69 marketing questions for a growing SaaS company to ask

While the Internet abounds with blog posts on 21 growth hacks and 50 tactics on SaaS marketing, there are surprisingly very few posts on the right questions to ask. Without asking the right questions, the hacks and tactics are disjointed and don’t come together to help you build the right marketing to grow your SaaS business.

So here are 69 marketing questions to ask if you are a growing SaaS company. These questions can help you think about your marketing holistically, can help you uncover unknown unknowns, areas you hadn’t thought about earlier or even open up new ways of going about your marketing.

1. Given our target market, nature of product and ticket size, what channels make sense for us?
2. Given our budget, team and skillset, what channels should we focus on?
3. What is the best way to experiment with different channels?
4. How much time and effort should we put in a channel before concluding it is not working for us?
5. How do we know if the channel didn’t work for us or we didn’t do something right?
6. Do you think it makes sense to focus just on paid channels for a while since they show immediate results? And we can turn them on and off at will?
7. Online literature says that most companies reach scale with 1–2 channels itself. Is that true? To what scale?
8. We did see some promise with outbound reach outs in the early days when we founders were reaching out and tapping into our networks. Do you think it can scale for us?
9. Should I start investing in long-term efforts at our stage or continue with things that deliver quick results?
10. There’s so much content out there. Does it even make sense to do content marketing anymore?
11. How can we stand out with content marketing in our space?
12. We just started with content marketing. How much time should we give it before we start seeing results?
13. How can we scale our content marketing efforts to drive more top of the funnel for us?
14. How much time will it take for SEO to show results given the competition in our industry?
15. How do we get our product page to rank in search results? Nobody is dying to link to a page promoting our product but it’s the shortest path to conversion.
16. How do we put a number to the max we should allow our cost of acquisition to go since we don’t really know what our LTV is at this stage?
17. Our lead to sale conversion is not the best but it’s pretty decent. Should we focus on correcting that right now or increase the top of the funnel for now?
18. Should we work on creating our own demand or just focus on channels through which we can harvest the demand our well-funded competitor is already creating?
19. Does account-based marketing make sense for us? What is the smallest experiment we could run to see if it works for us?
20. We are thinking about raising our prices by 50%. What should I know and be prepared for that before we do that?
21. Does it make sense to acquire leads from G2Crowd, TrustRadius etc or have they already made up their mind by then?
22. LinkedIn ads seem expensive. Do they even make sense at our price point?
23. Podcasts seem to be the new rage. Should we do one?
24. If I do one, how do I measure what business results is the podcast driving?
25. Does the influencer marketing thing really work? Apart from money, what’s the incentive for any of them to share our product or content?
26. How do we track our marketing funnel end to end?
27. Does it even make sense realistically or should I just track traffic to leads in GA and the rest in my CRM?
28. Does a brand really matter?
29. When should we start thinking about building a brand?
30. How should we go about building a brand?
31. How do we know that our branding efforts are working?
32. Should I also build a personal brand as a founder or should I just focus on the company brand?
33. We have multiple products. Should we build mini brands for the individual products at all or just focus on building the company brand?
34. We are kind of creating a new category with our product (like HubSpot did with inbound marketing and Drift with conversational marketing). But with our small funding, should we try creating a new category at all?
35. How should we think about how much budget to allocate to marketing?
36. How should we think about allocating the marketing budget to different activities and resources?
37. How much more growth can we unlock by localizing our website? How should we go about it?
38. We are about to raise a round of funding which will give me a marketing budget 4 times what I have right now and the CEO wants to know how I plan on using it to scale marketing? How should I go about it?
39. Should my first hire be a junior hire for say content marketing or a marketing manager/head types?
40. We have a content marketer right now and are looking for someone who can handle paid ads. Should I hire a specialist for that or a generalist?
41. If I hire a generalist, how soon will I have to get that person to specialize?
42. Is it possible to scale up content marketing with freelancers and agencies?
43. What parts of marketing is it best to outsource because internal expertise is hard to develop or takes a long time?
44. What parts should we outsource to begin with but bring in-house once we can afford it? How should we manage that transition?
45. How do I keep my content marketing team motivated?
46. Should we hire a marketing operations person or should everyone handle their own operations?
47. We are looking to hire a product marketer but what metrics should we measure to understand their impact?
48. What does a good marketing ops person look like?
49. When should we think about getting in marketing automation?
50. What should I look for in a marketing automation solution?
51. What will I need a year or two down the line?
52. What marketing automation solutions should we consider and evaluate?
53. HubSpot (replace with any marketing automation solution) says it’s great at creating landing pages, but how good is it really? What does it do well? What does it not?
54. What should the rest of my marketing stack look like?
55. Should I add Mixpanel/Amplitude or is GA enough at our stage?
56. How should we get started with lead scoring?
57. What’s the best tool for doing webinar marketing? What factors should I consider?
58. I know last-click attribution is not the best one but is it worth putting in the effort to get the right model right now? How much effort does it take anyway?
59. What tool do you use for tracking metrics for all the important things happening in marketing?
60. Personalization seems to be all the buzz right now. How much personalization is right for us at this stage?
61. How do I test whether my messaging is resonating with my audience?
62. How should we launch new features to our customers?
63. Should we have a 2-week free trial or a month long?
64. Should we ask for credit card details before starting a trial?
65. Does doing our own event make sense at this stage? When should we look at doing our own event?
66. How should we find the benchmarks for different stage of the conversion funnel for our industry and for a company our size? Should we be benchmarking at all?
67. How should we go about tracking marketing RoI? Our CEO asks me for that and right now I am not sure about how to go about it.
68. We are considering having a freemium plan but are not sure if it will help more people start using our product or would we be losing money on people who could have paid but used the free plan instead? What’s the best way to estimate this?
69. Does having a free plan change the perception of our product and brand?

Shameless Plug

You don’t have to find answers all of these questions by yourself. I am building a SaaS marketing mentorship platform called MonkHD where you can get on calls with experts and get advice from them. There are experts from companies like HubSpot and Zendesk, and in specific areas like marketing automation, account-based marketing, positioning etc. With the right advice, you will make lesser mistakes and grow faster. You can check out all the experts here.