SaaS Marketing Weekly

In this episode, Ryan explains how Rocket SaaS set out to double its revenue in a year, and hit the target nearly four months early. For years, his approach to growth was simply hoping for a good year. Now his strategy is about setting a number and working backwards, all the way down to how many leads the business needs each month. Ryan walks through the exact maths of how this is done and how you can build a strategy to get to your goal.

Takeaways:

• Stop hoping for growth. Set one number and reverse engineer it. If you know how much monthly recurring revenue you need to add, and you know your average deal value, the number of clients you need to sign each month is simple division
• Work the funnel backwards using last year’s real conversion rates. For Ryan, that looked something like: a 42% close rate meant ten sales presentations, which meant 13 MQLs, which meant around 20 leads a month
• Set your CRM pipeline up properly so every stage can be reported on each week. It sounds basic, but surprisingly few businesses have it right
• Use attribution and self-reported attribution to find what actually drives deals.
• Double down on what works and cut what isn’t. Rocket SaaS doubled its webinars, more than tripled its live events, and increased LinkedIn ad spend, while pulling back on Google and Meta
• Track it weekly. The senior leadership team reviews every funnel number on a traffic-light dashboard and roundtables anything sitting in the red
• If you fall behind, lean on social proof: stronger case studies with real numbers, video testimonials, and lookalike audiences targeted with ads

In this episode, Ryan is joined by Sam Gocher, Head of Content at Rocket SaaS, to discuss how you can create top quality content that always resonates with your ICP. For most B2B SaaS brands, they don’t have an idea of what that statement is. Sam and Ryan discuss a ‘What We Want To Be Known For’ statement and how that holds all of your content accountable to your ICP.

Takeaways:

• The logo test: if a competitor could put their logo on your content and nobody would notice, it is not niche enough and you do not have a strong enough voice in your market
• Messaging and content are different things. Messaging is the fixed layer that sits on your website, content is the fluid layer you publish constantly, and the second one cannot work until the first is settled
• The fix is a single statement defining what you want to be known for. It will feel long and specific, and that is exactly the point, because no competitor could claim it
• Get the founder in the room. They started the business for a reason, and that reason is usually the answer. In larger companies go to the CMO or CRO, but the founder should still steer it
• Bring salespeople too, since they hear the objections first hand and have to sell against the same messaging
• Focus on 3 key aspects: why the business was founded, whether your ICP actually cares, and a separate point of view for each ICP that ladders back up to the one statement
• Ryan’s take on AI and what its good for and what you should still be doing manually for your content and ideas.

In this episode, Ryan argues that the biggest difference between founders who scale and founders who stall is the speed at which they make decisions. He actively tries to never to let a decision leave the room. Ryan covers the decision tree he built at Rocket SaaS and the worst-case scenario test that shrinks the risk.

Takeaways:

• The speed of decision-making is what separates founders who scale from founders who stall
• The maths favours speed: twenty decisions with sixteen right beats five decisions with five right, as long as the wrong ones are not catastrophic.
• Slow decisions kill activity.
• Build a decision tree: set monetary thresholds and named sign-offs so people know exactly what they can approve without asking. Fewer meetings, less Slack, and far more trust
• Use the worst-case scenario test. The risk is usually far smaller than it feels
• Audit your own decisions for a month, logging what each one was, what it was worth, and how long it took, then move faster on the ones you dragged your feet over
• Kill “let’s circle back” and replace it with “let’s decide now and adjust later”. Speed beats perfection when you are trying to scale

In this episode, Ryan is joined by Sam Gocher, Head of Content at Rocket SaaS, to work through the 5 traps that stop content driving revenue. Most B2B SaaS companies are producing content activity, but when the CEO asks whether any of it is actually generating pipeline, nobody can give them an answer. Ryan and Sam cover why guessing your topics never works, how to extract real thought leadership from time-poor founders, why content and paid teams must stop operating separately, and if your content is not boosted and not helping SEO, you should probably stop making it altogether.

