SaaS Marketing Plan: How To Put It Together
Summary
TLDRThe video discusses key differences between sales and marketing to help SaaS founders grow their businesses. It explains how marketing educates many potential buyers to streamline later sales conversations. The video outlines a 4-part marketing strategy to define target customers, product value proposition, differentiation, and urgency. It then covers marketing execution using organic outreach and ads to generate leads over brand awareness. The video concludes by offering a coaching program to help create an ideal customer profile, messaging, and ongoing sales and marketing processes to drive growth.
Takeaways
- 😀 Marketing educates many buyers while sales talks to individual buyers
- 👥 Marketing creates leads, sales converts leads to revenue
- 💡 Good marketing makes sales easier by educating buyers beforehand
- 🎯 In early stages, focus marketing on generating leads over brand awareness
- ✏️ Define your marketing strategy by answering 4 key questions before executing
- 📝 Build a marketing plan that clearly states who your product is for and what value it provides
- 🔎 Understand why customers should choose you over competitors
- ⏰ Craft messaging that convinces customers to take action now
- 📈 Use organic marketing to test what resonates then scale with ads
- ❌ Don't mistake outbound and events as marketing when they are actually sales
Q & A
What are the core differences between sales and marketing?
-The core difference is that sales is a one-to-one activity focused on closing deals, while marketing is a one-to-many activity focused on educating potential customers.
Why is marketing important for early stage SaaS companies?
-Good marketing educates potential customers and makes the sales process easier by bringing qualified leads further down the buying journey before sales engages.
What are the 4 key components of a marketing strategy?
-The 4 key components are: 1) Who is this for (ideal customer profile), 2) What is the result you deliver, 3) Why choose you over competitors, 4) Why act now.
What are the main marketing execution channels?
-The main marketing execution channels are organic (unpaid) activities and paid ads. Outbound and events are more sales-focused.
How can events be used for marketing?
-If you present on stage at an event educating the audience and directing them to learn more, that classifies as marketing. Engaging one-on-one at a booth is sales.
Why focus on leads over likes in marketing?
-Likes may increase brand awareness, but leads actively show interest and can turn into sales pipeline. Leads are a stronger signal for revenue growth.
What is the Broadway Show concept?
-It refers to a consistent set of synchronized sales and marketing activities run weekly to engage ideal customers and convert them into pipeline and revenue.
What 3 pillars are covered in the SaaS Go-To-Market coaching program?
-1) Ideal customer profile, 2) Manifesto (positioning and messaging), 3) Execution framework for sales and marketing.
What mistakes can be avoided through the coaching program?
-By learning core go-to-market principles and strategy before execution, founders can avoid common pitfalls in misallocating resources to the wrong activities.
Who can this video be useful for?
-This video provides an introductory overview useful for any early-stage SaaS founder looking to better understand marketing and articulate their go-to-market strategy.
Outlines
😊 Understanding the Difference Between Sales and Marketing
The first principle is understanding the difference between sales (one-to-one activities) and marketing (one-to-many activities). Good marketing makes sales easier by educating buyers beforehand. You want leads over likes - leads turn into opportunities and revenue.
😀 Building an Effective Marketing Strategy
Before executing marketing campaigns, define a strategy by answering: who is this for, what result you deliver, why choose you over competitors, and why act now. Outbound and events seem like marketing but focus on organic reach and ads for real leverage.
🚀 Executing Your Marketing Plan
For marketing execution, do organic outreach which is free and helps you test messaging. Take top performing organic content and turn it into ads to scale reach. Avoid thinking of outbound and events as marketing when they are actually one-to-one sales activities.
👍 Bringing It All Together
By following these principles to understand marketing and sales, build an effective strategy, and properly execute campaigns - you can generate leads, pipeline and revenue to scale your SaaS business. If interested in hands-on help to build your go-to-market strategy, check out the coaching program (link provided).
Mindmap
Keywords
💡SaaS
💡sales
💡marketing
💡leads
💡ideal customer profile (ICP)
💡manifesto
💡go-to-market strategy
💡organic marketing
💡ads
💡outbound sales
Highlights
Sales is one-on-one activities. Marketing is one to many.
