Startup Marketing Framework - How to Get Started Selling Your SaaS

A lot has been written about how to go from zero to one with startup marketing, but unfortunately much of it is generic and without any real ‘roadmap’.  While there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to beginning a new marketing campaign I’m hoping that this article will at least give a good starting point to think about how you might put together your own sales and marketing strategy.

We all love formulas that we can follow. Things that are “proven” and can give you a quick way to get started without being paralyzed by the choices that we may face when starting marketing a new business from scratch.

That’s the place I found myself in recently when acquiring SalesCamp. SalesCamp is a referral marketing SaaS tool that helps companies get more high quality new customers from word-of-mouth referrals from their existing brand ambassadors (existing customers and fans).  I bought it with exactly zero customers a few weeks ago.

Now it’s time to go get some customers and start paying some bills.

Below I’ll lay out the things that I’m doing to raise awareness for our product and begin both those long term and short term, inbound and outbound growth tactics that we all know are important.

I’ll give things a dollar amount, but you can scale these amounts up or down depending on what your sales and marketing budgets are. The goal here is to give a single example of what a beginning sales and marketing stack might look like.

Ok let’s dive in

Sales – $200/month

Yes I’m starting with sales because, well they’re the most important part of any business. Say what you will but if you don’t sell (and close those sales) then you have a hobby, not a business.

My sales efforts are going to take the form of cold email outreach campaigns. I am using Leadfuze to both gather these emails and conduct the outreach campaigns to specific types of customers.

Because I’m not exactly sure who my ideal customer is going to be this will be a slightly more general/broad approach than I may have later on when I target specific types of businesses and customers.

I will begin by sending about emails to 100 contacts at a time and these campaigns will run the course of 2 weeks. There is an enormous amount we could discuss when it comes to cold and outbound email. More on what’s working and what’s not in a bit.

Content marketing – $300/month

Blogging.

Yuck, right? Well, kind of. Not all content marketing is as bad as you might think, especially for a new business.

The long term, and long tail, effect of content marketing can’t be argued with and we are taking an opportunity to get started on this bandwagon early. In the long run I absolutely know that our blog will be a huge value add to our overall brand and our marketing efforts.

This budget will allow us to create 2 really good, long articles per month. And we’ll spend the rest of our time marketing our content, which will take several forms (more on that in a bit).

We’ve done some pretty extensive keyword research for this content as well and are using the hub-and-spoke model to start getting organic rankings for some high quality search terms.

Facebook Cold Ads – $200/mo

I mentioned that we’ll be doing a lot of marketing of our content and this is where it comes into place. We will be running Facebook ads to cold audiences.

These will be those who have interests that we think will be similar to what our buyer persona will be. And we’ll be driving these ads to the blog content that we’ve created.

The objective with these ads is just to get new eyeballs on the SalesCamp brand, driving them from Facebook to blog posts on our website, and delivering value there.

This also does one other very cool thing…it will add a retargeting pixel to any user who visits the site.

Facebook Retargetting – $200

It’s pretty widely acknowledged that retargetting is the easiest, and best ROI you can get out of Facebook ads.

The concept here is simple: we will show new ads to everyone who’s been to our website (including the blog posts we’ve sent cold traffic to).

The retargetting goal here will be to get them into a webinar that I’ll be putting on.

Wrap up

This probably isn’t the wildest or most complex marketing plan ever created but that’s kind of the goal.  For me when faced with the big wild ocean of digital marketing a little opinion and direction on where to get started is really helpful.

And here I wanted to share with you the outline of my plan in hopes that it might inspire some marketing plans for you and give you a bit of direction in how you’re planning to grow your business.

Would love to hear your thoughts about how you’re looking to start growing a new SaaS app and how a framework like this might fit in with the plans you have.  Leave a comment below!