Hey it’s Ryan Allis at SaasRise, the private growth community for SaaS CEOs & Founders.

This week I have a gift for you… My personal SaaS Marketing Checklist PDF with fifty steps that lead to rapidly accelerating customer acquisition.

It contains some of my “secrets” for rapid SaaS growth that I use with my SaaS CEO coaching clients…

Yep, I’m giving away the exact checklist I’ve used to help SaaS companies systematize and scale their customer acquisition process and grow from $5M to $50M ARR (one client did exactly this in 24 months!). You can get the PDF version here.

But why am I giving all this epic SaaS growth content away for free? First, because I’ve been the trenches as a SaaS CEO for ten years building and then exiting iContact for $169M and now want to share the hard earned wisdom…

And second, more selfishly, because it’s helping us grow our SaaS CEO and founder community, SaasRise (we’ve gone from 0 to 67 members in the last six weeks) that we’ve set up to help SaaS CEO and founders grow customer acquisition and mRR more rapidly.

I hope the below checklist helps you accelerate growth at your firm!

-Ryan

The SaaS Marketing Checklist
By Ryan Allis, Co-Founder & Former CEO of iContact

Here is my 50 step SaaS Marketing Checklist for both B2B and B2C SaaS companies. These are the actual steps I take my SaaS coaching clients through over a six month implementation timeline. 

You can read the steps below or find a printable and designed PDF version here. Send this along to your head of marketing or agency lead to execute or we can help you executive it.

Just remember, it’s not just knowing what to do that matters — it’s actually doing it. So make sure you actually take a moment now to ensure these things actually get done.

Let’s jump in…

The Overall Growth Strategy: Dominate Any SaaS Niche Through Omnipresence

Here’s the mental framework…

1. Rapidly scale up lead generation and customer acquisition by becoming omnipresent with digital advertising on Meta, LinkedIn, and Google by turning on retargeting, showing ads to your outbound sales lists, and creating prospect lookalike lists.
   

2. Run small ad tests initially ($5k ad spend per channel) and then scale up the channels producing profitable CPLs and CPAs, growing spend by about 10-15% per week as long as CPLs and CPAs are profitable, and continually improving results through conversion rate optimization (CRO) on the ad creatives, landing pages, and offers.
   

3. Then, once you’re omnipresent digitally with targeted ads to your prospects, ABM lists, and site visitors, scale up content marketing, affiliate marketing, reseller partnerships, outbound sales, tradeshows, conferences, podcast sponsorships, and newsletter sponsorships.

The goal here is to dominate mindshare, dominate your niche, and rapidly scale up customer acquisition and MRR within a payback window of 6-12 months of revenue (depending on your churn rate and LTV).

My 50 Step SaaS Marketing Checklist

Here are the 50 steps. Just implement them one at a time and watch your lead volume and closed won volume materially shift in the following few months.

If you want help implementing this omnipresence marketing system inside your business, join SaaS Circle or reach out to me so we can support you in making it happen.

LinkedIn Customer Acquisition

1. Install LinkedIn Insight Pixel to begin to build your retargeting audience

2. Turn on 180 day site visitor retargeting

3. Set up conversion tracking to track the Cost Per Lead and Cost Per Customer per campaign and ad set

4. Upload customer list then turn on 0.1% customer list Lookalike audience

5. Upload prospect list (trials/demos that didn’t convert) then turn on ads to prospect list

6. Turn on 0.1% Lookalike audience on your prospect list

7. Upload outbound sales email list then turn on ads to this outbound sales list

8. Turn on 0.1% Lookalike audience on your outbound sales list

Meta Customer Acquisition

1. Install Meta Pixel to begin to build your retargeting audience

2. Turn on 180 day site visitor retargeting

3. Set up conversion tracking to track the Cost Per Lead (CPL) and Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) per campaign and ad set. 

4. Upload customer list then turn on 0.1% customer list Lookalike audience

5. Upload prospect list (trials/demos that didn’t convert) then turn on ads to prospect list

6. Turn on 0.1% Lookalike audience on your prospect list (trials/demos)

7. Upload your outbound sales email list (people in target market who aren’t yet active prospects) then turn on ads to this list

8. Turn on 0.1% Lookalike audience on your outbound sales list

9. Create a custom conversion event to track trials, meeting bookings, demo bookings, and paying customers

Google Customer Acquisition

1. Install Google Ads Tracking Pixel to begin to build your retargeting audience (also install the GA4 Google Analytics Pixel)

2. Set up a conversion in Google Ads to track the Cost Per Lead and Cost Per Customer

3. Turn on Google Search Ads for your brand keywords and related keywords for your niche

4. Set up and turn on Google Display Ad Retargeting

5. Turn on YouTube video ad retargeting

6. Upload your prospect lists and any outbound sales lists to Google (Customer Match List) and then show display ads to people who match this list

Inbound Sales Automation

1. Create a 180 day prospect follow-up sequence within your CRM tool, utilizing case studies, educational videos, call-to-action emails focusing on trial/demos, and past blog posts. 2 quality emails per week for 6 months is the optimal frequency. Once the prospect converts, move them into the customer education sequence.