Takeaways:

• Even if you genuinely know your market, asking a thousand of your ICP will tell you far more than a team guessing in a room
• If your content is written purely with AI, any competitor could put their logo on it, and in-house teams or agencies will never know the industry like the founders do
• Get founder buy-in with a small ask: a 15-minute interview every fortnight gives you a transcript that becomes blogs, newsletters and posts. To scale it, pitch one 60-minute studio session a month, which is two episodes and a fortnightly podcast
• Use the thought leaders inside your business who match your audience, because buyers trust their peers far more than a vendor
• Content and paid should never run in silos. Your content team produces something they are proud of, and nobody ever asked whether the paid team intends to put a penny behind it
• If your content is not being boosted and is not helping SEO, almost nobody sees it. Either realign it with paid and SEO, or stop and put the resource elsewhere
• Don’t let all your content sit at the bottom of the funnel. Your top-of-funnel content is super important, and adding a thought leader to the mix gives you plenty tofu content to work with
• Batch your recording, keep a content calendar, repurpose relentlessly, and revive old content that performed well rather than going quiet

In this episode, Ryan steps away from the usual marketing tactics to share the eight books that have had the biggest impact on his career and his business, Rocket SaaS. He covers what each book taught him and how he applied it.

Takeaways:

• Profit First (Mike Michalowicz): Take a set percentage for profit, tax, and your own pay into separate accounts every fortnight, rather than hoping something is left at year-end. Ryan ran this for around a decade
• The Pumpkin Plan (Mike Michalowicz): A pumpkin farmer rips out the rotting pumpkins and replants seeds from the prize winners. Your draining, unprofitable, scope-creeping clients are the rotten ones
• They Ask, You Answer (Marcus Sheridan): This is demand generation before it had a name. Stop hiding pricing and competitor comparisons behind forms and give buyers what they actually want
• Deep Work (Cal Newport): Focused, undistracted work is the only thing that actually advances your career, and it will never happen by accident. Ryan treats it as a ritual - calendar blocked, Slack off, phone in another room, and focusing on one task at a time only
• Key Person of Influence (Daniel Priestley): This book focuses on the five Ps: pitch, publish, product, profile, and partnerships. Ryan credits the accompanying course with saving his business in the early days
• Obviously Awesome (April Dunford): The ten-step framework for positioning and messaging, and the first step towards a genuinely strong marketing function
• Traction (Gino Wickman): Introduces EOS, a system for running a company around its vision, people, data and processes. The part Ryan rates most is the weekly leadership meeting: pull up the numbers that matter, colour-code them, and roundtable anything sitting in the red until you have actions for that week
• The Elon Musk biography (Walter Isaacson). This one focuses on finding the single biggest bottleneck holding the business back and going all in on it, then moving to the next one

In this episode, Ryan is joined by Joe McLaughlin, Rocket SaaS’s Director of Strategy, for a run through the ten things they most often see going wrong with LinkedIn ads. Plenty of B2B SaaS brands have tried the platform, seen no return, and switched it off, while others are seeing a great ROI. Ryan and Joe work through everything on what not to do, from budgets, to targeting, all the way down to the creative that doesn’t convert. If you fix all ten things mentioned in this episode, your LinkedIn goes from a channel you gave up on to one of the highest ROI channels.

Takeaways:

• Poor budget allocation is the most common problem. LinkedIn is expensive, and a large audience with a small budget means you don’t show up regularly. It’s time to shrink that audience
• LinkedIn’s native filters are too broad, so build an account list from the companies actually buying from you
• Targeting the wrong decision makers wastes budget. Check your CRM for who actually requests demos
• Too much bottom-of-funnel activity limits you to the 5% of your audience that are ready to buy. What about the other 95%?
• Busy creative kills performance. People spot an ad instantly, so aim for ten words or less, a big header, and no clutter
• Poor messaging is causing your audience to leave. Name the problem you solve in plain language and skip the buzzwords
• The wrong ad format costs you. Carousels take ten times the effort and rarely stop the scroll. Single image ads drive pipeline
• No retargeting means leaving the fastest conversions to fade away. Sploit your budget roughly 70% cold audience and 30% retargeting
• What happens after the click decides everything. The landing page is where the conversion happens.

In this episode, Ryan shares that LinkedIn Ads are not a lead generation channel. Google Ads is, because people go there actively searching for a solution. Nobody scrolls LinkedIn hoping to find a B2B SaaS vendor. LinkedIn is a place where people consume content, and it should be treated as a content amplification channel.

Takeaways:

• LinkedIn ads are not a lead generation channel. Leads come off the back of them, but that is not what they are for
• Google Ads is where people are actively searching for a supplier. So LinkedIn and Google Ads should never sit in the same category
• Treat LinkedIn as a content amplification channel, and it changes how you approach it, how you measure it, and what you create
• Targeting on LinkedIn is the whole point. Focus on industry, headcount, revenue, location, job title, even hand-picked companies, so your content reaches exactly who you want
• This is a demand generation play. 95% of your audience are not in market and nothing will force them, so build familiarity now and be the name they think of when they are

In this episode, Ryan is joined by Joe McLaughlin, Director of Strategy at Rocket SaaS, who now oversees all Rocket SaaS clients and spends half his time on Rocket SaaS’s own marketing, to walk through exactly how an expert reviews a marketing strategy from top to bottom. Joe starts with reporting and attribution, because until you can see what is really driving pipeline, you are just guessing. From there it becomes a simple exercise of deciding what to scale, what to fix, and what to kill. Along the way they cover the outbound rethink that dramatically lifted conversions at Rocket SaaS.

