SaaS Marketing Strategy 101: Building your SaaS Marketing Plan

Creating a successful marketing plan to help grow your SaaS business is no easy feat. This will be your roadmap for the next 3-12 months, and although there will always be room for flexibility, it’s vital that your marketing plan helps you to achieve the growth goals of your business.

Setting Goals

Before you can create a functional marketing plan, you must first understand the revenue growth targets and the current marketing funnel metrics of the business. Once you have this, you start to work out the number of marketing and sales qualified leads your efforts will be able to produce to hit those targets.

To do this well, your marketing and sales teams need to be aligned and have a shared revenue goal that both departments are working together to achieve. Once this is agreed, both teams can create a service level agreement (SLA) to help keep you on track month on month.

To calculate marketing’s SLA, you will need to know your 6-12 month average for:

• Total sales revenue goal
• % revenue that comes from marketing vs sales-generated leads
• Average sales deal size
• Average lead to customer close rate

Then you’ll need to do some calculations:

Sales quota * % revenue from marketing-generated leads = Marketing-sourced revenue goal

Marketing-sourced revenue goal / average sales deal size = # customers needed

Customers / average lead to customer close % = # leads needed

Once you have clear goals and the agreed service needed to get there set out, you will next need to make sure your budget can deliver your targets. Jason Lemkin suggests SaaS companies invest 40% of their revenue into their marketing. If looking to outsource some–or all–of your marketing efforts, you’ll likely need a starting budget of around 10% of your revenue goal to cover agency fees, depending on the level of internal resources.

Confirm your strategy

The next step to building your SaaS marketing plan will be to create your buyer personas and produce your pricing and marketing strategy to reflect the pain points and personalities of who you plan to target.

Creating buyer personas is vital to a successful marketing strategy and should not be rushed. By working through this process, you will be clearly able to see what kind of content you need to create going forward, in what format as well as where you should be promoting your business. The biggest mistake we see companies making in their marketing plans is jumping straight into tactics, such as SEO or social media advertising, without a strong strategy behind it.

We recommend all our clients start with a Gameplan to build their long term strategy plan, starting with a buyer persona and goal setting workshop, which then becomes the foundation to a 3-month content marketing strategy aimed at increasing lead generation through your website.

Find out how we can help build your marketing Gameplan

Resources

Creating an in-house marketing team that can handle your on and offline marketing can be a costly route, with so many areas of expertise, you can end up with an ever expanding team from content writers, SEO specialists paid media experts – the list goes on!

By working with an agency, you can offset some of this cost by outsourcing areas of your marketing that require a unique skill set rather than hiring for an internal resource. Agencies can offer a mixture of skills for the cost of one head on your marketing team and can handle surges of additional workloads easier than an internal team where resources can get stretched.

Evaluation

With a healthy investment in your marketing resources, it is essential that regular checks and balances are carried out to be sure that your marketing strategy is working as well as you hoped and allow for agility if anything hasn’t gone to plan.

This is where having clear KPIs can help keep you on track. For a SaaS company, we would recommend measuring your monthly retained revenue (MRR), customer churn, customer lifetime value (LTV) and your cost per acquisition as indicators of how well your marketing efforts are performing.

If you would like to discuss your own marketing plan with one of our experts, book a callback today.