Promotion rarely fails because a product is bad. It fails because teams talk around what buyers actually experience, instead of talking from those experiences into the real world where buyers live.
Unconventional ways of promoting SaaS don’t mean gimmicks. They mean doing work that aligns with the way people actually decide, talk, struggle, and share information. They show up where others assume nobody is paying attention.
Below are ten of the strongest approaches I’ve seen in practice — told as stories with real execution cues woven in, so you can actually picture yourself doing them.
1. Create a tool that solves one real step before your product ever enters the picture
One SaaS team I know noticed a pattern: prospects would spend hours cleaning up messy data in spreadsheets before they could even start using automation. The real pain wasn’t the automation itself — it was getting the files ready for it. Rather than locking their product behind a signup wall, they built a tiny web app that cleaned data and formatted it properly. You drag a file in, it spits a clean version back.
When they published it, users shared it inside their companies as a convenience. No signup. No trials. Just utility. Over time, people connected that clean data step with the product that made data work for them. This is exactly what Breakcold AI Native CRM did by releasing 20+ tools that attract their potential customers to them.
If you want to try this yourself, don’t aim for polish first. Identify the single manual step that eats time just before people would logically reach for software like yours. Then build the simplest version of that step as a freestanding thing. Let promotion happen as a by-product of usefulness.
2. Tell the story of a decision your team argued about
In another company, product and marketing teams argued for weeks over whether to support a particular workflow. Engineering resisted because it introduced complexity; leadership worried it diluted focus. Eventually they shipped a compromise. What came next surprised everyone: prospects started referencing that internal debate in sales conversations.
Realizing this, the team wrote a post that didn’t argue for the right choice, but walked through the arguments, the trade-offs, and why the final path felt like the right fit for the long term. They didn’t talk about competitors or features. They talked about reasoning.
That post became one of the most referenced pieces in sales decks because it answered a deeper question buyers had about confidence and judgment, not just capability.
To do this yourself, think back to a real internal discussion where multiple strong opinions were weighed. Write it as a narrative. Explain the tension, what was at stake, what finally tipped the decision, and how that choice shaped product direction. Don’t polish it too much — authenticity is the signal here.
3. Turn a repeated sales question into a living content asset
Every week, one SaaS sales rep I worked with kept hearing the same question from different leads: “What happens if our workflow doesn’t look like the demo?” Early attempts to answer this in calls felt repetitive. Eventually they realized they could capture how they answered it and publish that explanation openly.
Instead of writing a static FAQ, they recorded a session where the rep walked through three real client scenarios where workflows diverged from the demo. The rep explained how the product adapted in each case, mistakes clients made early, and what adjustments helped. They published the recording with a transcript.
Now prospects see the nuance instead of a canned answer. The team still revisits it quarterly to update examples. It’s not a list of features. It’s a narrative walkthrough based on real interaction.
If you want this kind of asset, start by recording the next time a question like this comes up in a call. Don’t script it. Let the natural explanation run. Then share it — that friction-based storytelling becomes promotional because it matches how real buyers think.
4. Free your onboarding explanations and use them early in the journey
When customers sign up for many SaaS products, they receive helpful emails: “Start here,” “Common mistakes,” “Next steps.” Most of these are hidden behind authentication because teams assume they only matter after someone chooses to engage. Working with a SaaS branding agency can help ensure these early emails reflect your brand’s identity and voice, turning even automated messages into meaningful first impressions.
A team I know changed that mindset. They took early onboarding content — explanations of key concepts that help users understand why things work the way they do — and published them publicly without tying them to accounts or sales. These explanations were not promotional. They were oriented toward people trying to understand the problem space.
Traffic to these pages was slow at first, but steady. Prospects who landed here felt prepared for a conversation because they had already seen a neutral, jargon-free explanation of the domain. The product talk came later. Understanding came first.
To start, review your onboarding messages and find ones that explain why something matters. Strip out product links, publish them, and watch how they attract people who are earlier in their thinking process.
5. Use your hiring pages as a window into how work really happens
Hiring pages often read like wish lists. “We want someone who can do A, B, and C.” Very few hiring pages reveal how the team actually works, what problems matter day to day, what constraints exist, or what real success looks like after 90 days.
A SaaS org once rewrote its hiring pages using an AI web agent so that each role was described as a real workflow instead of a laundry list of skills. They described the first project a new hire would tackle, what tools they would use, and what trade-offs they’d face.
Unexpectedly, that hiring content became shareable among prospective customers. People saw a reflection of their own challenges in the way the roles were described. Promotion here wasn’t about advertising the product. It was about showing the thinking behind the work.
If you want to try this, avoid generic buzzwords in role descriptions. Write each role as a story of real problems, tools, constraints, and expected outcomes. Let readers see what your team actually does.
6. Teach your pricing logic out loud
Pricing pages usually show numbers, features, and tiers. But in real purchase conversations — for example, about contract management software pricing — the question is rarely about cost alone. It’s about value alignment over time. The question is rarely about cost alone. It’s about value alignment over time.