Takeaways:

• Until your reporting and attribution are right, you are guessing. HubSpot is what let Rocket SaaS see which touchpoints actually produced deals
• Good attribution shows you where the funnel leaks, so you know whether the problem is lead quality, the sales deck, or the sales team, rather than guessing
• Run a simple exercise on every campaign: what do we scale, what do we fix, and what do we kill
• Kill what cannot be meaningfully differentiated. Fix what is close but underpowered
• Every campaign should earn its budget, and that means a time allocation as well as a spend allocation
• New markets and bigger clients are tempting, but there is usually more room in the ICP you already win in
• Do more of what already works. Attribution showed events, webinars, podcasts, and LinkedIn thought leadership drove almost every deal for Rocket SaaS
• Put process behind thought leadership. Have a dedicated testing campaign for promoted posts, and a recurring task so the weekly post always gets boosted rather than occasionally
• If the business is plateauing, it’s time to carve out dedicated time and people to grow your business through marketing efforts.

In this episode, Ryan runs through 8 key things that you need to consider and change so you can go more upmarket and sign bigger clients. A year ago, Rocket SaaS set out to win clients in the 50 to 500 headcount range. Going upmarket changes almost everything, from your pricing and brand to your messaging and the way deals reach you. Ryan walks through all eight, ending with one deceptively simple habit that got him into a room full of ideal clients.

Takeaways:

• Start with research. Interview the bigger clients you already have, or invest in a tool to survey the upmarket buyers you want. What large companies care about is often the opposite of what smaller ones do
• Revisit your pricing. If an enterprise buyer lands on low pricing, they assume you are not for them, and “why are you so cheap?” is rarely a compliment
• Bigger buyers subconsciously judge your credibility based on how your site looks, so a dated design will most likely cost you those larger deals.
• Rewrite the messaging to speak to what larger teams are missing. Smaller companies want you to be their department; larger teams need to know how you fit into their current system
• Offer a free audit. Bigger brands already have a supplier or an in-house team, so lead with the problems they are still struggling with rather than your product
• You need to have an ABM strategy in place. Start with podcast invites, founder-to-founder connections, co-hosted events, and direct mail
• Big deals need a door opener, and partnering with a well-known consultant or advisor is one of the most powerful plays available
• And the last key takeaway? That one's Ryan's best-kept secret. Listen to the full episode to find out

In this episode, Ryan sits down with Sam Gocher, Head of Content at Rocket SaaS, to make the case for top-of-funnel (TOFU) content: the kind that grows pipeline by reaching the 95% of your market who aren’t ready to buy yet. Ryan credits top-of-funnel content as arguably the single biggest reason Rocket SaaS scaled from $1 million to $7 million ARR in two years, and yet it’s the part of the funnel most businesses under-invest in.

Sam and Ryan break down where to start (your ICP and the problem that keeps them up at night), how to decide what you want to be known for, and how to find your topics by mining your own sales calls. If your growth relies too heavily on the 5% ready-to-buy-today audience, this episode shows you how to widen the top.

Takeaways:

• Top-of-funnel content targets the 95% of your market who aren’t in-market yet, so that when they are ready to buy, they already know you, like you and trust you.

• Ryan credits top-of-funnel content as arguably the biggest driver behind Rocket SaaS scaling to $7 million ARR in two years.

• It all starts with your ICP: if you don’t know who they are and the problems they’re facing, you can’t create content that resonates

• Decide what you want to be known for and tie it back to your offering, without ever pushing your product at the top of the funnel

• Build ‘big rock’ campaigns: one deeply-researched pillar asset and then repurpos it into video, social clips, blogs, events and posts that all link back

• Don’t gate your top-of-funnel content: gating drags it down to bottom-of-funnel. Top of funnel is about giving, not extracting

• Find your topics by mining demand: survey your audience, add top-of-funnel questions to sales calls, then use AI to transcribe and an LLM to surface the common themes

• A podcast is one of the best top-of-funnel investments you can make

• CEOs often resist top-of-funnel because it doesn’t attribute leads immediately, but a wide top of funnel is how you scale pipeline fast