SaaS Marketing Weekly

In this episode, Ryan makes the case for content frequency over the one big campaign that you think makes an impact. He used to spend months building towards a single webinar, guide or exhibition, hoping it would deliver a wave of leads. Now he knows that it’s the weekly rhythm that makes those big campaigns work at all.

The simple saying of ‘consistency is key’ is a true testament to your marketing. Your content needs to be going out there everyday and help lead up to the one big campaign. Ryan walks through how to build that rhythm, from the six-month content calendar and the thought leaders who feed it, to the data that tells you what to double down on. Don’t just wait for the one big win. Compound your work every week and see constant results.

Takeaways:

• Frequency beats intensity. One brilliant session a month gets you nowhere, but showing up every week compounds.

• Quality will dip when you first raise the output, and that’s fine. Expect around ten run-throughs before it feels slick, and get your thought leader critiquing every piece

• Build a six-month content calendar rather than a twelve-month one. One main topic per month with four subtopics gives you a fresh topic to work with every week

• Find those topics in your sales calls transcripts, conversations with clients, feed them to an LLM and draw out the pain points.

• Assign a thought leader to each topic. It can be someone internal, a partner or even a paid influencer, but get their buy-in on the topics before you start

• Find your golden egg of content. Take that 15-minute interview, or podcast episode and turn it into various content pieces. Social clips and posts, blogs, newsletters.

• Let the data choose your big campaigns.Get your most popular podcast, turn it into a webinar, the best webinar into a guide, and the best guide into a live event

• Put ad budget behind it. Organic-only rarely works for B2B SaaS brands without a large following

In this episode, Ryan sits down with Director of Strategy, Jamie, to talk about website CRO’s, conversion rate optimization and how to get more leads from the traffic you already have, without a costly rebuild. Most B2B SaaS companies pour budget into the next campaign, the next funnel, the next ad, and completely overlook the shopfront every prospect actually lands on. Ryan and Jamie break down how to diagnose whether your site is a problem, the handful of pages that move the needle most, and the specifics that turn browsers into booked demos. If you’re getting the right traffic but not enough leads, this episode shows you where to start.

Takeaways:

• Don’t rebuild, optimise: unless your site is a genuine disaster, CRO beats a £20–30k, 4–5 month rebuild you probably don’t need
• Diagnose first: if you’re getting the right ICP traffic but few conversions, CRO is the fastest, most organic route to more leads (use Google Analytics, Lead Forensics and your LinkedIn ads data to check)
• Your hero headline is the most important real estate on the site: ten words or less covering who you are, what you do and the benefit — spend hours on it and test multiple versions
• Messaging beats design: cut the buzzwords and say plainly what you do, who it’s for and the problem you solve (frameworks like Fletcher’s or April Dunford’s help)
• Write headings that tell the whole story on their own, because people skim and read the headers first — validated with heat-mapping tools like Hotjar
• Make the product shine: don’t dump raw UI screenshots — strip out detail, enlarge the fonts and use short looping animations (Slack’s site is the gold standard)
• Social proof needs numbers: case studies with hard stats and percentages convert far better than vague testimonials
• Look beyond the home page: your pricing page (anchoring and tiering), mobile experience, niche use-case pages and book-a-demo page are all high-leverage CRO wins
• Rule of thumb: if your website CRO isn’t at least a 7/10, fix it before you spend a penny on ads

In this episode, Ryan tackles the problem most businesses come to him with: “We are not getting enough leads.”

His advice is to stop reacting to the noise and look at the business as a simple funnel, then fix it backwards. Most advice in the market says that you should start at the top of the funnel with awareness and brand building. Ryan starts at the bottom, because the 5% of your market who are ready to buy today skip all of that and land straight on your website, your demo page and your sales deck.

If they do not convert with your bottom of the funnel assets, nothing you do at the top will save you. Ryan walks through a simple framework on exactly what to fix and in what order.

Takeaways:

• Treat the business as one simple funnel: top, middle and bottom
• Fix it backwards. The 5% who are ready to buy skip straight to the bottom, so if that does not convert, nothing above it matters
• Start with messaging: get people to read your homepage and to tell you what they think you do and who your business serves. If they get it wrong, that’s your first problem to fix
• Then work on the rest: dated design, thin social proof, vague case studies, and demo page that is just a form instead of selling the demo
• Do not overlook the sales deck. Redesigning, rewording and restructuring it lifts sales on its own
• Only turn on your Google Ads if all of your bottom of the funnel assets have been fixed. Then the leads should flow. If not, check on your pricing
• Middle of the funnel is case studies and lead magnets.
• Top of the funnel comes last, and only pays off once you have somewhere to send potential leads

In this episode, Ryan sits down with Sam Gocher, Head of Content at Rocket SaaS, to talk about subject matter experts, or SMEs, and how to turn the experts already sitting inside your business into a content engine. Most of your competitors are pumping out generic AI slop that nobody engages with. The advantage goes to the brands whose real experts show up and share genuine thought leadership. Sam breaks down who your SMEs should be, how to actually get busy senior people into a posting rhythm, what to do when they go quiet, and exactly what they should be posting about. If your content relies entirely on the founder, this episode shows you how to widen it out.

