How do you plan your first marketing budget?
Great question. It’s actually amazing how cheap things can be in the first month when you do things like building your saas marketing budget and plan right. Infrastructure with simple tools like Mailchimp, Hubspot, and Woodpecker are very cheap, and I’m not a fan of digital agencies before you get your messaging, positioning, etc. right. (first, you need to do work like this).
You need some great writing capacity, and ideally, this is an employee or a freelancer with who you build a long-term relationship. You also need some budget to get the initial marketing automation set up by an expert (for example set up Hubspot fast, and train your team).
The main campaigns to do early are for prospect nurturing, customer up-sell/nurture, and loyalty/on-boarding. After setting these up you will not need a lot of deep expertise in this area in the first year.
In the first months of having your marketing team, I suggest a marketing budget for SaaS companies of about $5k-$10k/month and have your team focus on fundamentals like the 4 p’s, branding, customer testimonials, and getting your infrastructure setup.
After that, it becomes an option to throw fuel on the fire (SEM, PR, sponsorships, events, etc.) but this would be a waste of SaaS marketing spend unless your landing pages, analytics, etc. are in place.
Ideally, your team is at least 1-2 FTE before you start spending any serious money, or get help from agencies. You don’t want to fall into the trap of outsourcing things you don’t master, and cannot manage.
