SME SaaS Startups: How to Create a Marketing Team

What is the first thing you need to grow your startup?

It can be different for each company. But the common denominator we’ve seen effectively working across various sectors is having an awesome marketing team.

Why marketing?

It’s not easy building a B2B SaaS product, let alone acquiring and retaining a healthy customer base. But a good marketing team will help you boost your product awareness in a pool of over 5,000 SaaS solutions and attract potential customers.

SME SaaS Startup Marketing Team

Your SaaS product has been created, developed, tested, debugged, and refined. Now the entire world is about to experience its value.

But considering the amount of SaaS products out there, how are you going to differentiate yourself from the rest? Are you even going to see your SaaS sales grow?

Of course, but you’ll need to form a marketing team that can genuinely connect with your target audience. But where do you even begin?

First, you need to determine your applicant’s strengths and what role they’re going to occupy. For each role, hire people who are efficient, collaborative, and team-oriented.

While all of these are of vital importance, you’ll want to emphasize the last one.

You need a team player. An independent player has a place in marketing.

Over time, however, independent players may strive too autonomously toward distinct aims. Some even stretch themselves overly. Unsurprisingly, poor team collaboration reduces employee morale, say 33% of HR pros.

Key team members, sales leaders, and executives should collaborate with the SaaS marketing team regularly. But, each team should have its own specialty.

This blog will be a two-part series on how to create a marketing team for Saas businesses.
For now, let’s examine who you must hire for your B2B SaaS marketing team. This article will look at a core marketing team for small to medium startup SaaS companies.

The Core Team Members

DEVELOPER

Your program’s launch team may already have the means and skills to create public marketing assets. Yet, it could be that your database and server-side teams aren’t the best fit here. You may need a front-end designer that knows HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

CMS knowledge is needed. If you use a CMS like HubSpot, you may need to hire someone who understands HubL markup.

DESIGNER

Your designer will create your branding. He ensures that all your marketing campaigns reflect your voice. That matters in raising brand awareness.

Choose someone who knows not only UX and design principles but also your product and brand. One who can manage a brand across multiple platforms is a great choice.

WRITER

Content marketing and copywriting are critical components of generating SaaS leads. You’ll need a writer who can engage readers and has a good grasp of new SEO tactics.

Post-Covid, skilled writers may be harder to find as evident by over 50% drop in online job vacancies. Yet, they are worth the time and money spent finding them.

Writing compelling sales text for landing pages, emails, and other consumer touchpoints are also required. This individual does not have to be an expert on each of your platform’s back-end systems. Yet, he must be able to communicate with back-end team members when necessary. He should be able to write in a different tone. A blog, for example, should be written in a significantly lighter tone than a webpage that focuses on a product’s technical specifics.

Recognize your social networking prowess. Your writer should be familiar with each platform’s criteria. He must be able to customize posts accordingly. A great writer can handle site content, pillar pages, and even Twitter tweets.

STRATEGIST

Your strategist will “own” your SaaS company’s marketing. They report to you and everyone else.

Together with company stakeholders, this person will build an effective B2B SaaS marketing plan. He makes sure that it is lucrative and can be monitored and analyzed to maximize outcomes.

More importantly, he does it all while maintaining the organization’s business goals. The strategist must organize and manage the team. He makes sure that the marketing efforts are in line with the corporate objectives.

A smaller SaaS company’s strategist may be a Marketing Director. In a larger organization, they may be called CMO or VP of Marketing.

Marketing Department Structure

Putting together a marketing team is a big job amid a rapidly evolving marketing field. Job descriptions and organizational structures change with it.

Hiring top talent will involve finding the best talents for every role. Having the most transferable skills will help you hire those who can grow into different roles in the future.

This section will discuss the many jobs found in marketing teams. We will also discuss the skills required to excel in them. Are you ready to start assembling your perfect rockstar team?

1. Web Design Group

Team members should be familiar with best practices and web standards. They should also be aware of the latest content management applications.

As your company grows, you may have to hire a full-time web master. The person must be expert in site design, web planning, and SEO.
Your web design team will create and maintain your website’s messaging. They will need to work with content and product marketing teams to produce web pages.

Any issues with your site will be directed to them, and they must be able to fix any technical issues.

Inspire repeat business with a user-friendly website design team.

Structure:

Site designers work hard to make each visitor’s web experience smooth and enjoyable. They’ll use their abilities to drive visitors to your company’s website happy.

If you can afford it, hire Senior Web Developers to keep your site up to date and manage it. As your design team grows, an Associate level professional can help with these tasks.

Possible roles:

• Designer
• Webmaster (Front-end)
• Graphic Designer Expert
• Senior web dev
• UX/UI Designer
• User Experience Designer
• Website designer
• Internet programmer

2. Content Group

Writers must have strong editing and organizational skills. They must also have a collaborative mindset.

Content creators have the following responsibilities:

Ensure you have enough content to present a compelling story. Their content, from videos to blogs, will help you in all aspects of your marketing.

Write an engaging webinar or blog post. Their social media content, videos, and blogs rely on professional editors.

Create high-quality multimedia materials for your firm, such as podcasts, films, and ebooks. To ensure accuracy, content creators may need to collaborate with other parties.