Takeaways:

• Your subject matter experts are already in the business: the founder, head of sales, head of product, senior marketers and any real expert with useful knowledge in their head
• An SME does not need to be charismatic or great on camera. They just need genuine expertise. Your job is to extract it and turn it into content
• A recurring project management task (Rocket SaaS uses Asana) plus a clear SOP is how you turn good intentions into a consistent posting rhythm
• Busy senior people have two or three minutes a day, so give them everything: the topic, the transcript, the templates, the examples. Lead the horse to water
• Ghost writing tends to strip out authenticity, so it is usually better to enable people to write in their own voice than to write for them
• If free methods fail, incentives can work: paying per post, or running a competition for the most engaged post that month
• Sell it to your team on career growth, not just company benefit. A strong LinkedIn presence is one of the best things anyone can build for themselves
• Follow the 80/20 rule: 80% helpful, educational, top-of-funnel content and only 20% bottom-of-funnel promotion

In this episode, Ryan shares one of his favourite LinkedIn tactics: using thought leader ads to boost posts from other people who say genuine, positive things about your brand. A testimonial posted from your own company page gets skipped over. The same praise coming from a real customer with a real voice is far more believable, but it usually dies in the feed because that person only has a few hundred followers. This tactic fixes that, letting you put real budget behind authentic advocacy and get it in front of exactly the right audience. Quick to listen to, easy to apply, and genuinely effective.

Takeaways:

• Thought leader ads let you boost an individual's post to a precisely targeted audience, not just their own followers
• Praise from a real customer in their own words is far more credible than a testimonial posted by your brand
• Build a list of happy customers, partners and advocates, then ask them to post (a small incentive like an Amazon voucher can help)
• Let people write the post themselves so it sounds genuine, but offer to draft it if they are short on time
• Always get a fact or a stat in there, and keep it snappy rather than a long essay
• Check whether people are already tagging you with positive posts, because those are ready to boost right now

In this episode, Ryan sits down with Jamie, Rocket SaaS's paid media and strategy lead, for a deep dive into what actually makes a great ad on LinkedIn and Meta. This is not about targeting or budgets (listen back to episodes 63 to 65 for that). This is about the creative: how to research what your buyers are really thinking, how to build ads across the full funnel, which ad formats are worth your time, and what needs to happen after the click. Jamie also ranks every major LinkedIn ad format out of ten in a quickfire round. If you run ads and you are not getting the results you want, this episode will show you where you are going wrong.

Takeaways:

• Great ads start with research, not design. Find the real scenarios and language your buyers use when they talk about the problem
• Use AI to analyse 100 recorded sales calls and surface the most common pain points, then build ads around exactly what your customers said
• Most B2B SaaS brands waste budget by only running bottom-of-funnel ads when they have no brand awareness to support them
• Top-of-funnel ads are about getting on the radar and building the right associations, not chasing conversions
• Middle-of-funnel ads (case studies, testimonials, comparison content) can work even to cold enterprise audiences
• At the bottom of the funnel, the offer is everything. A free strategy call or audit often beats a straight demo request
• Keep creative simple: ten words or less on the header, minimal graphics, and use dark backgrounds to fight the white LinkedIn feed
• A great ad is useless if the landing page or asset behind it does not convert. Sometimes the problem is the offer, not the ad

In this episode, Ryan makes the case for founder-led sales and explains why, at $7M ARR and over 60 employees, he is still the primary person doing sales at Rocket SaaS. No SDRs, no AEs, just the founder qualifying leads, running discovery calls and closing deals. It sounds like it shouldn't work at that scale, but Ryan argues it's one of the biggest reasons the business is growing so fast. He breaks down why the founder is almost always the best person to sell, how a strong personal brand makes those sales calls dramatically easier, and why consultative selling beats a traditional sales pitch every time. If your growth has plateaued, this episode might point to the reason why.

