For a business to be really successful, you have to do some kind of marketing – and while you might understand your business inside and out, and know exactly what kind of audience you’re speaking to, translating that into marketing can be difficult for people who aren’t used to advertising as an industry.
That’s why you should outsource your marketing to the experts, and look into outsourcing your marketing department.
A SaaS marketing agency takes care of all your marketing needs so that you can focus your attention on growing your business in the way you know how: networking, implementing new products, and seeing how you can take your business to the next level. Marketing helps with all of that – but it can take up a lot of time and energy for payoff less than what you’d get if you outsourced it to professionals.
On your own, you’ll need to figure out how to best communicate with the audiences your business attracts, how to use social media to your advantage, how much to spend on marketing, and a lot of other little details like this. If you outsource your marketing to a SaaS-focused marketing agency, none of that is stuff you have to concern yourself with: all you need to do is focus on keeping your business running.
However, you need to make sure you pick the right SaaS marketing agency for your needs. This guide will help you determine what SaaS marketing agency to invest in when you want to outsource your marketing to professionals who can help you boost your business.
Table of Contents
What are the high-level areas of marketing for SaaS?
Before you start googling ‘SaaS agencies near me’, it’s important to understand the two areas in which SaaS agencies should be helping you grow, specifically in customer acquisition and customer retention. As a small or medium enterprise, your business isn’t just going to rely on word of mouth and a Facebook page, but on actively and continuously bringing in and keeping new clients. A good SaaS marketing agency should be able to help with both.
Customer acquisition
Customer acquisition is considered one of the top priority growth activities for SaaS businesses at 89%, and a key area for improvement in most businesses with 44% of businesses focusing on customer acquisition over customer retention. However, with the average acquisition cost of a new customer five times as much as retention, and the probability of selling to a new customer at 5% – 20%, customer acquisition can be a costly investment.
SaaS agencies can help your business by creating a customer acquisition strategy that will focus on increasing awareness and engagement for your audience. As most SaaS marketing agencies typically offer a full-service approach, this could be anything from a dedicated website to running your Facebook page or creating a newsletter that goes out every month and guides new clients throughout the early stages of converting them into lifelong fans.
Customer retention
As a former SaaS service provider ourselves, we know how important it is to retain customers rather than just attract new customers over and over again. By creating a baseline of loyal customers, monthly revenue gets a boost, and business can cut down on costs by talking to a naturally-developed audience who will support the brand through many potential changes.
Furthermore, when it comes to customer retention versus acquisition, the numbers are heavily in favour of customer retention. The chances of selling to a customer who’s already a fan of your brand is between 60% and 70%, and the chances of new customers trying your newest product are higher too: existing customers are 50% more likely to try your latest product, and 31% more likely to spend more per average order than new customers.
Most importantly, increasing your customer retention by just 5% can double or even triple your revenue!
However, it’s not as easy to retain customers as suggested. In most industries, customer retention is less than 20%, whereas churn rate – where customers change or drop businesses – is up to 30%.
This is another area where hiring an SaaS makes financial sense: an SaaS marketing agency can help you with customer retention as well as customer acquisition, without any extra time spent on creating a strategy on your end.
Breaking down the cost of customers
The real numbers for customer acquisition and retention can provide a lot of value for business, especially startups who are yet to fully launch. Figuring out how to balance the cost to acquire new customers (or CAC) and the ability to monetise those customers (or te LTV, the Lifetime Value of a Customer) is fundamental when you’re starting out and profits are yet razor thin.
But how do you calculate the real numbers for your business?
CAC
The cost of acquiring customers is an easy calculation to make, and something that all businesses should know. If you’re not certain of how to calculate your CAC, here’s a handy guide to help!
Step 1: Take the entire cost of your sales and marketing department in a given period. This also includes salaries and headcount, as well as any additional costs.
Step 2: Divide the figure by the number of customers acquired in that period.
This relies on accurate record-keeping, but it’s a foolproof way to see how much each new customer is actually costing you per tracked period.
Let’s use a basic example.
