Know what you need to look for in a SaaS marketing agency? Then:
Jump straight to our list of top B2B SaaS marketing agencies for 2023.
To read how to go about selecting a strong SaaS marketing partner, read out guide below:
We have written extensively about what SaaS marketing is all about. In a nutshell, SaaS marketing encompasses the marketing & nurture effort that spans the length of brand awareness to lead gen to demo/free trial/freemium to engagement of paying subscribers. It is massive, and it is complicated. An agency that can get these goals accomplished without wasting your money is what we would call a SaaS marketing agency worth its byname.
What is a SaaS Marketing Agency?
A SaaS marketing agency is one that has extensive experience with all of the above aspects of marketing and nurture. However, the most important perspective a SaaS marketing agency brings to the table is its knowledge of strategies that have the highest likelihood of working. After running experiments with various verticals and audiences, SaaS marketing agencies have developed a nose for finding success. This experience is the bedrock of strong SaaS marketing strategies.
We regularly espouse the necessity of a SaaS marketing strategy before the execution begins. While the SaaS marketing strategy doesn’t have to be developed from scratch every time, there is enough variance from company to company that certain components should be carefully evaluated before including or excluding them from the strategy. This is where true SaaS marketing agencies differentiate themselves – they have the experience and sense to know what tactical components of a marketing strategy have a higher chance of success.
In a hurry? Jump to what to look for when evaluating SaaS marketing agencies.
Why should you care to find a specialized SaaS growth partner?
For a very long time, people have beaten the drum of inbound marketing being the elixir that cures all marketing challenges. And this drum will continue to beat for longer. What a SaaS marketing agency knows is that its clients do not have the patience to wait for months to see the magic of inbound marketing come to life. Knowing how to balance short term sales team needs with long term predictable stream of leads is a balancing act that is learned only through experience.
This sensitivity to results drives our ability to define key performance indicators (KPIs) that keep clients as well as agency employees focused on efforts that matter. Some of the KPIs that a specialized SaaS growth partner will sign up for include marketing qualified leads (MQLs), sales qualified leads (SQLs), cost per lead (CPL), and demos booked.
Such KPIs are essential because, in a software-driven world, barriers to entry are very low. So there is a race to carve out a niche and to dominate it. Because of such pressures, expectations from SaaS marketing agencies are very high. Ability to deliver in the short-term and build out a runway for future growth is the combination you should look for in SaaS marketing agencies.
Let’s talk about specialization for a minute. While you may focus on finding an agency that has familiarity with your vertical, we have found time and again that the effort to ramp-up on a vertical isn’t nearly as significant as it is perceived to be. Instead, the specialization focus should be on the agency’s ability to excel in the stage of growth that your SaaS is in.
For example, if you are a pre-PMF SaaS, what you need is market validation, quick pivoting, brand message testing, value proposition testing and more. In such situations, vertical knowledge could be an inch deep, but growth stage experience needs to be a mile deep.
Another area of specialization is the target market focus of the SaaS agency. A B2C SaaS agency is skilled in very different strategies compared to a B2B SaaS agency. What it boils down to is the price point and time-to-decision in each case. The lower the price point, the faster the purchase decision happens. As the price point climbs, the number of decision makers increase and so does the time to buy. What to do between that lead generation event and the decision-making event is the expertise that a B2B SaaS agency brings to the table. In case you are wondering, Bay Leaf Digital is a B2B SaaS marketing agency.
What are the 5 signs that you are looking at a SaaS marketing agency?
As the SaaS vertical explodes with opportunity, so do agencies marketing themselves as SaaS agencies. So how do you know that you are actually talking to a SaaS agency that knows how to market SaaS? Here are five things we recommend checking out:
1. Their Home Page Says a Lot
You don’t go to Domino’s to order burgers, do you? When you want pizza, you go to a pizza joint. For burgers, there’s always Whataburger (we are headquartered in Texas, after all). Similarly, there is enough specialization in marketing to where you really want to look for a specialist that is heavily invested in SaaS. The SaaS flavor of marketing permeates into every. single. thing. we do as marketers. From defining the persona to creating the right mix of demand generation and lead generation. The SaaS mindset needs to be everywhere.
2. They Talk about SaaS on Social and through Content
It might be easy to slap a new sticker on the storefront and call it a pizza joint. But it isn’t that easy to change every listing and every page about you to being pizza specialists. Check the agency’s social media page, particularly LinkedIn and Facebook pages. See how far back their posts about SaaS marketing really go (Hint: If they go back to 2021, then you may be looking at a wanna-be SaaS agency because the pandemic drove a lot of pivots). Look at the content they post on their blog. Is it primarily about SaaS? Pick a couple of articles and peruse them. If the SaaS expertise is deep, you will know soon. This basic check will save you a lot of anguish further down the line.
3. SaaS Reviews and SaaS Clients
Getting high ratings is one thing. Getting high ratings from the right audience is a whole other thing. Most agencies will have their “Nascar” logo line up on their home page. Look at what clients they have featured. If at least 50% of these are SaaS logos, then you are truly in “good company”.
Don’t stop there. Look at reviews on big directories such as Clutch and Upcity on SaaS marketing agency lists. Do their reviews show SaaS experience?
4. Strategy vs Tactics
SEO, PPC, social are all tactics. SaaS marketing isn’t about instant gratification. SaaS marketing is about methodical planning and carefully guided execution. Does the agency know the difference between strategy and tactics? Does the BDR you are talking to know what SaaS marketing strategies are all? One conversation is typically enough to identify whether the agency you are evaluating has a series of dedicated SaaS marketing strategies or whether they are misrepresenting tactical execution in various channels as their “winning” approach.
