Lesson 6 of 30: Build Your B2B Content Machine 👀

Want to know the exact marketing strategy we used to bootstrap SaasRise from $0 to $4M in ARR over the last 18 months and that we're now using to grow the GrowthRise community of B2B Marketing & Sales Leaders? Here it is!

This is a sampler for our upcoming live 16 week Done-With-You B2B SaaS Growth Program., where we teach you and your marketing team how to do this.

» Lesson Slides

It’s all laid out below step-by-step…

We did it by building an Account Based Marketing lead list using Instantly, Apollo, and ListKit  – and then running email and digital ad campaigns to that exact audience – making our brand omnipresent within our target market.

The total cost? About $15k per month for ads + outbound campaigns generated $3M in ARR in the 12 months after our launch in Sep 2023. We turned $180k of total S&M spend into $10M+ of enterprise value in 12 months.

Our guiding philosophy? There’s no sense in simply waiting for your target audience to find you. Go out and find them – and then start building trust with your audience by sending high value content.

Build a list of everyone in your target audience (using the tools above or any lead prospecting platform) – and then send automated outbound email sequences (we use Instantly for that) and then show matched audiences ads on Meta, LinkedIn, Google, and Adroll to those same people.

Then… layer on search ads, retargeting ads, lookalike ads, and review site ads. Within 2-3 months – if you actually produce great content that’s worth watching and reading (that’s the key!) – everyone in your target market will know your brand and understand the problem your software solves.

If you do it right, you’ll be reaching about 60,000 new leads per month via outbound prospecting and turning that into around 15,000 additional highly targeted visitors to your website monthly from email and ads, resulting in around 1000 new MQLs every month.

Between our targeted ads, emails, and LinkedIn posts we’re now getting about 1 targeted B2B million impressions per month within our target market – all for $16,711 per month in sales and marketing spend ($10k on ad spend, $3k for the outbound system, and $3k for an SDR to follow-up on new member applications).

Yes, doing tradeshows, SEO, PLG, and affiliate marketing helps – but NOTHING replaces actually going out and proactively educating and building trust with your target market with great content (videos, case studies, PDFs, webinars, articles, etc.) and then AFTER you’ve built trust, inviting that audience to your main CTA of a trial, freemium, free consultation, audit, discovery call, demo, etc.

Building your outbound content marketing system first (leads list + email sequence + ads) to supercharge your growth within 90 days – and then work on the slower and longer payback investments like inbound marketing.

This is what a SaaS growth marketing team should be doing…

The Four Steps to Rapid SaaS Growth 🔥

Let’s break it down in more detail… Six months of following this SaaS Growth System I’ve created and honed over the last 20 years and you’ll transform your B2B SaaS sales results and finally get over that $5M ARR plateau that many SaaS firms get stuck at…

1. Build a list of everyone in your target market using lead prospecting tools like Instantly, Apollo, and ListKit
2. Set up a ~10 email sequence of actually valuable and highly relevant content to go out every 3 days to your target market (survey results, case studies, PDFs, reports, articles, etc.) and then add everyone in your target market to this sequence.

1. Using Instantly, you can set up a system within a couple weeks that adds 2,000 leads per day to the top of your sequence funnel and allows you to reach 60,000 new leads per month. Build the system yourself so you own it. Costs around $2k/mo to do this at this scale. See our B2B outbound prospecting inbox/domain calculator here. Focus on sending actually valuable and relevant content.
2. Have an SDR reach out to anyone who is consistently engaging with (clicking) on your content
3. Add those who click through to your content to a longer more in-depth sequence and to your weekly/monthly newsletter

1. If your ACV > $5k you may want to also do outbound LinkedIn prospecting to the same audience
2. If your ACV is > $15k, you may want to also do outbound calling prospecting to the same audience
3. If your ACV is > $25k, you may want to also do outbound postcard/physical package prospecting to the same audience
4. If your ACV is > $100k, you may want to add in field sales to the same audience
   

3. Turn on Matched Audience Ads on Meta, LinkedIn, Google Display, and Adroll to show your ads to the exact same people you’re emailing.
   
4. Then, once the above is set up, turn on retargeting ads, lookalike ads, search ads (brand terms, comparison terms, and competitor alternative terms), and review site ads.

Follow those four steps and you’ll be off to the races.

In the video above, I’ll guide you on building a sustainable content machine, emphasizing CEO-led or Founder-led quality content creation and show you how to hit 1 million monthly impressions to your ABM

Lead List with minimal spend. I’ll share strategies for content creation, distribution and repurposing including long-form content, short-form content, and video content.

An actual SaasRise Founder Video retargeting ad — filmed in one take on my iPhone when I used to live in Asheville, NC (I’m now in Austin, TX!) - 58 seconds long:

Another actual SaasRise Founder Video retargeting ad — filmed in one take on my iPhone when I used to live in Asheville, NC (I’m now in Austin, TX!) - 18 seconds long:

We'll see you next time with more killer SaaS growth and scaling content.

In the meantime, check out our upcoming live 16 week Done-With-You B2B SaaS Growth Program, designed to be the best program for scaling B2B SaaS firms from $1M to $100M in ARR by building a predictable revenue machine and combining ABM lead list building with AI personalized outbound with scalable digital advertising.

The next cohort of the B2B Growth Program is starting soon - apply here to join us.

All the best,

Ryan

Ryan Allis, CEO & Founder

SaasRise - The Community for Experienced SaaS CEOs & Founders

www.saasrise.com |  Austin, TX

P.S. - Be sure check out GrowthRise, our new mastermind community for B2B Marketing & Sales Leaders at www.growthrise.com where we teach how to rapidly scale up revenue within a B2B firm. Send your Head of Marketing, Growth, or Sales to join us and we'll take good care of them!

About the Author:
Ryan Allis is the CEO and co-founder of SaasRise, the community for SaaS CEOs & founders, and GrowthRise, the comunity for B2B Marketing & Sales Leaders. Ryan founded and grew iContact as CEO to $50M ARR, sold it for $169M, and has an MBA from Harvard Business School. Today, Ryan coaches SaaS CEOs in rapidly scaling up revenue, building their teams, and achieving $100M+ exits. He's coached and guided the CEOs of high growth B2B SaaS firms like Instantly, Clearstream, Seamless, Tatango, RNL, RXNT, Sojern, and many others.