If you, as a company, spent €10,000 on marketing, and acquired 100 customers in the same period, each customer would cost you €100 to onboard. For a small to medium enterprise, that could prove a difficult figure to maintain and budget for.
LTV
However, CAC is only one half of the business equation.
The second figure you need to calculate is the lifetime value of a customer.
For every customer that your company invests in, your business makes back a percentage of the initial investment fees, which include support, installation, and servicing costs. To calculate Lifetime Value, you need to look at the gross amount that you could potentially make off the back of a customer. This includes monitoring how long each customer spends with your company before churning or moving to a different company, as well as any discounts offered and profit margins per customer.
There are different ways of calculating LTV dependant on the situation, and most companies actually use more than one method to get a more accurate idea of their LTV!
The simplest way to calculate LTV is by multiplying the number of weeks in a year by the average customer value per week (this would be calculated by multiplying the expenditures by visits per week).
Take the following equation.
You have a store that sells coffee.
You have three regular customers.
Customer 1 spends €3.50 per visit and visits 4 times a week.
Customer 2 spends €10 per visit and visits 2 times a week.
Customer 3 spends €5.85 per visit and visits 6 times a week.
The average spend for each customer amounts to €6.45 and the average visit is 4 times a week.
Therefore, now we can calculate the average customer value per week.
Customer 1’s average CV/week: 3.50 x 4 = €14.
Customer 2’s average CV/week: 10×2 = €20.
Customer 3’s average CV/week: 5.85×6 = €35.10.
The average customer value per week is therefore €23.03.
The simplest way to calculate Customer Lifetime Value is based on customer value per week times the life-span. Assuming that each customer will stay with your location for an average of 10 years, we can use the following equation:
52(average customer value per week) x average customer lifespan.
Or: 52(23.03) x 10 = €11,975.60 LTV per customer.
Simple!
Why are these figures important?
To run any successful business, you have to use the data you have available and constantly improve. This means recalculating the same figures a number of different ways and figuring out how you can increase your customer lifetime value while also minimising the cost of customer acquisition.
A successful business with a well-balanced business model will always have a lower CAC than LTV. This is because every customer acquisition cost should be offset by the lifetime value of bringing that customer onboard with your company.
Having a business which will have a higher customer acquisition cost than customer lifetime value might mean that ultimately your business is geared for failure sooner or later. If each CAC investment costs you €150, but you only net €100 per customer lifetime value, your business model needs recalibration.
What are your internal competitive advantages?
So now you know your customer acquisition cost and your customer lifetime value. At this point, a SaaS marketing agency would be able to help create a marketing plan that will help work on your weak points, but there’s more you can identify before a marketing agency can truly make the most of your business model.
For example, do you know what your competitive advantages are? Why people choose your company over other companies? What your product can do that no other retailer can provide or match?
An experienced SaaS marketing agency will investigate why your product or service does well on the market, but it’s always good to know what your strengths and weaknesses are in a business, especially if you’re thinking of outsourcing your marketing efforts to a SaaS marketing agency. We can speak from experience: having a business understand some of the most fundamental aspects of their company not only makes our job easier, but also helps us decide on a plan of action.
What are internal core competencies?
Before a strategy can be formed, you need to understand what you bring to the market.
Every company has its own internal core competencies that are impossible for other competitors to imitate and puts them a cut above the rest of the competition in their field. a core competency normally identifies itself over time as the business learns to manage resources more effectively.
Core competencies are also an identifier for multiple companies, distinguishing the agency from the rest of the competition and highlighting aspects of its personality that are customer-facing. For example, a company well known for prompt delivery and excellent after-sales service can consider that a core competency over competitors who deliver the same product but offer less than stellar aftersales service, or struggle to keep to a given delivery date. These core competencies are usually the reason why consumers favour your company’s product over another, and what allows businesses to build consistency with their client base.
How do you identify core competencies?
Using VRIO analysis, identifying the core competencies of your organisation becomes a lot easier!
