Not everyone in your target audience is looking for a solution right now. At any given moment, only about 3% to 5% of your market is actively searching. The other 95% have the problem but are not shopping. They are tolerating it, working around it, or do not realize there is a better way.

For those people, you need a different approach: plant the idea, build trust over time, and stay visible. When they are ready to act, you want to be the first product they think of.

The mistake: reach as many people as possible and hope

Many startups try to get their brand in front of as many people as possible and hope some will sign up. They show their product to hundreds of thousands of people through ads or social media.

For most of those people, your brand is one of hundreds they saw that day. Forgotten in minutes. One impression is rarely enough to make someone act.

The better approach: stay in touch with the right people over time

Instead of reaching 100,000 people once, reach 1,000 of the right people repeatedly. Engage with them over weeks and months. Each interaction builds a little more familiarity and trust. When the moment comes that they need a solution, you are already in their mind.

This principle changes how you think about channels. Posting once and hoping for virality does not work. Building a consistent presence with a smaller, targeted audience does.

How to build authority gradually

LinkedIn content. Post 1 to 2 times per week about the specific problems your audience faces. Share practical insights, not product updates. Over time, the right people start recognizing your name when they think about that problem.

Email nurture. Offer a lead magnet (a useful guide, template, or tool) and build an email list of people who care about the problem you solve. Send useful content regularly. When they are ready to buy, your product is already familiar.

Community presence. Participate actively in the communities where your buyers spend time. Answer questions, share experiences, be genuinely helpful. This builds the kind of trust that ads cannot buy.

Content marketing. Publish articles about the problems your audience searches for. These articles build authority, bring in organic traffic, and keep working long after you publish them. Best started after you have validated your positioning with faster channels.

Dive deeper with our free course

You now understand the five steps to marketing a SaaS. But when you sit down to work on your positioning, channel strategy, or landing page, questions will come up that a summary cannot answer.

The free email course answers those questions. One lesson per week, each focused on a single problem, with a video and clear steps.

It is the same process we walk our clients through: just delivered to your inbox so you can work through it at your own pace.