Reaching product-market fit is no easy task for any SaaS product. If you’ve gotten this far, give yourself a high-five, thumbs up or pat on the SaaS for all your hard work. But the hard part is not over. Now that you have proven you have a service that offers value to people, it’s time to scale. At this point you have to decide if you are going to hire all the resources that you need to support growth on a large scale or if it’s time to call in the experts.
While you will almost certainly be hiring additional resources to support sales and product development, marketing can (and often times should) be outsourced. Not only will you benefit from an agency's experience with helping clients just like yourself, you don’t have to take on the overhead cost of hiring a full team.
Here are five ways a marketing agency can help you scale your SaaS.
1. Develop a strategic marketing growth plan
When you want to start scaling your SaaS, it’s important to have a clearly defined marketing plan in place that will support your growing initiative. You need to find new customers, keep the customers you have happy, streamline processes, hire the right sales people, etc. A marketing agency can help you define this plan.
A marketing agency will help you:
- Define your personas,
- Map out the buyer's journey,
- Create a content strategy to attract prospects and improve customer success, and
- Most importantly, makes sure your company doesn’t have any dreaded SaaSHoles.
See how one SaaS company, Silvertrac Software, increased their leads by 629% thanks to a strategic marketing growth plan.
2. Tap into new markets
At some point you will exhaust your customer base in a particular marketing channel and you’ll have to focus on new places to find customers. It’s important to understand who your customers are in order to reach them in other markets.
By outlining your personas and the journeys they take on their way to becoming a customer, you can get into the mind of your prospective customer and find out where they spend their time.
An agency can help you not only identify your customer, but also which channels/markets make the most sense to focus your efforts. They will work with you to ensure your pipeline stays full.
3. Establish goals and KPIs
It’s nearly impossible to know if you are successful if you haven’t defined the term for your specific situation. What are you trying to achieve? What represents success for your organization? Is it a low churn rate or a low CAC?
Having these elements defined will let you know if your marketing efforts are working and make sure that your sales and marketing teams are aligned on their objectives. This alignment is crucial for optimizing resource allocation for maximum efficiency. You can learn more about which SaaS metrics you should focus on in our previous blog post.
4. Pipeline marketing
Think of pipeline marketing as lead generation 2.0. The focus of pipeline marketing is on connecting data from both sales and marketing to enable revenue based decision making and goals. Decisions are made by working back from revenue to the top of the funnel.
A marketing agency can help you implement this strategy and make sure your sales and marketing teams are aligned. Having this alignment helps hold everyone accountable and can make a significant impact in accelerating growth because the quality of business leads which are passed to the sales team will increase.
5. Identify areas of weakness and opportunities for growth
When you hire a marketing agency you get the benefit of their expertise from working with similar businesses. They know what it takes to build and maintain a successful company because they’ve done it many times before. They can help you upsell your products to existing customers and determine what marketing efforts are not performing.
These are just a few of the ways that marketing agencies can help SaaS companies scale. For more information about whether you have what it takes to scale your own SaaS business, ask us to check for your SaaSholes today!
