look for shows with consistent publishing schedules and genuine audience engagement in the reviews. Pitch a specific angle that gives their audience something useful, not a pitch for your product.
Email outreach done properly
Cold email has a reputation problem, mostly earned by the people who abuse it. Spray and pray sequences. Mail-merged "personalisation" that fools nobody. Follow-up emails that say "just circling back" four times in a row.
That version of cold email is indeed dead, and good riddance.
Thoughtful, well-researched outreach to a small, carefully chosen list is a different thing entirely. When you write an email that demonstrates you understand someone's specific situation, references something relevant about their business, and makes a genuinely useful offer rather than a vague request for their time, the response rates are significantly better than most people expect.
The economics of this are compelling for B2B SaaS specifically. If a single customer is worth £10,000 or £50,000 in annual recurring revenue, the return on spending two hours crafting twenty genuinely personalised emails is very high, even if only two of them respond.
This is not a scalable channel in the traditional sense. It works precisely because it does not scale, because the effort required to do it well is also the thing that makes it stand out.
Where to start: Identify twenty ideal customers. Write one genuinely personalised email to each. No sequence, no automation. Just one good email with a clear, low-friction offer. Measure what happens.
Review platforms and directories
G2. Capterra. Trustpilot. GetApp. Software Advice. Your buyers are using these platforms to make purchasing decisions and most SaaS companies treat them as passive presences rather than active marketing channels.
A strong review profile on the right directory drives inbound from buyers who are already in decision mode. These are some of the highest intent visitors you will ever get, because they have gone out of their way to look for validated social proof. They are not browsing, they are deciding.
Getting there requires an active strategy for collecting reviews, not just hoping satisfied customers will leave them spontaneously. A well-timed in-app prompt. A personal email from the founder to your first hundred customers. A small incentive such as a gift card, handled within the platform's guidelines. The reviews compound over time and the traffic compounds with them.
The other opportunity here is comparison pages. When a buyer searches "alternatives to [your competitor]", they often land on a comparison page on G2 or Capterra. If your profile is strong and your reviews speak directly to the things buyers care about, you can win business from your competitor's audience without spending a penny on ads.
Where to start: Claim and fully complete your profiles on G2 and Capterra. Then contact your ten most satisfied customers personally and ask them to leave a review. Make it easy by sending them the direct link.
Founder-led content on LinkedIn
This one sits slightly differently to the others because many founders are already on LinkedIn. The difference is between being present and being intentional.
A company page post gets seen by a fraction of the audience a personal post from the founder reaches. LinkedIn's algorithm consistently favours personal profiles over company pages, which means the most cost-effective distribution of your thinking is the founder posting directly rather than routing everything through a branded account.
What works on LinkedIn for B2B SaaS founders is not promotional content about the product. It is honest, specific, useful content about the problems your customers face and how to think about solving them. It is behind the scenes thinking about building the company. It is data and observations from working with customers that others in the industry cannot easily replicate.
The goal is to become the person your buyers follow because they find your perspective genuinely useful, not because you are constantly reminding them your product exists. When that audience eventually has the problem you solve, you are the first person they think of.
Where to start: Post once a week for three months. Write about something specific you have learnt from a customer conversation that week. No product pitches. No motivational quotes. Just useful, honest thinking from someone who knows this space well.
Referral programmes that actually work
Most SaaS referral programmes fail not because customers do not want to refer people but because the programme makes it too complicated or the incentive is misaligned.
A customer who has genuinely had a good result with your product will refer people without any incentive at all, if you simply ask them at the right moment. The right moment is shortly after they have experienced a clear win, not three months later in a generic email campaign.
A simple, well-timed ask is more effective than a complex referral scheme with a confusing rewards structure. "You mentioned the onboarding work made a real difference — do you know anyone else at a similar stage who might find it useful? Happy to give them the same starting point we gave you."
When you do add a formal incentive, make it meaningful and make it immediate. A credit on their next invoice. A cash payment. Something that lands quickly rather than accumulating in a rewards balance they will never use. Reciprocity works best when the reward is tangible and the timing is close to the referral.
Where to start: Identify your ten happiest customers. Schedule a check-in call. Ask directly whether they know anyone who might benefit from what you have built together. You will be surprised how often the answer is yes.
The common thread
None of these channels require a large budget. Most of them require something harder to find: consistency, patience, and a genuine interest in being useful to the people you are trying to reach.
The B2B SaaS founders who build the most efficient growth engines are not necessarily the ones with the biggest ad budgets. They are the ones who show up in the right places, say useful things, and build trust over time in channels where their competitors have not bothered to look.
If you are currently over-reliant on one or two paid channels and want to think through where else your pipeline could be coming from, we are happy to take a look. A funnel audit covers acquisition as well as conversion, so you leave with a clear picture of both where you are losing leads and where you might find more of them.