Outsourcing marketing - experiences?
Hey im a developer with a few saas products but not much time to market them.
Does anyone have any experience outsourcing marketing content SEO etc. and if so how did it go, particularly in terms of ROI?
My budget is around $1-1.5k/month for near full time help.
Thanks
Most of the time a waste of money in my experience. The large majority of marketing agencies are good but expensive at performing a certain task you are asking them for - e.g. writting SEO content - and get paid therefore. But what you need as a developer in the early phase of your Saas product, is somebody who tells you if SEO or any marketing is the right thing to do or not. Sometimes the best advise I give founders, is to stop marketing at all for the moment and rather get in direct contact with 5-10 users. Or using other alternatives, e.g. lead generation paternships, revenue sharing etc.
As a marketing consultant, this comment is 100% correct. Agencies generally do tactical stuff, they recommend what they do as a product. That's what they sell, so of course they say it's "the best/newest/latest/innovative" thing.
Strategy first, tactics come later.
You can't choose tactics properly without first understanding the market you operate in, the size and value of customer segments, how to position to them and then devising a strategic plan based on SMART business objectives over an annual period.
It's that which should be used to brief an agency, it's that which holds them accountable for the work they do.
If you can't afford to do proper strategic level marketing yet, please don't spend money on some crappy social/content/SEO agency that only wants your money.
You're better off learning from existing customers, building baseline sales models and auditing your own activities first.
Thanks for the truth
be careful if you decide to hire an agency to do a SEO for you. a lot of agencies employ shady tacticts by spamming blog comments and twitter accounts which may actually backfire. my advice would be to invest fraction of that money into yourself. it might not be the fastest way achive results, but you will carry that bag of knowledge with you in to the future projects. Start digging through posts on IH/Hacker News and over time you will get the sense of what this is all about . good luck!
I'm curious what type of SaaS products you own.
We just launched a huge SEO content marketing strategy 30 days ago and have been utilizing freelance writers, paying blog owners to write articles, etc. Would be interested in sharing with you what we've been doing.
For the past year we focused only on PPC & Media buys but want to gear up for long term.
Like others mentioned, you first need to figure out if SEO is actually what you need.
As a copywriter, I've had lots of people come to me telling me they want x but after I ask them some questions I show them that what they really need is y.
If you have competitors, figure out first how they acquired customers. If you have existing customers, talk to them and ask what was going on in their life that led them to start using your product.
If you have even a few customers it's a great place to start to find out:
Hope this helps. Cheers!
At that price point you won't get a great marketer. You'll get someone to go through the motions but you'll have to direct them and make sure they're doing their job. If all you want is someone to follow your orders then you'll be fine although managing them will also take significant time on your end (more than you think).
If you want someone to actually take over marketing, contribute with their own ideas, etc. then you should consider taking on a partner and offer shares/revenue sharing.
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