B2B SaaS Marketing Maturity: What It Means, Why It Matters, and How to Achieve It
Did you know that SaaS companies invest 80-120% of their revenue in marketing and sales in their first five years of existence?
If you’re investing all of your revenue into marketing, shouldn’t you know whether your messaging is having the impact it should?
In our B2B SaaS Maturity model, we explore a powerful process for making your SaaS marketing efforts and demand generation strategies more proactive, connected, and intelligent when taking advantage of digital media and connecting with the audiences that matter most to your SaaS company.
In this eBook, we outline the five phases of SaaS marketing maturity and how each one builds on the last to create a marketing strategy that’s built for growth, longevity, and sustainability.
- Phase 1: Reactive
- Phase 2: Organized
- Phase 3: Digitized
- Phase 4: Connected
- Phase 5: Intelligent
Scale Your SaaS Organization with Strategic Marketing Made for Growth
The five-phase Leadit SaaS marketing maturity model is designed to help you become and stay agile in your SaaS go-to-market efforts. It will help you constantly evolve and become more proactive in meeting their buyers and customers in the places where you can be most effective.
It’s about being proactive in seeking out marketing opportunities, then building solutions and processes that are constantly equipped to take advantage of those opportunities. And, as you grow, our model is designed to grow with you with agility and sustainability.
5 Phases to SaaS Marketing Maturity
Leadit’s SaaS marketing maturity model is broken up into five phases, though you should know that no single phase exists in a vacuum— and once you reach phase five, it doesn’t mean you’re finished. This framework is about building from one level of maturity to the next, using the principles honed in the previous phase to help inform everything you learn and do in the next phase of your SaaS growth.
Phase 1: Reactive
In Phase 1, SaaS companies typically have no defined strategy. Email and advertising tend to be one-off efforts executed with very little planning. You have little or no distinction in marketing efforts from one platform to another, and your leadership may not yet see the difference between digital and traditional marketing. You have a small in-house marketing team (if any), and few (if any) marketing tools at your disposal.
Phase 2: Organized
In Phase 2 of Leadit’s SaaS marketing maturity model, you’ve become more regular with your communications and content creation. But there’s still no regular, repeatable workflows to ensure continued momentum, and your leadership may or may not assign a point person to direct marketing channels or even distinguish between those channels. You may adopt some marketing tools or outsource certain aspects of your marketing during this phase.
Phase 3: Digitized
In Phase 3 of Leadit’s SaaS marketing maturity model, you’ve started to establish some repeatable processes for strategizing, creating, and posting content. You’re even optimizing that content based on agreed-upon metrics and KPIs. Your leadership values digital marketing, even if they don’t yet have the resources to fully utilize every channel the way it should be. By phase 3, you’ve gotten more sophisticated with leveraging the marketing tools at your disposal, whether you’re still outsourcing aspects of your digital marketing or depending on an in-house team.
Phase 4: Connected
Phase 4 of Leadit’s SaaS marketing maturity model is all about connecting your marketing efforts. You’re able to adapt to new marketing trends and platforms without major process changes, and you have a multi-year marketing plan in place. Your leadership acknowledges the need for digital-first communications and optimizes all content to that end. You can claim advanced tool integration, but you’re getting close to a point where hiring an agency may be essential for executing on some or all aspects of your marketing vision.
Phase 5: Intelligent
In the final phase (though by no means the end of your marketing maturity journey), you’re executing on 1:1, fully traceable communication across the SaaS customer lifecycle— communication defined by personalized messages that are fueled by customer insights. Your leadership is all-in on digital marketing as a primary focus and marketing efforts as a vital asset to sales. Your tools are globally integrated, and you may even be engaging with multiple agencies for marketing needs.
B2B SaaS Marketing Strategies Built to Last
Without a marketing roadmap, your marketing efforts won’t do much other than cause you to spend money without any ROI. Get stuck in the early phases of marketing maturity and you’ll miss competitive opportunities and market share as your competitors pass you by.
Your brand has potential. Put that potential into action with our eBook. Book a 30-minute consultation with our B2B SaaS GTM experts to learn how to grow in SaaS leads and B2B bounds with demand generation solutions built to last.
