5 early stage marketing problems every SaaS founder hits and how to solve them
I’m chatting to founders every week about the problems they’re finding with their founder-led marketing programmes.
A lot of it is thinking that they’re behind because they’re not following the popular LinkedIn advice, which they’re absolutely not. That’s because most marketing problems show up structurally and not visibly, which isn’t at all exciting, but incredibly important to know about.
So here’s the 5 things I look for when working with a new client to figure out what needs to be highlighted and fixed with the problems they're finding in their early stage marketing programmes.
Do you recognise yourself and your business in any of these?
Marketing slowly becomes a side project with no owner
I’ve run out of fingers to count on the amount of founders I’ve spoken to who responded “maybe last month?” when I asked them when they last did anything marketing related. This is always after they’ve recognised that there’s an issue.
But when you start tracking back into what happened to lead to the situation that found no actual marketing activity taking place, there are always signs that this will eventually happen.
First and foremost will be because marketing lands squarely on the founder in their new-found founder-led marketing role, adding an extra hat into the ring.
Little fires start need to be put out everywhere across the business. A LinkedIn post announcing a new service or feature now becomes an afterthought and gets pushed out on a Tuesday night at 11pm just before logging off.
And it just becomes the new normal - great ideas, forgotten, then rushed, with no follow up.
Solving this issue until you get to the point that you can hire a specialist employee to do it for you - either freelance or full time - is going to take a bit of time management and accountability from your co-founders or directors.
You need to identify what has worked best and across which channels and do more of that more consistently. A mini marketing plan if you will, get it in a spreadsheet and attach an actual owner to the task and follow up frequently on the progress that has been made.
If this still doesn’t work, then absolutely get in a marketing consultant to bridge the gaps and help you create a resource plan.
A gulf between audience and messaging has developed
This is probably one of the easiest issues to spot but only from the outside looking in. If you’re too close to this issue it will always be invisible. Always.
How it happens is usually because there’s been iteration between one and not the other. For example, you’ve looked at updating who it is that you’re targeting, you’re having more conversations in person and you feel like you’re getting closer to what’s working and who your customer is. But your website is a jargon filled nightmare from 3 iterations ago.
This will result in your customers being confused when they start researching you and any previous conversion absolutely dries up.
Or, conversely, you’ve updated the messaging on your website to be more in line with what you think the messaging should be, what you think will get your customers to convert. But you’ve not really spoken to a customer in a while.
This will result in attracting conversions from leads who are not your ICP and will either suck up too much of your time in the sales cycle, or churn immediately.
None of this happens on purpose, it’s usually because iteration happens in silo when you’re head down trying to fix issues quickly. But it’s one of the most common issues I come across and the most invisible. But you can get visibility around it.
One of the easiest places to spot either of these problems is that if you’re still getting referrals through, pay attention to how they’ve been referred and what they latch on to from your pitch. Does it match your website and marketing materials?
If not, you have a bit of a messaging problem and can be easily fixed with a bit of marketing expertise assistance.
Decision paralysis is causing problems in marketing at this early stage
It’s always good to take a beat to decide if something is worth doing or not but if every single marketing decision is now taking at least 5 business days, then what’s actually happening?
I’ve known founders to go back and forth over every possible outcome of every single idea and still sit on the fence about a decision because they don’t want to get it wrong.
The more risk adverse to marketing a founder is usually because there’s less of an understanding of what marketing actually entails and how it works. This is usually more prevalent with technical founders who can’t get their head around not being certain what an activity will do.
For example, last year I worked with a cyber security start up. A truly fascinating product and category, with some great early signals and some incredible insight from the founder. He wanted thought leadership, so I created it for him from the calls we were having.
But no post was ever good enough and to him never sounded like anything he would say, even if it was a direct quote lifted from a recording.
Turns out that he didn’t actually want the visibility that came with thought leadership content. A year later it’s his co-founder that’s posting this stuff, which would have been a great decision to come to a year previously.
So actually know what you’re comfortable with when it comes to marketing activity to avoid the awkward back and forth.
Additionally, know and accept that you’re not going to be an expert in every single area of business. If you can really make marketing decisions because you don’t really know what’s going on, bring in some expert help. Like you would with HR and finance.
Which leads me to…
The marketing expertise gap start to show
Just because you’re the founder and leader of a business does not mean that you’re an expert across all business disciplines.
Give yourself a break.
None of these disciplines are easy and when you start getting to a certain point (around raising seed is SaaS or hiring commercially in B2B) marketing starts getting considerably harder.
Sure, you can probably see early success on referrals and the odd lead from posting on LinkedIn, but what happens when that well dries up? Do you have a strategy and plan in place that outlines the steps you’re going to take to get in front of your customers? Are you 100% sure who your customer actually is?
I had a client recently who was obsessed with the way that we’d bring in more leads was by going hard on AEO/GEO because that was the latest advice being peddled by the gurus. So we started from the beginning, building the profile of ICP, looking at messaging, building the core strategic foundations for the business.
In the end the strategy was clear - building trust through founder-led video on social and in person events. Very different from the original hypothesis and half way through building the strategy and processes I got told that it’s amazing just how much he didn’t and still doesn’t actually know about marketing.
So, once you start to get to the point of not really understanding what comes next in marketing, don’t feel disheartened that you don’t know, do what others in your position struggle to and hire in some expert help.
The inevitable FFS moment
Eventually all of the above will culminate into the realisation that you just can’t do it all and something has to give. And that’s usually when I get a message about needing to start to do marketing properly.
That realisation doesn’t always show up in the same way though. I had one client need a proper marketing strategy and plan in order to secure a round of investment. I had one client absolutely know they needed marketing as they were certain the messaging was off. I even had one client resonate so hard with a video I made on the pitfalls of founder-led marketing that they had a mini existential crisis and hired me on the call.
The one thing that keeps coming up time and time again is that they thought they had to do it themselves as they couldn’t hire a full timer or an agency.
As a marketing consultant I work with founders who have fallen into the founder-led-marketing-lead trap and need to start building their way out of it properly. I work with them by auditing everything that has happened, is happening and will happen. Then I assess the gaps, build the strategy, then get a solid plan in place which includes how to resource properly.
If you’re interested to know more about how I can help you do that, get in touch.
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