Ask yourself if your offering is:
- Valuable
- Rare
- Difficult to imitate
- Supported by the organisation.
An object or a service that is valuable means that it allows the company to exploit opportunities; for example, a company with control of a specific resource, such as delivery routes or an internet service, means that the company has a resource that enhances the competitive edge of the organisation. Similarly, rare and difficult to imitate resources elevate the company’s offerings onto another level by making that company the only supplier of a particular product or service.
Furthermore, by having a supportive organisation, the business can explore opportunities with those resources in a number of different ways. Exploiting rare and valuable resources boosts business value, and therefore boosts business performance.
Understand your scope, time, and cost triangle
With this knowledge in hand, it’s time to look outwards and think about what you’re looking for in a SaaS marketing agency. While most SaaS marketing agencies are happy to give you a rundown of what it’s like to work with them, here’s a few personal tips we learned from the SaaS side of the business:
- Come to a SaaS marketing agency with a budget already in mind. While most SaaS companies can happily negotiate a budget with you, it’s better to have a figure already in mind to save some time.
- Know what you want to do. SaaS marketing agencies can help you, but to help you, you need to know what you want them to help with. Is it reaching a new audience? Is it rebranding? Whatever it is, have a concise idea of your end goal in mind, and shop around for SaaS agencies that excel in precisely that field.
- An agency relationship is not an employee-employer relationship; it’s a partnership. There will be times where you will disagree on how to approach a certain issue, and compromise is going to become your new favourite word. Trust in the SaaS agency you’ve picked.
- Pick your must-haves. Understanding what is most important to you is key to both finding a SaaS marketing agency you’ll be happy with and navigating through potential disagreements with a minimum of hurt feelings and resentment. Furthermore, any agency that can promise to do everything quickly and cheaply needs to be examined carefully. Bad marketing is not something you should risk if your business already needs help.
If you have an idea of what you already want, it’ll give you a good place to start understanding the scope-time-quality triangle that most projects will operate with.
What is the scope triangle?
The scope triangle is an equation that triangulates the three most important forces in any project: time available to deliver the project, the money and resources available, and the quality the project must achieve to be successful. The general theory is that one aspect will always be fixed, whereas the other two qualities will vary inversely to each other.
In other words, your deadline might not change – but the end quality of your project will absolutely depend on cost and resources available.
Maybe there’s two fixed points in your project: you need to advertise by this date and with a specific budget. Normally, what happens is that quality suffers in that regard – but not necessarily! A good SaaS marketing agency will be able to isolate what article of the scope-time-quality triangle can be adjusted without affecting the end result.
Is it important?
Imagine planning the world’s biggest birthday party. With no limits set anywhere, you could probably throw the most exciting and expensive party ever – but this is almost never the case when you’re working for or running an organisation. A scope triangle is fundamental to make sure that your project is successful, without compromising on quality or struggling to finish in time.
You can, obviously, trade in one of the axes for another: sacrifice quality for time and money, or time for quality and money. However, a good SaaS marketing agency can help you figure out how to balance all three axes without needing to make sacrifices for anything!
Working models
Every SaaS marketing agency will have its own way of working, the same as any other organisation. It’s important that the way the agency has of working will integrate with your expectations and with your own organisation, so make sure to double-check with the agency you have in mind how you can work together, and whether or not you can finagle some other sort of agreement.
Working with an agency that has a working model you support goes a long way towards building an excellent relationship as the possibility for getting a surprise fee or a sudden uptick in your regular payment are very limited.
It is critical to find a model that works well for both parties. You might feel like you’ve scored a great deal if you push too hard, but you’re going to have a client or an agency that resents the relationship, meaning that there will be very little loyalty.
Fees, per hour
This is one of the most common working models, and SaaS marketing businesses are very fond of this model for a number of reasons: it’s the fairest to both parties, and it’s the easiest to integrate into a monthly accounting bill.
Hourly fees are especially good for one-off projects where you already have a set amount of time set aside for a particular project, however they can also be a little higher than other working models.