The better you get at marketing, the easier sales becomes.
Leads are better than likes. A lot of people think that brand marketing, getting the brand out there just saying, oh, we are awesome.io and awesome.io is everywhere, they think that that's really what's going to drive revenue.
Strategy breaks down into four key questions. Your marketing strategy, you just need to answer who is this for? Specifically who is your product for?
What is it that you are selling to them? What exactly does your product do? What is the value proposition?
Why they should go with you, regardless of what you may think there are competitors.
Marketing should also define why now. Even if you are solving an urgent important problem, and you're the best solution, it doesn't necessarily mean they'll take action now.
Organic is you can go to X, you can go to LinkedIn, you can go to Facebook, you can go to Instagram, you can go to TikTok, all of these places, you can go write a blog post.
The other one is ads. You can run ads on LinkedIn, you can run ads on ads, you can run ads on Facebook.
Outbound is not exactly marketing. Marketing is one to many, right?
Some people think of events as marketing, like we went to this event and we talked to a whole bunch of people. That's really sales. It's still one to one.
You want to focus on organic and ads 'cause organic helps you do it for free, you test what works and then you double down on it with ads.
Go-to market is sales and marketing working together to actually drive growth for your company?
Your manifesto is your positioning, it's your messaging, it's your strategic narrative.
This is what I call a Broadway show. A Broadway show is a consistent set of sales and marketing activities that you do every single week to bring your manifesto to your ICP on a consistent basis.
Transcripts
- If you're looking to grow a SaaS business,
you need to know the difference between sales and marketing.
Now, I'll be honest, when I first started out
as a SaaS founder, I thought I knew the difference
until I really dug into books,
talked to mentors, put things into play.
Now here we are, 15 years later,
I realized I had no idea what the difference was.
Be honest, do you, in this episode,
I'm gonna walk you through the three principles
you absolutely need to know on exactly the difference
between sales and marketing, what type of marketing
is actually needed for an early stage SaaS company
and exactly how to build your marketing plan.
And when you watch till the end of this episode
and apply these principles, you will be able to apply
the right type of marketing, build a plan,
and accelerate your path to that next stage of growth intro.
(upbeat music)
What's everybody?
Welcome to "Unstoppable," I'm Tk, and on this channel,
I hope SaaS founders like you grow your size businesses
faster with an unstoppable strategy.
Now, if you're new to this channel, welcome,
I drop an episode every single Sunday
with actionable strategies and tactics from the trenches
on how to grow your SaaS business faster.
So be sure to hit that subscribe button
and that bell icon, you'll get notified every single time
I drop an episode with the TK Energy.
Now, if you're already part of this community,
if you're part of my SaaS, go-to-market coaching programs.
My people, welcome back.
It's really awesome to see you over here.
Sales is one-on-one activities.
Marketing is one to many.
That is the core principle that you absolutely need to know
because when you're doing sales,
you're talking to one person, one buyer,
and you're trying to do everything.
You're trying to educate them, you're trying to build trust,
you're trying to figure out if their needs are real
and you're trying to close them.
Marketing, on the other hand, works on one to many.
That is one of the fundamental differences that I needed
to understand as a SaaS founder in the early days.
And even when I use that definition,
it may sound obvious to you,
but what you'll find is most SaaS founders,
especially the ones I work with,
underestimate marketing over index on sales,
and that hurts them in their growth trajectory.
So in this episode, I'm gonna walk you
through the three principles you absolutely need to know
on how to build your marketing plan,
how to focus on the right type of marketing,
how to tell the difference between sales activities
and marketing activities,
and how to actually put it all into play.
If you excited, digging into principle number one,
go ahead and smash out like button for the YouTube algorithm
that just loves it when you do that,
and let's dig right into it.
Okay, principle number one is understanding the difference
between sales and marketing.
Now, I mentioned this in the beginning of the episode,
sales is one-to-One, marketing is one to many.
Now, one of the things that people don't realize
is the better you get at marketing,
the easier sales becomes.
