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Easy-To-Follow B2B SaaS Marketing Plan Template For Hyper Growth

As a B2B SaaS owner, you’re probably working late hours and feeling overwhelmed with responsibilities, from managing your team to improving your service. The crucial aspect of any business, regardless of the industry, is planning. However, with everything that’s going on in your company and the market changing so rapidly, you probably have little to no time to plan anything.

Having a proactive instead of reactive approach in all business areas enables entrepreneurs to be prepared for any outcome and ensure their entire team is managed well and is not working under pressure. As most SaaS business owners will rarely prioritize planning of their marketing activities, although it provides an endless number of benefits, there is a lack of time-management and quality marketing strategies in this niche.

Building a SaaS marketing plan template allows businesses to allocate the right resources to ensure their marketing produces the desired results. A SaaS Startup Marketing Plan will look very differently from that of a mature B2B SaaS brand, because you have fewer resources, smaller advertising budgets and a smaller marketing team. After all, in such a competitive environment, SaaS companies must create their SaaS marketing strategy template and plan for SaaS product development if they wish to be ahead of their competitors. 

 

What is a SaaS Marketing Plan vs a SaaS Marketing Strategy?

 

A marketing plan is a document outlining an advertising strategy that an organization intends to implement to generate more leads and communicate efficiently with its target market. A good SaaS product marketing plan will lay out all details of outreach, PR, social media, email, content, and other campaigns necessary to achieve the objectives. Besides campaigns, the company will also need to determine how to measure the success of each campaign and optimize them on time. 

Now, you might ask yourself, ‘What is a marketing plan template?’ if all B2B SaaS businesses have unique objectives and challenges they face daily? More importantly, should you find a marketing plan template before working on it with your team? Most B2B SaaS owners and employees will not have enough marketing experience to create their marketing plan from scratch. 

SaaS companies with a marketing professional on their team will probably prefer to use a template and spend more time finding ideas that might bring them more success instead of spending days thinking about how to make a marketing plan step by step.

 

 

B2B SaaS Marketing Plan Example

For a marketing plan to be successful, it will need to consist of a few components that provide the company with a framework to move its marketing activities in the right direction. 

Executive Summary

The executive summary is the foundation of your marketing plan. It will remind you of the business vision and mission to ensure that everything you’re planning aligns with the overall business objectives. This plan should include the higher-level strategies that bring the vision of fast growth and your marketing plan. 

Marketing and Business Objectives

The goal of every SaaS marketing plan will surely be to get more customers, so make sure your objectives are very specific. Use the timeline to determine your sprint workflow and track the progress of your campaigns. Each goal you add to the plan must be measurable as well. 

Market Position Analysis

• Who are your competitors? 

• How successful are they with their marketing? 

• Are there any legal or economic forces that might affect your marketing results? 

• Plot your weaknesses and threats (SWOT) that might negatively affect the outcome of your marketing plan. 

• At the same time, consider what makes you better than everyone else on the market and how to utilize your USPs in your marketing message across every channel. 

Marketing Program Assessment 

Does your marketing program address the 3 key marketing questions your audience is keen to know?

• Why should we care and think about adopting this change into our tech stack or a marketing plan?
• Why should we pick your B2B SaaS over competitors who might be cheaper or have XYZ in their offering? 
• Why should we do it now as opposed to later?

SaaS marketing is a special business case, so we typically ask a few more questions since customers typically start with a trial or a single-user subscription like a Free Plan or a limited basic plan. 

• “Why should I buy more from you?” (give them a reason to do more business with you with upselling strategies reinforced in value for the current or future customer)
• “Why should I continue doing business with you, not your competitors?” (to ensure they remain in the retention stage of your marketing funnel and, of course, move them to advocacy.) 

Customer Strategy

Knowing your competitors is one thing, but truly understanding the needs of your target market is what will ultimately result in success. 