5. Leads vs Hand Raisers
Last but the most important – The traditional roles of marketing, BDR, and SDR are blurring. The traditional expectation is that leads are to be nurtured, and nurtured leads will then turn into SQLs that are then engaged by BDRs to turn them into SALs. While that may be true in other verticals, as a SaaS you are particularly about the time to close. For SaaS companies, time isn’t just money, it is the difference between success and failure. The agency needs to talk in terms of delivering demo requests, not MQLs.
This is the one thing separates the wannabes from true SaaS marketing agencies – the ability to deliver hand raisers in quantities that meet SaaS company goals.
How to vet a SaaS marketing agency?
While the answers to some of these questions depends on your situation, these questions will reveal to you the quality and quantity of work you can expect from your agency:
1. How many clients does a client strategist (other agencies have names such as associate CMO for such roles) handle?
What you are looking to determine is how much time really is the top brain allocated to your account spending on your account. While there isn’t a fixed answer that is correct, there is a minimum threshold that you do not want to go under if you truly want white glove treatment for your SaaS marketing.
2. Who writes your content?
The goal behind this question is to figure out how much heavy lifting your team will have to do and what quality of content you can expect from your agency.
3. Once LinkedIn campaigns are running, what is the target CTR and lead form conversion rate you will strive for?
You might wonder why specifically LinkedIn. If you are looking for a B2B SaaS marketing agency, then LinkedIn is one channel that they need to show mastery in. While one could argue that organic search, paid search, and other social media channels are also important, if your agency doesn’t have a good handle on the core channel for B2B marketing, then nothing else really matters. Want to know what is a good CTR and lead form conversion rate for B2B SaaS on LinkedIn – drop us a line.
4. What are the core KPIs you use to measure success?
A strong agency will have very specific high level KPIs for all parts of the funnel. For example, a traffic KPI isn’t just number of visits to the site. A good traffic KPI is number of relevant visits/engagements to your properties (website and social media profile pages). Other similar KPIs for conversion, nurture, and sales hand-off need to be well established. These are KPIs that don’t change from client to client.
5. How long will it be before we start seeing results of your work?
The answer you are looking for is one that shows process behind the BDR talk. Your agency needs to have a clear idea on what pieces need to be in place before running ad campaigns. For example, if your PMF has been established, then you will have pieces such as target verticals, personas, style guide, voice and tone etc defined. If you are pre-PMF, then you will need help with determining these first.
The agency’s BDR should be able to articulate what is needed based on your SaaS’s situation. The BDR should also be able to explain what resources are essential to getting campaigns off the ground.
There are several other such questions that are very revealing when vetting agencies. We have a checklist put together that we can share. Contact us today to get the checklist.
Who are the top B2B SaaS Marketing Agencies in the US?
After evaluating 15+ agencies, here is our top B2B SaaS marketing agencies list:
1. About Bay Leaf Digital
We have been in business for nearly 10 years. While our headquarters are in Dallas, Texas, we are a team of nearly 25 marketers spread across the country as well as the world.
We are a pure B2B SaaS marketing agency. In other words, every single marketer on the team obsesses about the same goals for our clients – more demos. How we do it is a robust mix of demand generation, lead generation, sales enablement, and sales tactics all wrapped up neatly in 4 proven marketing strategies.
Want to know more? Contact us today.
2. About Kalungi
Kalungi provides marketing for early-stage B2B SaaS companies. According to their website, they provide several services such as “start”, “scale”, “profit”, “coach” and more.
What we like about Kalungi is that they have a proven playbook to help B2B SaaS companies get to market and scale fast. To us, this means there is plenty of strategy behind the execution.
Kalungi is headquartered in Seattle, Washington.
3. About 310 Creative
310 Creative is a B2B SaaS sales and marketing agency. They are also a Hubspot diamond partner. That’s a lot of respect in our eyes.
They emphasize the need for alignment between sales and marketing to be successful. On their site, they showcase their expertise in several sales and marketing functions essential to SaaS including B2B sales acceleration, B2B marketing operations, and growth-driven design.
310 Creative has offices in Santa Monica, CA and Austin, TX.
4. About Refine Labs
According to their website, Refine Labs is the first Revenue R&D laboratory. They help unlock sustainable growth for B2B software companies. Refine Labs features a five-phase scientific process to stop revenue chaos and create fully integrated programs consistently.
They offer a variety of pricing plans from Trailblazer to Category Leader to Strategic Innovator
Refine Labs is headquartered in Boston, MA.
5. About Roketto
Roketto is a full-funnel inbound marketing and web design agency that focuses on driving predictable growth for its clients. According to their website, Roketto educates and empowers prospects at all lifecycle stages.
Roketto is a Google partner, a Hubspot partner, and a CallRail partner
Roketto is based in Kelowna, Canada.
6. About Inturact
Inturact is a SaaS marketing agency focused on scaling growth with a data-driven product-led approach.
Intruact emphasizes heavily on Hubspot’s inbound marketing methodology and has fashioned their SaaS marketing journey process using it.
They are based in Houston, Texas.
7. No Good
Headquartered in New York, No Good is a growth marketing agency that lists SaaS as an expertise. The agency services start-ups and enterprises alike. According to their website, No Good is a squad of marketers with various skills focused on unlocking rapid growth for iconic brands and fast-growing startups.
That wraps up our list of top B2B SaaS marketing agencies in the US. Good luck with your search. Remember, we are just a click away for your marketing needs!