Think about it, if you're purely doing sales,
let's just say you're only doing outbound
or you're only taking referrals
and you talk to a potential buyer in that process,
you are trying to do everything.
You're trying to educate them,
you're trying to understand their needs.
You're trying to differentiate yourself
from the competition.
You're trying to drive urgency
and you're trying to do a deal.
At the same time, if that buyer has already been exposed
to your marketing, if they've seen your marketing messaging,
if they've become a lead, if they have actually
been educated on your content, by the time they get to you
or someone on your sales team, they already understand
the transformation you're bringing into the market.
Therefore the sales process ends up becoming easier.
So one of the biggest things I had to learn
and almost had an aha moment around is the better
the marketing, the easier the sales.
Now don't get me wrong, sales is never gonna be easy.
It's still hard to actually earn revenue,
but it's going to be much more leverage activities
if you have the right marketing in place.
So this is one of the first things
I try to get founders to realize.
I recognize in every SaaS company that I start now,
the sooner you start on actual marketing,
the better off it's going to be.
Regardless of whether you have a sales team
or a product that tries to convert to revenue,
the better the marketing,
the more you're educating the buyer,
the more you are influencing them in their buying journey,
the more easier and successful and higher the conversion
is gonna be on the sales side, whether it's the sales team
or the product that's doing the selling.
So that's principle number one to really understand.
One more thing that you really wanna understand
is it's gotta be the right type of marketing.
One of the mantras that I always have is leads
are better than likes.
A lot of people think that brand marketing,
getting the brand out there just saying,
oh, we are awesome.io and awesome.io is everywhere.
They think that that's really what's going to drive revenue.
But the thing is, leads are more valuable than likes.
You can do a LinkedIn post, you can do a Twitter post,
you can run ads, you may get a lot of engagement,
you can get a lot of views.
Maybe you're paying a marketing agent,
they're like, look, we got a million views
on this thing that we ran.
But when you look on the other side,
you look at the other side of the span,
you're like, well, we didn't get any leads,
we didn't get any sales calls, we didn't get any trials,
we didn't get any revenue.
So it's super important to understand
that in the early stage you really wanna focus on leads
and actual pipeline being generated
from your marketing versus just exposure.
Now, when you get bigger, let's just say you're thinking
about Google, Microsoft, a series C company,
brand marketing logos, getting your name out there
does make a difference, but in the early days,
you wanna remember leads are more important than likes.
And anyone else that you're working with,
maybe you have a part-time, CMO,
that can't hold a real CMO job.
So they're tricking founders into paying them monthly,
even though they've never held real success
in their careers, they might be saying,
we're getting all this exposure.
Just tell 'em I want leads that turn to opportunities,
that turn to revenue.
I don't care for likes.
That's the biggest thing you wanna understand
as you spin up marketing.
That's principle number one.
Once you understand that's marketing
and why that's important,
and it's almost like leveraged activity,
you think about it in the terms of you know, building code.
You want to do it in a leveraged way.
You don't wanna just spin up a data center,
you want to use the right APIs on Amazon web services.
That way you're not doing all the hard heavy lifting
in the beginning.
That's kind of what marketing is in the sales process,
in the revenue process.
The better the marketing, the more you're educating
the buyers, the easier it is to convert that revenue.
So that's why it's super important.
That's principle number one.
Principle number two is, okay, Tk,
what do I do to actually build a marketing plan?
Now I understand exactly what I need to be doing.
So principle number two
is all about your marketing strategy.
One of the biggest things that I talk about in this channel
is you first get the strategy down
before you do the execution.
Execution is sending out a thousand emails,
paying a thousand dollars in ads,
paying an agency 25 KA month
to actually run your ads, paying a CMO to actually,
I don't really know what fractional CMOs do,
but you know whatever it is that they promised you.
Those are execution pieces.
Strategy is what you actually need to define
before you do any of the execution.
Strategy breaks down into four key questions.
Your marketing strategy,
you just need to answer who is this for?
Specifically who is your product for?
There may be a huge market to go after,
but you wanna get specific on
who exactly you're gonna be targeting.
If you're super early may mean
they need to be early adopters.