Performance-based rewards
Performance-based rewards are models where the agency accepts to work on a no-win-no-reward model. These are usually based on a specific cost per lead or cost per acquisition.
Agencies who choose this model charge more per acquisition because they’re taking on the whole risk themselves. This model tends to be great for SaaS companies who arfe looking for a quick fix, because with this model the agency has very little incentive to work on retention and brand.
Fees and performance-based rewards
The hybrid model is probably the fairest on both sides. Here we see the agency being paid a lower fee for the tasks it performs, but then it would add on performance bonuses based on the results of its efforts.
These bonuses can be capped or uncapped, depending on the metrics set and the way the agreement is set up.
There’s also a hybrid model between B and C, where the agency would be paid a percentage of revenue, say, with a bottom monthly cap. This acknowledges that the work done by the agency can still bring value even if it isn’t moving the needle in the short term.
Outsourced CMO and agency
You might be wondering what the difference is between outsourcing a CMO, and outsourcing a CMO and agency. Here it is: a chief marketing officer’s primary goal is to increase the lifetime value of customers, and decrease the cost of acquiring those customers, using whatever methods, not strictly marketing. They’ll create benchmark KPIs and execute a strategy for you, but the focus for CMOs is business growth regardless of the marketing channel used.
On the other hand, an agency can help you with the nitty-gritty details of marketing: branding, web design, advertising through social media, buying billboards and more.
If you don’t have a plan in mind for business growth or development, this is definitely the option for you! The CMO can help you improve business growth and create a detailed marketing strategy while the agency itself will help you put those plans into action – the perfect combination for businesses who need marketing and outreach help from the ground up!
Setting goals
Hiring a SaaS marketing agency without having an idea what to ask for isn’t the worst thing to do, but it’s far more beneficial if you already have something in mind: it’ll save you time, it’ll save the marketing agency time, and you’ll be able to isolate exact what you want to get out of this working relationship. If it’s not something you’ve done before, no worries! We’re here to introduce you to the beneficial wonders of SMART and VQVC goals.
SMART goals
SMART is one of the oldest management and goal-setting tools available today, and has been in use since 1981, however the actual terms for the acronym sometimes change depending on what goals organisations would like to meet. For this purpose, we’ll be using the most common use of SMART.
SMART helps you make sure that your goals are clear and achievable. It stands for
• Specific
Your goal needs to be clear to yourself, otherwise you’re going to struggle to focus your efforts on how you truly want to improve your business. This is usually the first step in understanding where you want your business to go, but it’s the most important, especially if it’s the first time you’ve used SMART or are considering hiring an SaaS
Consider the following questions:
- What do I want to do? Is it to improve customer lifetime value? Is it to decrease running marketing costs? Maybe you want your company to be spoken about more frequently, or you want to reach out to new customers. Whatever it is, spend some time to really figure out what you want to achieve for the next few years of your business.
- Why is this goal important? Is it going to help your organisation stay afloat? Increase your revenue? It’s important to understand that certain goals may take longer to achieve, and thus you need a focus to keep you going.
- Who do you need to achieve this goal? If there’s someone lacking in your organisation, or a department you’re missing, do you need to hire them in order to achieve your goal? For example, if you don’t have a marketing department, is it worth hiring for one, or outsourcing your marketing needs to an agency? Or would it be possible to do it in-house?
- Which resources are involved? If you have limitations, these go here: maybe you don’t have an in-house marketing team, but you’d like to increase your social media presence. Maybe you do have a social media presence, but you’d like to curate it further.
An example: if you run a semi-successful business, but the COVID-19 pandemic has really cut into your profits, maybe you’re looking at increasing your social media presence and acquiring new customers. Your goal is important because it could save your business from struggling, but you’d need an in-house marketing department, or to outsource your marketing to an SaaS agency who could make the most of your social media.
• Measurable
Setting goals is all well and good, however you need to be able to measure those goals to actually track your progress. Going forth and implementing your new marketing strategy is all well and good, but how are you going to know if it’s actually working or not? You need to measure.
Some metrics to keep in mind are:
- How much is it going to cost?
