Mass Marketing in B2B SaaS

The Problem: Should you take a mass marketing approach to your top-of-funnel activities, or is a more targeted strategy the better move?

The answer: It depends.

As Byron Sharp says, “Sophisticated mass marketing doesn’t mean targeting everyone, nor does it mean treating everyone the same.” Instead, it means reaching all category buyers—the people who could actually buy your product.

For B2B, this audience is a small fraction of the total population. The illustration below shows just how much smaller your true category buyers are compared to the general audience.

Many B2B SaaS companies waste budget by advertising outside their category buyers—reaching people who will never buy. (check my previous article)

So, does mass marketing make sense for your B2B SaaS? Let’s break it down.

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The Real Cost of Targeting: The Case for Mass Marketing in B2B

There’s a reason why we (marketers) love mass marketing so much for top-of-funnel campaigns. The broader your audience, the easier it is to reach them. Targeting the whole category buyers can be difficult but just a segment within the category is even more difficult.

With targeting just a segment comes a trade-off.

You need to calculate how many impressions actually reach relevant buyers vs. wasted spend. And reach maximilization is cheaper the CPMR).

For illustration Research on Spotify’s ad platform found that to reach 20% of a the population, the campaign needed to be four times more effective to justify the broader approach. March 2024 (source)

The Trade-Off for Mass Marketing: When Mass Marketing Becomes a Money Pit

Mass marketing usually requires long-term investment and deep pockets as it doesn’t deliver immediate results—it’s about brand-building over time.

One of the role models for mass marketing in B2B SaaS is Monday.com (MNDY) But people don’t often mention the true cost of this approach. Let’s look at the details.

📌 In their S-1 filing, they stated: “We believe that our platform can be used by nearly every organization across the world.”

Translation: Their audience is almost everyone. But how much did that cost them?

In 2019, MNDY spent 125% of its revenue on advertising alone. For comparison, bootstrapped B2B SaaS companies typically spend around 8% of revenue on marketing, while VC-backed SaaS companies spend around 14% (SaaS Capital, 2024).

This is the key point: Monday.com could afford mass marketing because they had VC money to sustain it. Most companies don’t.

Even MNDY’s co-CEO, Eran Zinman, admitted: “We found that when things don’t go well, instead of people being scared, they feel empowered […] when they see that cash was draining, everyone helped us raise the next round.”

But unless your company has endless investor money, this isn’t a realistic playbook.

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How to Balance the Top of Funnel?

For most B2B SaaS companies, dumping millions into broad awareness campaigns isn’t an option. But that doesn’t mean reach-based marketing is useless—it just has to be done strategically.

Start narrow, then expand

Begin with a well-defined segment to test messaging and positioning. If it works, scale gradually instead of going all-in on mass reach from the start.

Don’t rely on platform targeting alone

This doesn’t mean giving up on platforms like Meta or YouTube, even though they don’t offer job title or company targeting like LinkedIn does. I managed to use Google Ads and Meta even targeting segments. Because if you have traffic validation process you can see the targeting relevance and more importantly, feed it as conversion data back into the ad platforms. The more data for ad algorithms = improved targeting efficiency over time.

Instead, you can use optimization strategies:

• use a traffic validation process
• feed it as conversion data back into the algorithm

This allows you to train the platform to serve ads to the right people over time.

Balance the Short & Long Game

Another key balance is between short-term and long-term investments. If you only focus on top-of-funnel brand awareness without a strong conversion engine, you risk running out of cash before the long-term benefits kick in.

PS: If you can’t belive they spend so much here a screenshot form the S-1 filing and a great summary from Clouded Judgement