How to Do B2B SaaS Marketing - SaaS Growth Course 🔥

Hi there,

This week I’m covering how to B2B SaaS marketing – by building an ABM lead list, doing targeted outbound prospecting at scale, and layering on matched audience ads.

Below, I share the exact marketing strategy we used to bootstrap SaasRise from $0 to $3M in ARR over the last 12 months – and to recruit our first 350 members into the community (all CEOs/Founders with $1M to $100M in ARR).

We did it by building an Account Based Marketing lead list using Instantly, Apollo, and ListKit  – and then running email and digital ad campaigns to our exact target audience of software CEOs and founders. You can do the same thing, making your brand omnipresent within your target market.

The full steps are below…

Our guiding philosophy? There’s no sense in simply waiting for your target audience to find you. Go out and find them – and then start building trust with your audience by sending high value content and showing that same list matched audience and retargeting ads on Meta, LinkedIn, Google, and Adroll.

Yes, doing tradeshows, SEO, PLG, and affiliate marketing helps – but NOTHING replaces actually going out and proactively educating and building trust with your target market with great content (videos, case studies, PDFs, webinars, articles, etc.) and then AFTER you’ve built trust, inviting that audience to your main CTA of a trial, freemium, free consultation, audit, discovery call, demo, etc. 

Here’s this week’s Loom video covering all this in detail and the Google slides, created by Ryan Allis, founder of SaasRise and iContact ($169M exit). To access to all 26 lessons at once, apply to join the community here or log in to your member portal.

There’s LOTS more step-by-step detail below the buttons on how you can set this up inside your software company (so keep reading or forward this to your Head of Marketing for implementation purposes)…

⚙️ The Detail: How to Build Your SaaS Marketing Machine

Here’s the full video on SaaS Marketing Strategy and the full video of building your SaaS content machine, followed by a summary below for easy scanning…

First, build a list of everyone in your target audience (using Instantly, Apollo, and ListKit or any lead prospecting platform) – and then send automated outbound email sequences (we use Instantly for that) and then show matched audiences ads on Meta, LinkedIn, Google, and Adroll to those same people. 

Then… layer on search ads, retargeting ads, lookalike ads, and review site ads. Within 2-3 months – if you actually produce great content that’s worth watching and reading (that’s the key!) – everyone in your target market will know your brand and understand the problem your software solves. 

If you set up the system properly, you’ll be reaching about 60,000 new leads per month via outbound prospecting and turning that into around 15,000 additional highly targeted visitors to your website monthly from email and ads, resulting in around 1000 new MQLs every month (which usually turns in an extra 5 to 50 customers per month depending on your ACV and sales cycle).

The total cost? About $15k per month for ads + outbound campaigns.

Let’s recap the whole system with this one slide…

✅ How to Add an Extra $3M-$10M Per Year in New ARR

Following the SaaS Growth System in our own business generated $3M in ARR in the 12 months after our launch in Sep 2023. We turned $180k of total S&M spend into $12M of enterprise value in 12 months (assuming a 4x revenue multiple).

For a SaaS firm with real budget and SDR team, you could expect this system to add $5M to $10M in additional new ARR per year to your top line (and about $20-$40M in added Enterprise value per year).

We built a content machine that produces actually helpful content and then a system that distributes it to our target audience to build awareness, trust, and ultimately, new SaasRise community members.

All you have to do is ensure you can create 5-10 great pieces of content (case studies, articles, PDF reports, survey result summaries, etc.) that you can re-use over and over in many different formats (email, LinkedIn, blogs, outbound, ads, video summaries etc.).

The content itself needs to be created either by the CEO/Founder or someone who knows the market and space very well at an expert level (and who is a good writer). It can be written content, video content, or ideally a mix of both. You can win through AI regurgitation. You need stuff that is ACTUALLY worth people’s time to consume. That’s how you win the attention war.

Watch the video below on Building Your Content Machine for more details on how to set this all up…

⚙️The Actual Results We’ve Gotten: Open Sourced

Between our targeted ads, emails, and LinkedIn posts we’re now getting about 1 targeted B2B million impressions per month within our target market – all for $16,711 per month in sales and marketing spend ($10k on ad spend, $3k for the outbound system, and $3k for an SDR to follow-up on new member applications).