- How many resources will it use?
- How much time should you spend on each task?
- How will you know when to stop marketing?
• Achievable
While we don’t want to ruin your enthusiasm, part of successfully implementing a new marketing plan or strategy is making sure that your goals are attainable. You don’t want to set your sights so high that you struggle to actually achieve your goals, and you don’t want to set your sights so low that your goals are with you within the first few days of embarking on your new strategy. The best ground here is somewhere in the middle, where the investment of a SaaS is definitely worth it, but you’re not left feeling like you’re going to be working on stage one for the rest of the year.
Achievable goals will usually depend on resources available, such as money and time, so have those in mind before you answer this question.
• Relevant
Ask yourself this: is the goal you want to achieve worth pursuing? It’s easy to get caught up in possibilities, but a key aspect of maximising your business is to make sure that the goals you have in mind will support your ongoing business, or address a pain point, or benefit you in other ways. If the goal you want to pursue has a guarantee of improving your business in the long term, we say go for it! However, all too often goals that initially come to mind can be a bit off-base for the reality we’re living in.
If you’re worried, ask yourself:
- Will this goal help achieve tangible results?
- Is it the right time to pursue a new goal?
- Will this match what we’re doing with the business?
If you’re answering ‘yes’ to these questions, chances are your goal is definitely relevant for your purposes!
• Timely
How many times have you set a goal, but the deadline’s moved? With SMART, you need to have a definitive, immovable deadline in mind: this helps prevent your goal from being overshadowed by day to day business. The SMART goal will have an ending point, for example, by the end of the next quarter, allowing you to figure out a plan where you can work on your goal alongside your current business. Everyday tasks shouldn’t take priority, but neither can you stop what you’re doing to focus on a specific goal, so making sure you have a definitive end result by a definitive date helps keep you on task.
Ask yourself:
- When will this goal be finished?
- How is this goal going to proceed in six months?
- Is there a way of starting this goal from today?
What else?
Setting SMART goals yourself is beneficial; however, a good SaaS marketing agency will also set SMART goals with you, to better maximise their expertise in order to help your business. While the SaaS marketing agency can focus on your marketing goals, you can focus on SMART goals for your business in the longer term, and having two SMART plans will help enmesh your marketing within the overall business plan.
VQVC
SMART goals aren’t the only things you should think about; if one of your long-term interests is to improve your reach with your audiences, then you need to also look into your VQVC objectives. These objectives are obtained purely through your Google Analytics, so if you don’t have those yet, we highly recommend accessing your free account now – those metrics are a must-have for anyone looking to expand their digital reach.
VQVC stands for Volume, Quality, Value, and Cost. Here’s what each of them means.
• Volume
This metric takes into account unique visitors, visits to your site, and pageviews, meaning every visitor that accesses your website or your page on Google gets logged into a database that you can then look over to see how many people have accessed your site per month.
• Quality
This looks into the quality of those visits: how many of them lead to sales? How many of them bounced – i.e., visitors left without actually following through? How long was each visit for? Here, you can figure out how well your site is doing, or not.
• Value
How much revenue do you get from each visit? This metric is vital so you can understand where the money is coming from and what your consumers are looking for.
• Cost
Although cost measures are limited, you need to factor in how much Google Ads and Google products cost. After all, you might be spending a lot more money than you’re getting in, which is proof that you’d need to change the way you’re marketing as quickly as possible.
What else?
VQVC is pretty much unavoidable nowadays; over 95% of the world is online, with the numbers growing each and every day, and as the population on the internet grows, so does the competition. Understanding your VQVC will go a long way towards knowing where your current place on the internet is, and how to grow that position sustainably.
What are the Agency Capabilities needed to market a SaaS?
We’ve been talking a lot about what you can do to help prepare yourself and your business for outsourcing your marketing to a SaaS marketing agency, but there’s another side to the equation: what your agency can do for you. Picking a SaaS marketing agency based on popular reviews is one thing, but the best way to make sure that your agency suits you is to look deeper into what that agency is all about.