• Who are the ideal customers that can get you to MVP (minimal viable product) and then PMF (product-market fit)?
• What is your customer ICP (ideal customer profile) 
• What does their technographic, psychographic or geographic profile look like?
• Are you designing a blue ocean or red ocean strategy?
• How do they make their purchasing decisions today, not yesterday? 
• What are their habits that can be useful to you?
• Can you survey your current or potential future customers?

Advertising Strategy

B2B SaaS businesses desperately need advertising today to be at the core of their marketing strategy to get the kind of hockey-stick growth results they’re after. That means you will need to figure out a specific ad budget for your media buys as part of your advertising strategy and agree on the creatives you will run and the value it will contain for your target audience. 

• Decide on the timeline of your advertising campaigns. 
• Will they be evergreen or a mix of short and long-term campaigns?
• Will you plan and run marketing and advertising campaigns every quarter?

The answers to these 3 questions will tremendously impact the success of your entire marketing plan for your SaaS company. 

Execution Plan 

If you go through the best SaaS marketing examples, you will notice that, besides a great plan, they all had a great execution plan. 

Determine how you will track the progress of your campaigns, measure results, optimize underperforming elements, and which MarTech you will need to do all of that. Within the execution plan, outline your lead nurture strategy to ensure you’re constantly generating leads. You can always look at something like HubSpot or ActiveCampaign as your ultimate MarTech for lead nurturing and marketing automation.

 

Marketing Plan vs. Marketing Strategy

 

 

Even when searching online for a B2B SaaS business marketing plan template, you might notice that many websites confuse a marketing plan with a marketing strategy. These two terms are not interchangeable, and not knowing the difference will impact your marketing campaigns’ success.

A marketing strategy will entail an overall view of what your company wants to achieve, and a marketing plan will discuss in detail how this can be achieved and when. The crucial difference between these two terms is that the marketing plan is focused more on the timeline and ensuring all actions are completed. On the other hand, a marketing strategy aims to gather and funnel the best ideas and projections for the company. 

In reality, marketing strategy and marketing plan are two sides of the same coin. When discussing marketing strategies for B2B SaaS brands, keep in mind that the more structured it is, the more it will help you develop a comprehensive plan of action for your marketing team to follow.

For example, suppose your strategy defines content marketing as one of your main marketing pillars to capture new leads and nurture those relationships with new customers to get them to engage with you long enough to become paying customers. 

In that case, your plan of action should determine deadlines for each article in the next month, quarter, or year and assign it to your content marketing team or your outsourced content writers. You should identify how digital content production will fit into your SEO strategy, link building, and PR outreach on a tactical level and where it will strategically fit into your marketing funnel.

 

Determining the Appropriate Marketing Channels For Your B2B SaaS Marketing Plan

Because it follows your marketing strategy, the marketing plan will need to consolidate all marketing channels you plan on using. Each marketing channel can help you generate leads, re-engage existing customers, establish you as an industry leader, and improve your online presence. However, how you utilize a certain marketing channel is more important than the number of channels you decide to use in your strategy.

If you have a strong content marketing team and your customers prefer reading articles over Google or Facebook ads, crafting a well-thought content marketing strategy can achieve better results than running inefficient campaigns on 10 marketing channels.

These are the marketing channels that work well for B2B SaaS companies:

• Email marketing,

• Content marketing,

• SEO,

• Conference/trade show booths,

• Paid search,

• Public relations,

• Affiliate marketing,

• Influencer marketing,

• Paid social media,

• Programmatic,

• Video advertising,

• ABM (account based marketing).

 

Outlining a successful SaaS Marketing Team Structure

 

 

 

For your plan to work, you will need a team to execute it. That team consists of marketing professionals with the skills required to achieve your marketing goals. Regardless, if you have a team of 2 or 50 marketing experts on your SaaS Marketing team today, you will need to figure out how they’ll fit into your near-future marketing plans, which should be tied to the stage of your SaaS. 

We now see 4 key stages of B2B SaaS growth: 

1. Nailing MVP and PMF product-market fit; 
2. The single-floor phase; 
3. The scaling phase; 
4. The enduring phase; is when you’re likely managing at least five levels of management, 1,000 people, and $200M in revenue.