In smaller companies, if you are starting to scale,
maybe they need to be mid-market companies.
If you're truly scaling, maybe it'll be enterprise.
Who you're targeting really matters.
What is it that you are selling to them?
What exactly does your product do?
What is the value proposition? What is the ultimate result?
You should have a succinct definition
of that that will help you with any marketing
activity that you do down the line.
And remember, marketing is one to many.
Every single time you run a marketing activity,
it's gonna get exposed to a thousand people, 10,000 people,
a hundred thousand people to really wanna make sure
you are exposing them to the right message.
Therefore, the marketing strategy is super important.
Number three is why they should go with you,
regardless of what you may think there are competitors.
A competitor might be Microsoft Excel,
a competitor might be doing nothing for your customer,
meaning they could just not do anything
and just keep the status quo.
A competitor might be another software, a company.
So you really wanna define why they should go with you.
What is it that sets you apart compared
to anyone else in the market?
And you have the perceived competitors in the market,
in your customer's mind.
And lastly, marketing should also define why now.
Even if you are solving an urgent important problem
and you're the best solution,
it doesn't necessarily mean they'll take action now.
So you want come up with compelling reasons
of putting in your marketing that primes them
and educates them on why they should make this change now.
So why now is super important.
These are the four things you wanna define
in your marketing plan, in your marketing strategy
before you do any of the execution, who is this for?
What is the result you're delivering?
Why should they go with you versus anyone else,
and why they should do it right now.
Those are the four key things.
You answer those four key questions, they're hard to answer,
it's simple, but simple isn't always easy.
You answer those in a compelling way,
your marketing is gonna be 10 times more successful.
So those are the first two principles.
You understand why marketing is important
and how it actually helps the revenue conversion process,
sales or product line.
You understand why you need to have a strategy
before you do the execution.
Now it gets into the execution.
That's principle number three.
But before I go into that, let me pause here for a second.
Are you starting to see the power in this,
sales and marketing is one of those.
It's those two words where like, oh yeah, yeah,
sales and marketing, we should do both,
sounds great or go to market.
Go to market is what I talk about,
which is the considered effort between sales and marketing.
Conceptually, we understand what they are,
but when you really, really dig deeper into it,
you can get into a fancy definition,
but it's only when you really dig into it really understand
and you can get into simple explanations
of what those two things are,
why they're important and how they connect with each other
in order to drive growth.
So if you're starting to see the power of marketing,
how important marketing is and doing the right type
of marketing, remember leads over likes.
Leads are what matters. Sales calls are what matters.
Trials are what matters. Revenue's what matters.
You're starting to see the power in this.
If you're starting to get a little excited, like, oh my God,
we gotta get our marketing machine going.
If you're starting to see the power in this,
can I just get a yes in the comments below
and also smash out like button for the YouTube algorithm?
It just loves it when you do that and so do we.
We put a lot of love into these videos.
Also, you in the stage where you're building out
your marketing strategy, your overall go-to market strategy,
you are looking to scale, you're looking to figure out
these pieces and you want help.
This is why I run my SaaS go-to-market coaching program.
Inside of this program, I work with you one-on-one
to help you build out your go-to-market strategy
and I teach you how to execute on it.
And then I teach you exactly who to hire, who to avoid,
so you can actually scale your business with leverage.
Wanna learn more about that? I'll put the link below.
You don't have to go anywhere right now.
I'll tell you more about it at the end of this episode.
Let's go into principle number three.
This is where it all comes together.
So you understand the difference
between sales and marketing.
You understand the better the marketing,
the easier the sales, got it.
Then you understand why you just can't jump to execution.
You need to figure out your strategy.
Once you have those two things,
then you need to put into play.
Now this is where a lot of traps happen,
so let's walk through it.
Marketing execution ultimately breaks down into two pieces.
You're either doing organic or you're doing ads.
I'll talk about these other two in a second.
Organic is you can go to X, you can go to LinkedIn,
you can go to Facebook, you can go to Instagram,
you can go to TikTok, all of these places,
you can go write a blog post.
You can go to a partner's blog
or any of their social properties.