The first question to ask yourself when you’re looking for an agency is: what kind of marketing would you like to do?
Inbound Marketing
The key difference between inbound and outbound marketing is the method of how you address your consumers. For inbound marketing, it’s all about getting your customers to leave their busy lives and come and experience your brand. Inbound marketing is considered to be the more ‘effective’ form of marketing because the capabilities for reaching consumers are pretty much endless: blogging, email marketing, social media, SEO – anything and everything digital can help create a more valuable experience for the consumer and increase trust in your brand.
It’s considered a far softer selling tactic as the idea is that you’re not forcing the consumer to pay attention to your products, but only making them aware of your existence; when they’re ready to make the leap and purchase, they’ll reach out to you. Think of it like window shopping: nothing’s forcing you to make a decision, but if you ever end up needing a pair of shoes in the future, you’ll know where to find them!
Inbound marketing has a very specific purpose, though: making sure that your audience will stay with you. Outbound marketing by definition is liminal – that billboard or advertisement you take out might not play on television forever, that billboard will eventually get replaced, but inbound marketing lives on the internet, and the internet is forever. A steady stream of new content that people can opt in or opt out of is a good way to build a lasting connection with an audience that hasn’t yet realised you’re doing it, and to keep them invested when there are quieter periods of outbound advertising.
Inbound marketing is excellent for advertising your brand constantly, without actually having to take out a billboard or a television advert or go on the radio every time you want to talk to your audience. It’s the lifeblood of most companies nowaday, and something that every organisation, from the smallest startup to the biggest megacorporation, can’t really do without.
If you’re a SaaS company, inbound marketing is even more important for you! Depending on product fees, you might find that it’s hard to connect or speak to your audience once the initial purchase has been made. Social media helps make those conversations easier.
Outbound marketing
Outbound marketing is different on a couple of levels. It’s considered a little old-fashioned in terms of marketing – when your digital capabilities can strategize your marketing right down to the specific audience that you need, the old way of thinking about marketing can seem a little brash and outdated.
Outbound marketing uses any methods it can to make sure that the audience can’t ignore the presence of your brand. Whether it’s unskippable TV advertisements, ads on local radio, giant billboards, or pop-ups, the audience can’t escape your brand forever with outbound marketing.
Unfortunately, this sort of marketing can be considered disruptive, and clients are more likely to close or hide ads that they don’t like, but there’s definitely a way of doing it well. With outbound marketing, the lighter the better is the key note here.
However, outbound marketing is absolutely vital for one thing: ramping up your business quickly.
Especially if you’re a new business. If your start-up has just launched, nothing will bring people running more than an absolutely-can’t-miss-it pop-up ad, billboard, or television advertisement. With so much information out there in general, making sure that people don’t ignore your new business is an ongoing job on its own, so making sure that your business is impossible to avoid is a good thing, at least at the start!
Without outbound marketing, your business is going to struggle to attract attention, and the longer it takes for you to attract attention, the less revenue you’ll make. Most businesses need the boost from outbound marketing more than once; that’s why your favourite company will send you regular emails if you sign up to their newsletter, and why even big companies like McDonald’s and Burger King take out billboards and television ads.
Anything else?
The best way of marketing your start-up is to use both. This is something that we’ve found effective as an agency that ran SaaS business ourselves, and something we’ll keep talking about as often as we can.
Longer-term inbound marketing will bring in new consumers easily, but shorter-term outbound marketing is critical for ramping up your business’ reach. By using a blend of the two, where you’re not relying strictly on outbound marketing, and you’re not relying strictly on inbound marketing, you can keep a steady stream of consumers coming in through the door, build loyalties with your existing customers, and also keep a steady stream of new consumers who’ve discovered your brand late.
The more content there is online about your company, the better – so long as it’s good content, of course!
The Agency: Detailwork
Of course, there’s one other important aspect you need to look at before you settle for any agency, and that’s the agency itself. Not its capacity to market, not its capacity for social media – although those are important – who the agency is and what the agency does in general.