One SaaS company began publishing detailed pricing walkthroughs where they explained the logic behind each tier: why certain behaviors increased price, how value scaled with usage, what the pricing encouraged and what it discouraged, and how bills could change unexpectedly. They included annotated sample invoices to illustrate.
This wasn’t about justifying the price. It was about helping teams think through outcomes.
Prospects started sending these pricing narratives to colleagues in their own companies to justify decisions. That’s promotion that happens inside buyer organizations, not at the edge of the market.
To do this, take a real pricing conversation you’ve had, and turn it into a narrative that explains how value and cost flow together. Publish it where prospects can find it before deals begin.
7. Capture authentic user workflows in their own words
Prospects don’t connect with polished success statements. They connect with situations they recognize.
Instead of case studies that read like press releases, one team began interviewing users about how they use the product in their daily routines. What screens they open first, what choices they make when something goes sideways, what shortcuts they found.
They recorded these conversations, lightly edited them for clarity (not polish), and published them as narrative stories. No editorial gloss. Just real use.
Because these pieces were deeply specific, prospects saw themselves in the stories. They didn’t say “this product is great.” They said, “this is exactly how I work.”
This is where user-generated content examples become especially powerful. Social wall platforms help SaaS teams automatically collect, curate, and showcase real customer stories and workflows in their original context instead of polishing them into generic marketing assets.
If you want to replicate this, pick a user who’s articulate about their process. Record a walkthrough with them. Focus on decisions, not results. Publish it as a narrative, not a case study.
8. Explain real failures in your category
Most marketing avoids failure. It looks awkward. It feels risky.
But there’s a big difference between owned failure and anonymous critique.
A product team once wrote a post examining why a common workflow pattern in their industry causes frustration in real companies. They didn’t blame competitors. They drew from anonymized evidence: feature requests that never scaled, automation that broke trust, metrics that misled teams.
The piece didn’t say their way was perfect. It showed how the landscape tripwires looked in practice.
Buyers read it because it felt honest, not promotional. When they did come to product conversations later, that honesty made trust easier.
To try this yourself, take a pattern your users often evolve away from, and explain why it falters. Be specific. Be evidence-based. Let the explanation stand on its own.
9. Write content meant to be forwarded internally
Some of the most effective promotion doesn’t happen externally, it happens inside buyer organizations.
One SaaS startup team started creating content with deliberate internal shareability. They wrote articles that answered questions like:
- “How to justify this purchase to leadership”
- “What outcomes similar teams see after 90 days”
- “What checklist seniors use before approval”
These pieces weren’t flashy. They were designed to be forwarded as plain text or links in internal chats and emails.
Promotion happens not because of reach, but because buyers use the content as a tool in their decision process.
If you want to create this kind of content, ask yourself: What document or explanation would my buyer copy-paste into an internal thread right now? Then write that.
10. Use customer feedback loops to shape promotion, not just measure it
Many teams treat customer feedback as something that lives in surveys or CS tickets, often disconnected from broader employee survey best practices that could inform how feedback is interpreted and acted on. Some use it to validate marketing claims.
The unconventional move is to build promotional content directly from feedback loops. Not high-level testimonials, but real feedback about confusion points, surprises, and learning moments.
Instead of speculating what will resonate, you write from what buyers actually said.
One team distilled common early confusion phrases into a set of narratives they published publicly. Another turned unexpected compliments into stories that highlight value points prospects missed initially.
You can also take this a step further with an automated benchmark assessment. It helps you systematically collect, compare, and surface customer insights at scale — turning raw feedback into measurable patterns you can use to guide content, tools, or promotional stories.
This grounds promotion in reality instead of assumption.
11. Let customers promote you by giving them something easy to share
One SaaS team noticed something interesting: customers were recommending the product anyway, but each recommendation was improvised. Different wording, different links, different explanations. Advocacy existed, but it was unstructured.
Instead of trying to “activate ambassadors” through campaigns, they focused on reducing effort. They launched a referral program that gave customers a simple way to share the product, with clear incentives and ready-to-use messaging. Tools like ReferralCandy made this fast to execute by letting the team create a referral program from a simple prompt, rather than designing the entire flow from scratch.
What made this unconventional was not the referral concept itself, but how quietly it worked. No big launch. No aggressive promotion. Customers who already believed in the product now had an easy, intentional way to talk about it. Referrals showed up warmer than paid leads, and sales conversations started with trust already in place.
Final thought
The difference between conventional and unconventional promotion is not creativity. It’s alignment with how buyers think, decide, and share work inside their organizations.
Unconventional promotion doesn’t wait for attention. It earns it by showing up earlier, deeper, and in the context where decisions actually happen.
If you want, I can turn any one of these into a deep, 1,500+ word playbook with templates and examples. Just tell me which one you want expanded first.