You can go to a podcast that's already running an interview
there and talk about what you guys do and tell 'em to join
your software platform.
Any one of those are organic activities
because you are not paying for it.
You are getting your marketing message out there
and every single sentence that's coming out of your mouth
or you're writing down clearly articulates who this is for.
What is it that you do,
why they should go with you and why they should do it now.
You starting to see how this connects.
So that's organic.
Organic doesn't cost much beyond your time and effort
and you have to get pretty good at it.
You have to pick the right platform
or your ideal customer hangs out.
The other one is ads.
You can run ads on LinkedIn, you can run ads on ads,
you can run ads on Facebook and that can scale infinitely
because you can put that,
give them infinite amounts of dollars.
Remember, you want leads, not likes.
So you'll be able to measure, okay,
I generated this many leads.
Here's how much pipeline we got.
Here's how much conversion we got either through sales
or through the product so we can put back more money
based on the unit costs that we are seeing.
You can do organic and you can do that ads.
And those are the two key ways you can execute
on true marketing for SaaS companies.
Now, you might be saying, all right, well hang on a minute,
TK, there are lots of other ways you can get attention.
I'm like, I know.
Let's talk about the two traps
that people think are marketing but isn't always marketing.
First one that often comes up when people
think marketing is outbound.
Outbound is not exactly marketing.
Marketing is one to many, right? It's leverage activity.
Sales is one-to-one.
And when you're doing outbound, yes, you can load up a tool
and send 10,000 people an email
and you can personalize it using AI.
But let's be honest, everyone can tell it's saturated now
and it's not really personalized.
So true outbound, the ones that truly yields results
is actually more of a sales activity.
It's not a marketing activity.
And that's one of the traps a lot of founders fall into.
It's totally cool to do outbound,
but you gotta make it personalized.
You gotta make it bespoke, otherwise it won't count
and you'll just be burning your brand.
And so you want to know that that's a sales activity.
Nothing wrong with it, not quite a marketing activity,
which is why a mature organization and SaaS companies,
you'll see sales development always load up to the CRO
or the VP of sales, not necessarily marketing.
It's very rare.
The only time it really does happen is they have MDRs,
which is market development reps.
And what they're really doing is they're looking
at the leads that are coming in and following up with them.
So that's more of a marketing activity
because it's part of the one to many process.
So that's a little bit of a trap.
So you really wanna make sure that you're doing outbound.
If you are doing outbound, you know that it's not marketing.
It's really more sales. The other one is events.
This one's 50-50.
Some people think of events as marketing,
like we went to this event and we talked
to a whole bunch of people.
That's really sales. It's still one to one.
The exception is if you go to an event
and you get up on stage and you give a talk
and you give a talk and you say, "Hey, here's the big change
that's happening in the world.
Here's why you should pay attention to us.
Here's what we do. Here's who it's for.
Here's why you should choose us versus anyone else.
Here's our unique perspective
and here's why you should do it now,
by the way, if you wanna learn more,
go to our website or go to our booth."
That is marketing at an event.
But if you're just hanging around in the booth,
if you are just standing around meeting people,
it's still sales it's not truly leveraged marketing,
which is a little bit of a trap.
So events fits 50-50 and outbound is most likely
more of a sales activity versus a marketing activity.
So what it really comes down to is really want to focus
on organic and ads 'cause organic helps you do it for free,
you test what works and then you double down on it with ads.
That's the best strategy out there,
and that's how you execute on your marketing
to get your message out there.
So let's recap To actually truly grow your SaaS business,
you need marketing and sales.
That's what we call a go-to-market strategy.
Then you want to understand the difference
between marketing and sales.
Marketing is one to many.
You're educating people, you're turning them into leads,
not just likes and they're getting into sales.
And the sales conversations that are one-on-one
are more leveraged because they're further down
the buying journey.
They've been educated and you convert more
and the two work together.
In order to build out your marketing plan,
you want to answer these four key questions.
Who is this for? What is it that you do?
What's the result you give?
Why should they go with you versus anyone else?
And why should they do it now?
That's core to your marketing strategy.
Once you have that, then you wanna take that message
and execute on it.
