SaaS Marketing: Channels by Stage and What Agencies Charge

What is SaaS marketing? The numbers it answers to

A subscription changes what counts as a sale. A customer who signs up and cancels in the second month cost as much to win as one who stays for three years, so SaaS marketing is judged on the gap between what a customer costs to acquire and what that customer pays before leaving. Five numbers carry the judgment, and the SaaS marketing funnel (visit, signup or trial, first payment, renewal) feeds every one of them.

Two free tools on this site do part of the arithmetic. The MRR calculator turns a customer count or a set of plans into MRR and ARR, and a month of new, expansion, downgrade and cancelled revenue into net new MRR, churn rates and net revenue retention; the Stripe fee calculator shows what Stripe keeps from each payment, which comes off revenue before any margin is counted. SaaS product marketing (positioning, the pricing page and the onboarding that turns a trial into a payment) moves the conversion and churn rows. The channels below move CAC.

SaaS marketing channels by stage, priced

The spine of a SaaS marketing plan is a list of channels in the order a young product can use them, from before launch to growth. Each row below carries what the channel costs where the platform or publisher prints a price on its own page, who does the work, what is left once the spending stops and the page on this site that covers it.

Read down the column of what stays and the order of a plan falls out of it. The rows that leave an asset (the list, the pages, the listings, the review profile) add up: each month builds on what is already there. The paid rows rent attention. They can bring the first customers fastest, but they stop the day the budget does. Directories and launch platforms sit at the launch stage: the listings outlast launch week, and the work behind them (a form, a description and often a badge for each site) is the row worth handing off.

SaaS marketing strategy and plan: which channel first

A SaaS marketing strategy for a founder with no team is mostly a question of order. The SaaS marketing strategies on page one arrive as lists of eleven or eighteen tactics; one person can run two or three at a time. So the plan below takes the table a stage at a time: one channel to start with, one number to watch and a rule for adding the next.

A SaaS marketing plan, stage by stage

1. Before launch. Build the email list and the pricing, alternative and comparison pages. Take part in the communities your buyers use. Watch one number: waitlist signups a week.
2. Launch. Get listed on the directories and launch platforms that fit your product, launch on one platform you can staff for the whole day and post where you already have a name. Watch listings live and trials started, by source.
3. The first 100 customers. Sell to them yourself: demos, onboarding calls and a review request once they are happy. Watch trial-to-paid conversion and the first cohort's churn.
4. Growth. Add one channel at a time, starting with the one whose CAC you can measure: SEO and content if buyers search for your category, paid search if they search with intent and your LTV covers the click, an affiliate program if other people already write about tools like yours. Watch CAC payback, channel by channel.

Add the next channel once the current one gives a CAC you can repeat month after month, or once doubling the effort stops doubling the signups. The 5 C's of a marketing plan (company, customers, competitors, collaborators and context) belong to the step before all of this: who you sell to, and against whom.

SaaS growth strategies past the first channel lean on the customers you already have: upgrades and expansion revenue (the net revenue retention line in the MRR calculator), referrals and partners who sell for a commission. Inbound marketing for SaaS, the content and SEO that buyers find on their own, is the growth row with the longest wait and the longest tail; which pages to build first is set out in our SaaS SEO strategy by page type.

SaaS marketing budget: price the channel, then the people

No single share of revenue fits a company that has little revenue yet, so price the first channels instead. The launch rows cost a one-time fee or your time. Ad platforms ask little to start. Google's bidding page answers its minimum-bid question with “Bidding amounts are ultimately up to you.” LinkedIn's pricing page puts its costs down to “the type of activity you're paying for and the ad auction”, and its budget page sets the floor: “The minimum daily budget amount required to start on LinkedIn is $10, for any ad format.” The agencies that run those platforms recommend far more. Aimers writes “we recommend a minimum of $3,000/month per ad platform”, The B2B Playbook recommends $2,500 to $5,000 a month depending on the platform and Hey Digital $10,000 a month in ad budget.

Put The B2B Playbook's $2,250 fee next to the lowest spend it recommends ($2,500 on Meta) and a first paid channel run for you comes to $4,750 a month, against a one-time $29 for 30 directory listings. SaaS marketing automation and tools are a smaller line. Kit's email plan is free up to 10,000 subscribers, enough for SaaS email marketing to a first list. SaaS affiliate marketing runs on software such as Rewardful, from $49 a month.

Product-led growth or sales-led growth

Product-led growth puts the product in the seller's chair: a free plan or a trial, signup without a call and an upgrade offered inside the app when a user hits a limit. It suits a product a person can try alone and pay for by card. Sales-led growth puts a person there instead (a demo, a proposal, a contract), which suits a product that needs setup, a security review or several approvers. Many SaaS companies end up with both (a self-serve plan and a sales-assisted one), and the metrics table says which one carries the business: trial conversion for the first, CAC payback per deal for the second.

SaaS go-to-market strategy: what a GTM plan holds

A SaaS go-to-market strategy writes down six decisions before the launch date: the customer you sell to first, the problem you lead with, the price and the plans, the channels from the table above, who sells (the product, a person or both) and the date itself. The launch, from eight weeks out to 30 days after, has a week-by-week checklist of its own.

B2B SaaS marketing: a demo, a review profile and a security page

B2B SaaS marketing sells to a company, so a signup is rarely the end of the sale. The person who finds the product passes it to someone with a budget, and that person wants to see it working, read what other buyers say and know where the data goes. Three things follow from that.