Ensure your content writers are familiar with web management software. They help eliminate the need to review data from various sources.

Structure:

A content team may also comprise your product marketing and social media teams. While the duties are identical, content marketers should be well-coordinated. They should also be time-efficient in a fast-paced setting.

Employ a content developer who knows your history and voice. He must be able to encourage clients to discover more about your company through video, audio, or ebooks.

Possible roles:

• Writer
• Web editor
• Video editor
• Producer
• Video Production Expert
• Creator in Charge
• Content creator

3. Product Marketing

Expertise in technical and price strategies is necessary in a product marketing team. Creative problem-solving skills are a plus.

This group helps customers understand the product’s features and benefits. It organizes and pushes a product’s message, along with its brand and customers.

Product marketers use ad language and product pages to identify target audiences. To create marketing campaigns for your SaaS products, they must be thorough planners.

In a startup, a product marketer may be the only marketer. He conducts research and analyzes data. He then discusses future campaigns and customizes all marketing materials. He makes sure they all meet client needs.

A marketer should create a superb product page with relevant content to help sell a product. He must be prepared to deliver his strategies to other decision-makers.

Structure:

As a startup company, your product marketer will likely be your single marketer. He may also work alongside other team members. Seek a writer with business experience who can present marketing.

The product marketer will be explaining the product’s worth to potential customers. Thus, his skills should be varied. He must also have a good understanding of your buyer persona.

Your product marketing staff should be assigned tasks like copywriting or strategy formulation.

Possible roles:

• Product Marketing Expert
• Marketing Manager
• Product Manager
• Brand Manager

4. Acquisition

Your Acquisition staff should be customer-centric. On the team are people who live to delight consumers at every level of the buying process.

The skills necessary are as follows:

• customer service
• effective written and verbal communication
• a solution-driven mindset
• collaboration
• approachability

The acquisition team is the first point of contact for clients. Hence excellent customer service skills are a must. The corporate knowledge to engage with customers is equally important.

An acquisition team must be experts in how items may help SaaS customers. It also needs to capitalize on small opportunities to enhance customer experience.

To design effective development strategies, the team needs to produce appealing content offers. Likewise, it needs to track its effectiveness.

Structure:

Don’t allocate the responsibility to someone who can’t successfully communicate your brand. They should be able to delight all clients.

Possible roles:

• Acquisitions Editor
• Acquisitions Manager
• Customer Acquisition Expert
• Lead Generation Expert

5. SEO Team

The SEO team will optimize content. Members make sure your brand is aware of the keywords essential to rank for your product or service.

They’re also called upon to help make business judgments.

To achieve these aims, SEO teams must have the following:

• excellent writing
• programming
• technical skills

Some SEO operations need writing, proofreading, and content. Writing skills will come in handy here. SEO team members must be able to think creatively and solve problems.

You need somebody who can find and use keywords to increase your company’s Google ranking. He must also design link-building strategies and a basic SEO approach for the organization.

Finally, SEO experts should be able to use analytics tools to improve overall approach.

Structure:

A small company’s SEO strategist may be merged with another function. A person familiar with analytics, optimizing content for search engines, and completing detailed keyword research should be able to perform SEO.

If they are not familiar with how Bing or Google work, they certainly aren’t the ideal choice. Gaining new consumers requires knowledge of statistics and SEO.

Possible Roles:

• Senior Optimization Writer
• Writer
• Senior SEO Strategist

6. Social Media Team

Your social media staff will plan and execute campaigns. Hence, they must know how to create exciting content to engage audiences. They must be experts in generating leads.

Your social media staff should be able to create, schedule, and analyze social media material to accomplish these duties adequately.

Content creators will need basic graphic design abilities or knowledge of design tools like Canva or Adobe. In contrast, social media managers will need to schedule content, measure success through various metrics, and evaluate performance.

Customer service skills are also required since social media teams will interact with customers who engage via social media tags or posts. A good grasp of the company’s voice and target consumer is essential.

Small teams can use social media management software to execute a complete social media SaaS marketing strategy.

Structure:

SMEs with a growth marketing team should be familiar with fundamental customer and social media marketing strategies to develop a web presence. If you can afford it, start concentrating on functional areas like social media manager or marketing leader.

Content management, Facebook video editing, and Instagram Stories creation exemplify how an enterprise social media team might be structured.

Possible Roles:

• Head Account Manager

Hiring in this context is tough. Some people have done email marketing for years but never had to make a content offer. Avoid one-trick ponies and go for someone with less education but great digital marketing and communication skills overall.

Hiring excellent employees is a difficult task for any business, regardless of size or industry.

Don’t settle for mediocrity; there are outstanding talents out there who are worth the wait. If faced with budget constraints, fractional marketing can be a great option.

The Team’s Stakeholders

Product, service, and sales divisions should be involved in the strategy process since they understand intricacies that marketing may not. A great customer experience equals a stronger Customer Loyalty… and more return on investment.

While some of your team members may work more closely than others, you should always prioritize everyone to collaborate regularly. Creative and new ideas come from everywhere, so don’t assume that no one on your team can participate in a strategic planning meeting.

Your SaaS marketing team needs competent, highly functional team members in every task. A talented SaaS marketing agency can help. For more marketing tips, check our blog here.