You need to figure out where you are in the 7-step T2D3 framework: this will help you understand what your marketing team should look like at each stage and how to budget for growth, given your business objectives. 

• Step 1: Product development process towards a product-market fit
• Step 2: Reach a $2 million ARR (annual recurring revenue)
• Step 3, year one: Triple to $6 million
• Step 4, year two: Triple to $18 million
• Step 5, year three: Double to $36 million in ARR (annual recurring revenue)
• Step 6, year four: Double to $72 million
• Step 7, year five: Double to $144 million

As you understand where you are in the growth stages of your B2B SaaS, you can begin navigating your marketing budget and crafting an inbound marketing solution.

To do it properly, you should divide your marketing plan into four main stages: attract, convert, close, and delight. These stages are also known as inbound marketing phases, which allow business owners to understand in which phase each potential customer is. 

Assigning your team members to specific stages will also help them understand their mission in the overall marketing process. 

 

Attracting Team 

You should optimize your existing content, campaigns, and social media pages to attract customers. Think about what you could do better, and always consider customers first. 

1. Would they be attracted to your social channels (Social pages, YouTube channel, social community, social groups)? 
2. Are your recent thought leadership pieces aligned with your marketing goals and ICP’s intent? 
3. Are your new prospects finding you through different channels you are utilizing and converting (paid search, organic search, paid social, programmatic)?

An attracting team will typically consist of:

• Content writers,
• Podcasters 
• YouTube production team
• Copywriters,
• SEO specialists,
• Community managers,
• Email marketers.

Converting Team

If you manage to get leads onto your website, social media page, landing page, or subscribe to your newsletter, how will you convert them from prospects into leads? Is your content intriguing, valuable, and informative enough for them to stick around? Think about where you can provide more value to your target audience.

A converting team will typically consist of:

• CRO specialists,
• PPC Managers,
• Growth Strategists
• Community builders,
• Digital Analytics specialists

Closing Team

Who will work on closing your leads? Even the best content in the world will not close a new customer on its own. You will need to think about the team members who know how to encourage leads to make a purchasing decision. Without their involvement, you will lose your leads, who will most probably go to the first competitor who will know how to close them.

A closing team will typically consist of:

• SDRs and BDRs
• Director of Sales or higher
• Customer success managers (for upselling or cross-selling opportunities)

Delighting Team 

The last stage of the marketing journey is to nurture existing relationships and drive brand loyalty. This can be done in numerous ways as long as it is relevant to your target market. For instance, if your target audience is not a fan of receiving text messages but respond better to newsletters, you shouldn’t insist on reaching them on their phones.  

A delighting team will typically consist of: 

• Account managers,
• Marketing Automation specialists,
• Customer Success Managers
• Community Managers,

One person should ideally belong to one team to ensure efficiency. If you have a small team and don’t have enough people to build four teams, give each two consequent stages to help them manage the leads and customers in a more organized way. 

 

Template for SaaS Marketing Plan 

 

 

To help you create a winning framework for your already crafted marketing strategy, we bring you this B2B SaaS marketing plan template. Use this framework to create your marketing plan and make adjustments where you think it’s necessary.

A well-thought-out marketing plan will consist of all elements mentioned in our article, but it should follow the order outlined below.

B2B SaaS Marketing Plan Cover

The cover of your marketing plan should consist of the following elements:

• Company logo,
• Company name,
• State it’s a marketing plan,
• Short description of the objective (1-2 sentences),
• Authors of the document. 

Table of Contents

That is the page you will edit last in your marketing plan. It should contain the list of all your sections and their page numbers.

Executive Summary

Executive or business summary helps everyone understand their role in the marketing plan and how they help achieve the ultimate business goals and hit growth KPIs. These are the elements you should add to your executive summary:

• Short description of the company (one sentence),
• List of marketing leaders with their roles and responsibilities in the marketing plan,
• A brief analysis of the company (e.g., SWOT analysis).