We “open kimono” our marketing process and results at SaasRise, as part of building our own content machine. You can see above, we’ve built up to 1 million impressions per month of our content, and have bootstrapped from $0 to $3M in ARR as a three person team. 

Building your outbound content marketing system first (leads list + email sequence + ads) to supercharge your growth within 90 days – and then work on the slower and longer payback investments like inbound marketing.

This is what a SaaS growth marketing team should be doing…

If you want to know more detail, keep reading below, and apply to join SaasRise here as we cover this type of stuff in detail on our five weekly mastermind calls and share example high-performing email sequences that you can copy. 

🔥The Four Steps to Rapid SaaS Growth 

Stuck with me so far? Still reading?

Now for the full details… if you’re still with me here… you’re getting the good stuff as a reward for getting to this part of the article…

We want those who actually read through these emails in depth to get the REAL VALUE… so here you go!

Just focus on executing the below for six months and you’ll watch so much transform inside your business.

Six months of following this SaaS Growth System we’ve created and honed and you’ll transform your B2B SaaS sales results and finally get over that $5M ARR plateau that many SaaS firms get stuck at…

1. Build a list of everyone in your target market using lead prospecting tools like Instantly, Apollo, and ListKit
   

2. Set up a ~10 email sequence of actually valuable and highly relevant content to go out every 3 days to your target market (survey results, case studies, PDFs, reports, articles, etc.) and then add everyone in your target market to this sequence. 

   1. Using Instantly, you can set up a system within a couple weeks that adds 2,000 leads per day to the top of your sequence funnel and allows you to reach 60,000 new leads per month. Build the system yourself so you own it. Costs around $2k/mo to do this at this scale. See our B2B outbound prospecting inbox/domain calculator here. Focus on sending actually valuable and relevant content.

   2. Have an SDR reach out to anyone who is consistently engaging with (clicking) on your content

   3. Add those who click through to your content to a longer more in-depth sequence and to your weekly/monthly newsletter

      1. If your ACV > $5k you may want to also do outbound LinkedIn prospecting to the same audience

      2. If your ACV is > $15k, you may want to also do outbound calling prospecting to the same audience

      3. If your ACV is > $25k, you may want to also do outbound postcard/physical package prospecting to the same audience

      4. If your ACV is > $100k, you may want to add in field sales to the same audience
         

3. Turn on Matched Audience Ads on Meta, LinkedIn, Google Display, and Adroll to show your ads to the exact same people you’re emailing.
   

4. Then, once the above is set up, turn on retargeting ads, lookalike ads, search ads (brand terms, comparison terms, and competitor alternative terms), and review site ads. 

Follow those steps and you’ll be off to the races. And if you have questions about implementation just into one of our mastermind calls, our our members-only Slack channel or WhatsApp Group.

And if you want to learn more, apply to join SaasRise where we talk about this kind of stuff all day long. Every week we host five live mastermind calls for our members focusing on revenue growth, systems building, and exit preparation.

Finally, here are some slides that may be helpful as you put all this to motion inside your company… 

If you like this type of stuff – join our community here so you get access to all 26 modules of our SaaS Growth Course instantly. You’ll also be able to learn from the other 350+ SaasRise CEO/Founder members – all building 7 and 8 figure ARR SaaS businesses.

🛝 This Week’s Key Slides

Here are the most important slides we cover in this week’s unit economics lesson…

What’s Coming Via Email Weekly Over the Next 26 Weeks 📅

I’ll be sharing this type of content every Monday for the next six months. If you want access to the full course now, rather than waiting each week to get it, just apply here to join the SaasRise community (all CEOs/Founders of SaaS firms with $1M+ in ARR are invited to join)..

Next week I’ll be covering ABM Lead List building (part of outbound prospecting), so keep looking out for emails from Ryan Allis & SaasRise! 🎯

By the way, here’s what’s the SaasRise community directory looks like… we recently passed 350 members, representing over $2.2 billion in collective ARR. Members can access this via their member portal here.

See you next week with a post on building ABM Lead Lists!

-Ryan

Until then,
Ryan Allis, CEO & Founder
SaasRise
www.saasrise.com
The #1 Community for Experienced SaaS CEOs and Founders

About SaasRise Founder Ryan Allis

We’ll see you next time with more great SaaS growth and scaling content!

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