• A demo or a sales-assisted trial. A trial with a person attached (a setup call, a check-in in the first week) gives the buyer someone to bring questions to. It is also where SaaS demand generation, reaching buyers before they search, hands over to sales.
• A review profile. Review sites are where a buyer reads other buyers. G2 lets a vendor claim a basic profile and collect reviews for free. Its Starter plan costs $299 a month (“no contract, cancel anytime”) or $2,999 a year; the plan grid on the same page sets Starter for companies of 1 to 100 employees and adds “Year 2 pricing increases to $599/month or $6,000/year.” G2 also sells pay-per-click ads that run across G2, Capterra, Software Advice and GetApp.
• A security and trust page. Where the data is stored, who processes it, which certifications you hold and how to sign a data processing agreement. A procurement team will ask; a page answers before the email arrives.

A B2B SaaS marketing strategy for a team of one

The B2B SaaS marketing strategy that fits a founder is narrow: one industry or job title, the communities and newsletters that audience reads, a review profile with the first reviews from customers you already have and the comparison pages a buyer's colleague will open. Sponsoring a newsletter is priced per send. Cooperpress, which publishes developer newsletters, prices a Frontend Focus classified at $180 an issue and the primary slot in JavaScript Weekly (163,202 subscribers) at $3,680.

SaaS marketing agencies: what they sell and what they charge

Page one for SaaS marketing agency is agency home pages and agency rankings. The table below swaps the rankings for fees, each one read on the firm's own site. 20 firms selling marketing appear in Google's results for SaaS marketing and SaaS marketing agency; three of them are covered in our post on SaaS SEO, and of the other 17, five print a monthly fee for their own work and 12 print none.

Done-for-you fees start at $2,250 a month at The B2B Playbook and reach $50,000 and up at Kalungi, whose full service stands in for a whole marketing department; three of the five start at $5,000, which is also the median. Twelve months at the lowest fee is $27,000, ad spend excluded. The fee buys different work at each firm: Campfire Labs' $5,000 Foundational plan lists “2 pieces per month” of content, Lean Labs' $5,000 starts its Off-site AEO Authority program, TripleDart's standalone SEO/AEO starts at $5,000 and The B2B Playbook's retainers for paid demand generation start at $2,250, with ad spend on top: “Ad spend is separate and goes directly to the platform.”

Two of the five print a term. Campfire Labs: “All partnerships have a three-month minimum term.” The B2B Playbook: “No hidden fees. No lock-in contracts.” One-off projects sit beside the retainers: Campfire Labs' Research Sprint costs $28,000 and Lean Labs' websites start at $15,000.

SaaS marketing consultant or agency?

A SaaS marketing consultant sells direction, and the team you already have does the work. Two of the five price advice on its own: The B2B Playbook's consulting is $2,750 to set up and $1,150 a month (“Cancel any time. No minimum commitment.”), and Kalungi's CMO coaching starts at about $2,500 a month. SaaS marketing consulting at that price suits a founder who will write and run the campaigns; done for you, the same two firms start at $2,250 and $50,000.

How to choose a SaaS marketing agency

1. What does one month buy? Ask for a count of pieces, campaigns and reports, then divide the fee by it. Campfire Labs prints its count: “2 pieces per month” on Foundational.
2. What is the minimum term? In our reads it ran from three months at Campfire Labs to none at The B2B Playbook. Ask before the first invoice, not after it.
3. Who does the work? Names and roles, and whether the people on the sales call stay on the account.
4. What will the report show? Trials and paying customers by channel, next to traffic and engagement.
5. Is ad spend inside the fee? At The B2B Playbook, Aimers and Hey Digital it sits on top, paid to the platform.

The same questions hold for a B2B SaaS marketing agency, for a SaaS digital marketing agency running paid and organic together and for a SaaS marketing company or firm selling SaaS marketing services one at a time: the label changes, the questions do not.

Where Submitator fits in a SaaS marketing plan

Submitator takes one row of the channel table off your hands: the directories and launch platforms at the launch stage. You choose them in the dashboard, each shown with its Domain Rating, from the 189 we submit to (SaaS and software: 59; launch platforms and startup directories: 76; AI tools: 54). A directory is added to that list after one of our submissions to it has gone through from start to finish. Each directory receives a description of its own, cut to that site's length limits, and we fill in each form ourselves: any CAPTCHA on it is handled by us, so none reaches you.

Badge directories are served by a single component, placed on your site once, that shows whichever badge each of them asks for. From then on, keeping every badge live is our work, with no commit per directory. We push the listings we file through IndexMachine, the free indexing ($25 value) that Starter, Growth and Scale include. Nothing needs connecting on your side, and what gets indexed is decided by Google, not by us.

There are three plans, each a single payment: 30 directories for $29 (Starter), 60 for $49 (Growth) and 100 for $79 (Scale). All Directories, at $149, covers the catalog as it stands and whatever joins it afterwards. Most directories are delivered in 24 to 48 hours and every directory within 21 days at most. When a directory turns your product down, you pick one more in its place by default (All Directories excepted, as it already includes every one). A refund can be requested within 30 days of purchase, on the conditions in our terms. 580+ startups have been submitted with us so far, and what became of the submissions we filed from July to November is set out in our submission statistics.

What Submitator is not: a marketing retainer. It runs no ads and does no outreach. It is the launch-stage line of the plan, done for you and paid once, next to whichever channels you run yourself. SaaSRow, one of the SaaS directories on that list, sells Featured for $2 once and Premium for $5 a month, $20 a year or $199 for life; we file it on its free tier, as one of the 30 you pick for $29.