2. Create a 90 day customer education sequence within your CRM tool designed to educate your customer on how to get the best value from and use of your product and minimize churn. 1 quality email per week for 3 months is the optimal frequency.

Outbound Sales (For Companies with ACVs of $10k or Higher)

1. Buy or build an email list of everyone in your Ideal Client Profile (ICP)/Target Market

2. Use Apollo.io, Uplead, Seamless.ai, ZoomInfo, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator

3. If you don’t want to do this yourself, hire an SDR in-house or outsource your outbound sales reach outs via email and LinkedIn, using Revenue Accelerator

4. Use Reply.io, YAMM, or Outreach to create an email sequence to your outbound prospects, sending ~500 email reach outs per day per SDR

5. Upload these sales prospecting lists to LinkedIn (Matched Audience), Meta (Custom Audience), and Google (Customer Match List) to then show ads to these exact prospects

6. If your ACV is $100k or higher, create a field sales team to add in-person visits to prospects that have already been seeing your targeted ads and receiving email and LinkedIn reach outs for at least 90 days.

Content Marketing

1. Start a weekly newsletter and blog for your firm, promoting case studies. You can use your CRM tool or a tool like Beehive, Medium, or Substack.

2. Add your current customer and prospect list to your newsletter

3. Subscribe your current opt-in list to your newsletter

4. Offer a free subscription to your newsletter to anyone who’s expressed interest in your product, content, or lead magnets previously (then to maintain good deliverability and open rates, prune/remove anyone who doesn’t open after 60 days of weekly issues).

Additional Key Channels to Test

1. Find a list of firms using your competitors on Built.with and download the list of everyone using your competitors, then enrich the list with email addresses using Seamless.ai and LinkedIn Sales Navigator then upload these sales prospecting lists to LinkedIn (Matched Audience), Meta (Custom Audience), and Google (Customer Match List) to then show ads to these exact prospects as well as a Lookalike list based on this list

2. For B2B, get listed on G2 and Capterra and do a customer review campaign so you get ranked highly on G2 and Capterra

3. Smaller ad networks including Bing, Adroll, Taboola, Yahoo, Outbrain, Pinterest, and Reddit

4. Affiliate networks including ShareASale, CJ, Rakuten, Perform, Adsterra, and MaxBounty

5. Niche podcast sponsorships on Acast

6. Newsletter sponsorships on Paved, LiveIntent, Letterwell, and Beehive

Offline Advertising Channels

1. Hire a team to have a presence at all key niche tradeshows and conferences

2. Direct mail postcards using Sequel DM, and PostPilot

B2C Advertising Channels (for Saas Companies Marketing to Consumers)

1. Influencer Marketing with Grin, Upfluence, Klear, Neoreach, Traackr, TapInfluence, YouTube BrandConnect, Grapevine, Shoutcart, Whalar, Influence.co, and CreatorIQ

2. Streaming radio advertising on Spotify, Pandora, and iHeartRadio along with Streaming TV advertising on Hulu, Vibe, Netflix, and MNTN

3. Get reviewed and listed in ProductHunt

4. TikTok Advertising

5. Digital Billboards on Outfront, ClearChannel, and Lamar

6. Print Magazine advertising with magazines in your niche

If you haven’t already, you can get the PDF version here.

Join our Saas Growth Mastermind for CEOs and Founders

I hope this list is helpful. If you like this checklist and want more stuff like this, apply to join SaasRise, our mastermind community for SaaS CEOs and Founders who are focused on scaling up MRR. Every Wednesday we jump on a call to support each other and share what is working with scaling our companies – and we support each other throughout the week in our private community.

About this article: If you like this article and want more my free 1240 slide SaaS Growth Playbook goes into even greater detail about each stage of this process.

How to Work Together: For more resources and to learn more about our B2B SaaS CEO Coaching service working directly with Ryan, visit www.hillcanyon.com.

Join the Community: For more how-to-scale-up support and content, apply to join SaaS Circle, our mastermind community for growth-focused SaaS CEOs. We offer a free two-week trial to the community for qualified SaaS CEOs and founders.

About The Author

Four Helpful Free SaaS Growth Resources

The most in-depth guide for scaling up SaaS companies from $0 to $50M in ARR. Including over 1,200 slides on every aspect of SaaS scaling.

A fourteen page in-depth PDF on we take each CEO client through a six-phase process designed to increase lead volume, customer acquisition, and revenue growth — and then scale up the sales team, executive team, and investor support as we help you prepare for future fundraising rounds (if needed) or an exit (if desired).

A twenty page in-depth PDF on how to scale a B2B SaaS Company from $1M to $50M ARR. Covering CAC-based customer acquisition, sales team scaling, venture capital markets, and preparing for the exit.

The SaaS Growth Formula was written to help SaaS CEOs who are focused on growing their company's sales - by implementing a simple formula called The Growth Formula. This formula is for companies that have already established product/market fit, already have paying customers, and are now ready to scale up through scientific and CAC-based digital marketing, inbound sales, and outbound sales.

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