Takeaways:

• Until you are past roughly $10M in revenue, the founder should be spending around 50% of their time on sales and marketing
• Founder-led sales works best for higher-ticket businesses doing a handful of deals a month, not high-volume, low-ticket sales
• The strategy only works if the founder also has a strong personal brand, since people buy from people, not logos
• When the founder is front and centre of the marketing and then shows up on the sales call, it creates a seamless chain of trust that a random AE cannot replicate
• Founder-led sales is closer to consultation than selling. Ask questions, give genuine advice, and lead the dance into the pitch at the end
• Strong marketing means leads come inbound already 80% sold, rather than chasing people who are not in market
• If you plan to sell the business in the next one to two years, founder-led sales is probably the wrong strategy, since it makes the business too dependent on you
• If growth has stalled, log your time, delegate everything that is not sales and marketing, and get back to 50%

In this episode, Ryan sits down with Daisy, Rocket SaaS's new Head of SEO and AI Search, to tackle one of the biggest shifts happening in marketing right now. Organic traffic from Google is declining. 95% of B2B buyers are now using LLMs as part of their buying journey. And most SaaS brands are not appearing in any of it. This episode covers what AI search actually is, how it differs from traditional SEO, and the specific things you can do to start showing up where your buyers are looking. Whether you have heard it called GEO, AEO or AI search, the principles are the same and Daisy breaks them down clearly.

Takeaways:

• 95% of B2B buyers are now using LLMs as part of their buying journey, and if you are not appearing in those results you are potentially not making the shortlist
• AI search operates higher up the funnel than Google: people use LLMs to solve problems, not just find products
• Clear, specific messaging matters more than ever. Buzzword-heavy websites will not get cited because LLMs do not use those terms
• Over 80% of LLM citations come from third-party websites, not your own domain
• YouTube is one of the most highly cited sources in AI search and is significantly underused by most SaaS brands
• Podcast transcripts, press mentions and thought leadership published across multiple channels all feed into LLM citation
• Original proprietary data and research is favoured by LLMs because it gives them information outside their training data
• The brands that win at AI search are creating genuine problem-solving thought leadership consistently, not those chasing shortcuts

Episode 100. We're marking the milestone by doing something a little different. Ryan takes a step back to reflect on what building a weekly B2B SaaS marketing podcast from scratch actually looks like — the numbers, the lessons, the content strategy behind it, and why it's become one of the best business decisions Rocket SaaS has made.

Ryan breaks down the top episodes by downloads and what the data tells you about what SaaS founders actually care about, the biggest marketing lessons distilled from 100 episodes of conversations, what's changed in the SaaS marketing landscape since episode one, and why a consistent content engine — built around a sub-brand — is one of the highest ROI moves any SaaS business can make.

Whether you've been here since episode one or you're just discovering the pod, this is a good one.

Takeaways:

• A sub-branded podcast removes the sales intent barrier that kills engagement on company-branded content — give your content its own identity
• The pod became the seed of everything: newsletters, blogs, LinkedIn posts, webinars, breakfast events, and a pipeline that keeps growing
• Your top performing content will cluster around 2–3 themes — find the pattern and double down instead of chasing variety
• 95% of your audience isn't ready to buy yet. If your marketing only speaks to the bottom of the funnel, you're invisible to most of your market
• Help-first CTAs consistently outperform transactional ones — switching to a free strategy call tripled Rocket SaaS conversions
• Consistency beats perfection. 100 weekly episodes, never missed. The compounding effect on brand awareness and pipeline is real
• The content calendar is already in your sales calls — most SaaS founders just haven't gone looking for it yet

In this episode, Ryan sits down with Jamie to share exactly how Rocket SaaS grew from $5M to $7M ARR in the space of three months. Three things drove it: a pricing restructure, a serious focus on reducing churn, and an 18-month process that culminated in landing a million dollar deal. This is not a theory episode. Ryan and Jamie walk through the specific decisions they made, why they made them, and what other SaaS companies and agencies can take from each one. Honest, specific and genuinely useful for any founder or marketer trying to scale a recurring revenue business.

Takeaways:

• If your close rate is above 30%, you are probably underpricing. At 48%, Rocket SaaS raised prices and revenue jumped without close rate dropping
• Deleting your lowest pricing tier can force customers into more profitable packages and drive you upmarket almost overnight
• A weekly traffic light dashboard tracking client happiness scores lets senior leaders act on churn risk before it becomes a cancellation
• Proactive, structured client communication reduces churn more reliably than reactive responses to problems
• Recording every customer call and feeding it into AI reveals patterns in what your clients actually want, which becomes marketing gold
• Strategic hiring from brands you admire elevates your business in every sales conversation, even before the hire joins
• Partnerships work best when you give away a lot upfront with no guarantee of return. Vague referral agreements almost never work
• Clients who move companies often take their preferred suppliers with them. Relationships and results compound over time