 

 

B2B SaaS Business Objectives

What goals are you trying to achieve with your marketing plan? Explain each of them briefly and below each, add a B2B SaaS metric or KPI that will help you track the success and allow you to optimize for success on time and budget. Here is what you should add under your business objectives:

• A short statement of your OKRs or initiatives broken out quarterly,
• List of metrics to track the success of each KPI by channel.

 

“PRO TIP: Make sure to keep your objectives up to three maximum. It will help you stay on track and ensure you have enough time to complete everything from your marketing plan.”

 

Target Market and Brand Positioning

Being clear on your target market and whom you’re serving will help everyone on the marketing team, from the content writer to the account based marketing leader and CMO (Chief Marketing Officer), understand whom they’re marketing to and align all of their marketing messages. These are the elements to include:

• List of targeted industries and sub-industries,
• Deep descriptions of the buyer personas from the buying committee,
• Competitive SWOT analysis with a list of competitors and their value propositions (features, USPs, pricing models)
• 1st and 3rd party customer data to align marketing data with business goals
• Psychographic data, geographic data, technographic data, demographic data, and behavioral insights
• Brand vectors and market positioning 

SaaS Market Positioning Strategy

Here, you will need to think about how to market your products or services based on the information you have so far about your competitors and customers. Your market positioning strategy should include the following elements: 

• Product features and USPs,
• Brand vectors for superior positioning,
• Price and reasons for setting up a flexible pricing strategy,
• Promotional offers activities,
• List of people responsible for the market strategy and its success.

 

“PRO TIP: Don’t confuse market strategy with marketing strategy. One refers to how you will market your product, while the other includes marketing in general, from building brand loyalty to customer retention methods.”

 

 

SaaS Marketing and Advertising Budget

You cannot start executing your marketing plan if you haven’t decided on your B2B SaaS marketing budget. You will need to know exactly how much it will cost to implement all the activities from your marketing plan. To do that, you will need to include:

• List of marketing expenses with prices,
• The date or timeline when the expense will occur, 
• Alternative or cheaper solutions to each marketing expense,
• Total marketing team expenses (salaries, advertising budgets, MarTech costs)

SaaS Marketing Channels

You will need to outline all the marketing channels you and your marketing team consider necessary to bring your marketing plan to life. That will also help you realize if you need more people or other resources to implement your marketing plan. This section should include:

• List of marketing channels (paid search, paid social, programmatic, display, video, traditional channels),
• Purpose of each marketing channel (tie it to SMART KPIs), 
• KPIs to measure success for each channel

.

“PRO TIP: Think about the SaaS demand generation program and your SaaS channel strategy in a holistic and innovative way. Research to understand where your audiences might be hanging out, but your competitors aren’t crowding those channels too heavily just yet, so you’re less likely to be competing with them for the same customers as you would through organic search. Perhaps testing out Quora Ads, Reddit or TikTok’s new advertising platform might be a good way to attract your new customers in a cost-effective way.”

 

 

Marketing Technology

Which tools, platforms, and software solutions will you need to implement all activities to achieve your objectives? When considering technology for marketing success, these are the elements you will need to think about:

• Marketing CRM and data management,
• Email marketing software,
• Marketing automation software,
• Content optimization and experience software,
• Advertising and promotion platforms,
• Social media management platforms,
• Blogging platforms, 
• eCommerce and Sales,
• Video hosting software.

This SaaS marketing template can save much time you typically spend crafting your first marketing plan. However, not including only a few of these elements in your marketing plan might hinder your business objectives. Another thing you should keep in mind is that your marketing team should work with you on the marketing plan. Their insights and ideas are incredibly valuable in a situation like this. Ideally the CEO and CMO or (Fractional CMO) would go over the key business objectives and pass that on to the SaaS marketing team to design the specific KPI frameworks to measure success appropriately, so take the time to think through your key objectives as a team.  

If this seems overwhelming or time-consuming for you as a B2B SaaS owner who needs to think about hundreds of other CEO things, you can always reach out to us. We will help you implement the marketing plan and assist you in determining what is important with our deep SaaS industry knowledge and digital marketing skills.