You’ve done the heavy lifting. Your SaaS startup is funded, you have a sales team in place, and have hired key leadership. Now, whether you’re pursuing product-market fit or need to scale quickly and predictably as you prepare to go to market, it’s time to think about marketing. Specifically, SaaS growth marketing.
But what’s the best approach?
Hiring an in-house team is time-consuming and potentially intimidating, but partnering with an outside agency is often expensive, and they may not understand your business…
In this article, we’ll take the guesswork out of determining the right SaaS growth marketing strategy for your business by looking at the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. Plus, we’ll walk you through the key questions to ask and considerations to make, so you can move forward with confidence.
SaaS Growth Marketing - What is it?
SaaS growth marketing is a customer-centric, full-funnel, data-driven approach to marketing. Relying heavily on optimized, purposeful content creation, analytics analysis, and testing provides SaaS companies with a strategic marketing approach that ensures efficiency and effectiveness. By continually iterating and scaling what works, SaaS companies can grow profitably and predictably and CEOs can feel confident that they aren’t wasting time OR money on “random acts of marketing.”
With growth marketing, customer acquisition looks less like a funnel and more like a flywheel. It begins with awareness like most customer journeys but doesn’t end with conversion or revenue. Instead, it prioritizes retaining and nurturing existing customers to make them brand advocates and enthusiasts. Why? Because when someone loves your product, they’ll tell others about it, reducing your acquisition costs and increasing customer lifetime value. Not a bad deal, right?
In-House: Building Your Own SaaS Growth Marketing Team
Hiring an in-house growth marketing team certainly has some advantages. For starters, you control the budget and the size of the team and have a more direct impact on the messaging. Because they are your employees, you can fully immerse them in company and product knowledge and be assured that all of their marketing efforts are directed toward growing and building your brand. An in-house team also provides greater flexibility and responsiveness, allowing you to pivot or respond quickly when necessary.
The drawbacks of hiring an in-house growth team include having to hire and train qualified staff for these roles, which is time-consuming and often expensive. Additionally, managing and supervising a new department whose tasks and responsibilities may be outside of your experience can be intimidating and ineffectual, and finally, the hardware and software expenses for a full-fledged marketing department can be cost-prohibitive.
Although it seems as though building an in-house team would be more financially responsible, that doesn’t always turn out to be the case. Salaries, benefits, and the tech needed to create a growth marketing department are substantial ongoing expenses. If cost is a significant driver - it's worth laying out the expected budget for each.
Outsource: An Instant SaaS Growth Marketing Team
Hiring an outside growth marketing team also has its strengths and challenges. Among the benefits of working with an outside agency, team or even a fractional expert is the level of expertise and experience they provide. In addition, working with a team or agency means they have specialized team members in SEO, content creation, graphic design, analytics, search marketing, and more to help you achieve your growth goals.
Plus, you gain access to previously tested and proven strategies, giving you confidence that your marketing investment will pay off. Outside growth partners can also ebb and flow with your company’s needs and scale alongside you as you grow. Finally, they can understand and track key growth marketing metrics, helping you understand which tactics are working and fine-tune future marketing and communications efforts.
But there are some drawbacks to outsourcing a growth marketing team… For one, they do have other clients, so turnaround time may be longer than an in-house team. Also, they may not understand your industry or product as well as you would like. You will have to invest a bit more time in meetings and communications to bring them up to speed and educate them.
Additionally, fully outsourcing a team can be more expensive than working with consultants or freelancers, because growth teams offer a more cohesive package of services. And last, outsourcing often results in at least a little less brand ownership of the marketing process.
If you do consider outsourcing a marketing team or just want to do some preliminary research on cost and services to make a more educated decision, here are five questions you’ll want to ask:
- Do you have experience with SaaS?
- What are your growth marketing strategies?
- Will we have a dedicated team?
- What’s included in the cost?
- What happens if you fail to deliver?
Determining how to approach SaaS growth marketing is one of the key decisions you’ll make as a startup founder. Knowing the pros and cons of in-house vs outsourced teams can clarify which approach is best suited for your unique business.
Outsourcing can be particularly effective for SaaS companies when time is of the essence, as building strategy and creating processes take time, and experienced growth teams have battle-tested these elements across multiple clients. Often, SaaS companies will take a hybrid approach, starting with an outsourced team to build a foundation and then creating an in-house team once the company is sustainably thriving.
At Brand Theory, we specialize in helping SaaS companies grow predictably and profitably by following a strategic growth marketing framework. Curious to know more? Book a no-obligation introduction to Brand Theory today or sign up to get access to our free, DIY Growth Marketing Playbook.
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