There are about a thousand different marketing approaches that you can take. Similarly, there are ten thousand different agencies who will take those approaches and make it their own. Figuring out which agency will fit seamlessly into your plans is vital. It’ll cut down on the growing pains of working with an outside agency, and it’ll make it easier to smooth over any disagreements; plus, you’re not paying money for nothing!
Here’s a list of things you should look at when you’re finalising your agency selection:
The team
It goes without saying that the best agencies rely on their people to do the best work. What you need to look at here is who they employ: is it a design-focused agency, with a whole team of designers but very little in the way of social media marketers? Is it the opposite – a lot of social media experts, but only one or two designers? Somewhere in the middle? Something different?
Ideally, you can find an agency with a team that supports everything you need to do. The best full-service agencies employ a number of different roles and have a mix of everything you could possibly need to kick off a marketing campaign, from a professional photographer to a copywriter who can push your campaign on social media.
Experience in similar sectors
What industries does the agency primarily work in? There are some agencies who find their niche earlier on: they focus on just marketing automobiles or white goods or software, and they do well for themselves. There are some agencies who branch out into each and every industry, and do exceptionally well without being tied down to a particular sector.
If you’re in a particular niche or sector, you’ll want to make sure that the agency understands the caveats that come with advertising in that sector, especially if it’s different to what they normally do! Advertising a restaurant isn’t the same as advertising for a static store, so absolutely make sure that their portfolio includes work within your sector.
Experience in similar situations
Look: there’s no way we can get around this, but you need to find an agency that has experience in dealing with your particular situation. If your agency has only really dealt with big established companies, and has never really worked on smaller launches, that could be a potential issue for you later on. Same if it’s the opposite. The agency that you choose should be able to work with you, regardless of budget or agility.
Agencies who are experienced in both big-budget ‘launch day’ growth and smaller, low-key low budget growth are what you need. If you can’t find an agency that does both (though this is unlikely to happen!), find one that deals exclusively with your situation.
Agency age
A newly established agency is not necessarily the best agency you can opt for. For this, you want an older agency, an agency that has been around long enough that you can rely on them to keep you happy. After all, the best marketing businesses have been around for ages, and weathered hundreds of different changes in the way people market and have conversations with each other. While a new agency could have the benefit of cutting edge technology, an older agency will have the benefit of experience and doing things within limitations.
Marketing is a minefield. One bad campaign or terrible year, and the marketing company is normally the first to be thrown out. Look for agencies that have made it through recent crises, such as COVID-19, and kept communicating. Look for agencies who’ve been around for longer than five years, ten years, fifteen. Look for agencies who are constantly communicating.
You’ll find your agency then.
Previous work
Another key aspect that gets overlooked is the previous work the agency has performed – not just in terms of their clients, but in terms of their own website and advertising. Check out their website: is it up to date? Are there recent blogs? Do all the links work and send you to where they’re supposed to go? An up to date website is proof that the agency is continuously working on improving itself and making itself easier for people to find. Posting blogs on social media is also a key hint that the agency is constantly adapting and working.
Furthermore, look at their client work. Most agencies will have a portfolio section or mention what campaigns they worked on in their blogs. If you find those campaigns online, take a look at how they did: do you like the work? Did it do well in terms of numbers on social media? Are there client testimonials, and can you look at those testimonials online? Are they verified testimonials?
Getting the measure of a company through other people is a good way of determining who’s telling the truth about their work ethic and who isn’t.
Conclusion
Every SaaS marketing agency will have its merits and its downfalls, but the best SaaS marketing agency for you will be able to work within those limitations and those merits. Considering how wide-spread and important marketing is, if you’re able to outsource your marketing to an SaaS marketing agency, it might be the best option for you to get world-class marketing in a way that would cost you less than doing it yourself – and getting proven results to keep you going to the next fiscal quarter. Will it solve all your problems? Probably not – they’re marketers, not magicians! – but it’ll go a long way towards helping your company grow sustainably and keep going even when your profits dip low, such as during a global pandemic.