You wanna do organic and you wanna figure out
what works well.
You wanna generate those leads, and then based on that,
take the best performing organic stuff
and turn it into ads so you can infinitely scale it.
Sometimes people think outbound and events
are actually marketing, but they're traps there
and we talked about, so you wanna watch out for that.
You do these three things.
You'll be understanding exactly
how to leverage the right kind of marketing.
It's not brand marketing. It's not not fruit free marketing.
It's true demand acquisition marketing that generates leads,
that creates pipeline that helps your sales team
close deals in a leveraged way.
That's what you want for your SaaS business.
And even if you're product led,
all of that marketing hooks into your products
so people know about it and by the time they're starting
a trial, they really know what you are
and what you do and why they should go with you
and why they should do it now,
and therefore your conversion rates
are gonna be that much higher.
Now you know the three key principles to actually building
out your marketing plan and building leverage
for your sales process.
What you may not know is TK,
how do I put all these pieces together?
Like how do I know what part of the market I target?
How do I craft my messaging?
How do I run my marketing activities
and go into the right channels
so that I can get my message out there?
How do I structure my message?
How do I structure my message so it turns
into leads instead of likes?
These are all questions that go into building
and executing on a proper go-to market strategy.
Remember, go-to market is sales and marketing
working together to actually drive growth for your company?
If you're in that stage where you're looking to build
a go-to-market strategy and execute on it and hire
the right people and scale your SaaS business,
this is why I created my SaaS go-to-market coaching program.
Inside of this program, I focus on three things.
Number one, we build out your ideal customer profile.
Your ideal customer profile helps us
define exactly who your product is for,
for this next stage of growth.
Everyone thinks they have an ICP until they work with me.
We do a 29 point process to actually make sure
you have the right ICP for this next stage of growth.
Once you have your ICP, then we build out your manifesto.
Your manifesto is your positioning, it's your messaging,
it's your strategic narrative.
It's how we position you in the market.
Once you have your ICP and your manifesto,
then you have your go-to market strategy,
then it comes the third pillar, that's your execution.
This is what I call a Broadway show.
A Broadway show is a consistent set of sales and marketing
activities that you do every single week
to bring your manifesto to your ICP on a consistent basis
so that you're generating leads, creating pipeline,
and converting them to revenue,
and you're able to scale it to the right scalable channels.
It is an incredible program.
We get to work together inside of the program.
We've had so many incredible companies,
we've shared so many success stories.
So if you'd like to work together,
just go to tkk.com/gtm.
Tkk.com/gtm.
I'll also include the link in the details below
so you can click on it.
Once you go to that page,
you'll get all the details on the program.
The better the fit, the better the results,
which is why we'll ask you to fill out
a little form and book a call with us.
And on the call,
we'll look at where you are in the business,
what your goals are, what you're struggling with.
It sounds like you're a fit.
We'll be off to the races right away.
We'll start working together to actually build
your go-to market strategy and then execute on it
and then iterate on it so you can scale your SaaS business.
It's an incredible program.
I sincerely hope we get to work together.
Let's go to tkk.com/gtm to book a call with us
and get all of the details.
And also, if you got value from this video,
please smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm
that just loves it when you do that.
And so do we. We put a lot of love into these videos.
Also, if you have a fellow founder,
if you have a team member, if you're part of a Slack group
or WhatsApp group with other founders,
please share this video with them.
The reason I create these videos
is to serve the SaaS industry at the highest level,
to serve SaaS founders at the highest level
so you don't have to make the same mistakes that I did.
So you can learn these core principles
and build incredible SaaS companies.
So please share this video with others
so that we can help as many SaaS founders as possible.
Also, I drop an episode every single Sunday
with actionable strategies and tactics
from the trenches on how to grow your SaaS business faster.
So be sure if you haven't already
to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon.
We'll get notified every single time I drop an episode.
And lastly, remember, everyone needs a strategy
for their life and their business.
When you are with us, yours, it's gonna be unstoppable.
I'm TK. I'll see you next episode.
Or inside the SaaS, go-to-market Coaching program.
Details below. Take care, everybody.
(upbeat music)
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