SaaS Marketing: Consultant or Agency? (UK Founder Guide)

I see this question all the time from UK SaaS founders, and tbh, it's a bit of a trap. Framing it as a straight choice between a 'consultant' and an 'agency' is why so many businesses end up with the wrong partner, burning cash on ads that go nowhere. The titles themselves are often meaningless; I’ve seen one-man-band freelancers call themselves an agency, and massive agencies that offer 'consulting'.

The real issue isn't the label they use, it's about what you're actually buying. Are you buying a senior-level brain to diagnose a problem and build a strategy from scratch? Or are you buying a well-oiled machine, a team of hands to execute a strategy that's already working? They are two completly different things. Getting this wrong is like hiring a team of builders when you haven't even got architectural plans. It'll be expensive, messy, and the whole thing will probably fall down.

So, let's cut through the noise. I'm going to break down what each option *actually* means for a SaaS business like yours, when you should hire one over the other, the red flags to look for, and how to make a decision that won’t leave you with a massive hole in your marketing budget and nothing to show for it.

So, what does a good SaaS consultant actually do?

Think of a top-tier consultant as a specialist doctor. You don't go to them for your weekly check-up; you go to them when you have a specific, complex problem that needs a diagnosis and a treatment plan. A genuine consultant is a strategist, a troubleshooter. They are the person you bring in for their brain and their years of experience, not just to press buttons inside an ad account.

In my experience running campaigns for B2B SaaS, a consultant is most valuable at very specific inflection points in a company's journey:

1. The 'Blank Page' Stage (Pre-Launch/Early Growth): You've got a great product but no idea how to approach paid acquisition. A consultant will come in, analyse your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), map out the competitive landscape, and build your foundational campaign strategy. They'll answer the big questions: Should we be on LinkedIn or Google? What's our core messaging? What initial audiences should we test? What does a realistic budget and CPA look like? They build the engine before you turn the key.

2. The 'It's Broken' Stage (Plateaued Growth): You've been running ads, maybe in-house or with a freelancer, and things have stalled. Your CPA is creeping up, scale is impossible, and you can't figure out why. A consultant will perform a deep audit of your accounts, your landing pages, your offer, and your entire funnel. They'll identify the bottlenecks and give you a clear, actionable plan to fix them. I remember one SaaS client who came to us with a CPA of £100. We went in, restructured their campaigns and messaging, and got it down to £7. That's a consultant's job.

3. The 'Upskill' Stage (Team Enablement): You've hired a junior marketing manager who's eager but lacks senior experience. A consultant can act as a fractional Head of Growth, providing strategic direction, training your team on best practices, and overseeing their work. This is often a much more cost-effective way to get senior-level expertise without the massive salary of a full-time hire.

The key thing is that a consultant's engagement is often finite. They come in, solve the problem, build the system, and then either hand it off or move to a light-touch advisory role. You're paying for their focused, high-impact expertise over a short period. Any UK founder looking for guidance should consider how an expert can set the right foundations, which is often a better investment than hiring an execution team too early. If you're considering this path, you might want to understand more about the specifics of hiring an advertising consultant.

And what's the deal with a SaaS marketing agency?

If a consultant is the architect, an agency is the construction company with the whole crew: project managers, bricklayers, electricians, and plumbers. An agency is an execution engine, designed to take a proven plan and scale it efficiently. They are not who you hire to figure out if the house should be built in the first place.

A good agency brings several things to the table that a single consultant or freelancer can't:

-> Manpower and Scale: This is their primary advantage. When you have campaigns that are working and you need to ramp up spend, test dozens of new creatives, and manage activity across multiple platforms, an agency has the team to handle it. We've worked on campaigns pushing 45k+ signups; that's not something a single person can manage effectively while also thinking strategically.

-> Diverse Skillsets: A proper agency will have specialists. You get a PPC expert, a social ads manager, a copywriter, a designer, and maybe even a video editor all under one roof. Trying to hire all that talent individually is a nightmare for a founder. For example, for one B2B client in environmental controls, we were able to reduce their cost per lead by 84% by leveraging our specialists on both LinkedIn Ads and Meta Ads, platforms that require very different approaches to succeed.

-> Systems and Processes: Good agencies have well-oiled machines for reporting, communication, and project management. This can bring much-needed structure and discipline to a founder's chaotic marketing efforts. They should be providing you with clear dashboards and regular updates that show exactly what's working and what isn't.

You hire an agency when you have product-market fit and a clear, validated acquisition channel. Your main problem shouldn't be "how do we find customers?" but "how do we find *more* customers, faster, without breaking everything?". They are the right choice when you want to delegate the day-to-day execution to a team so you can focus on other parts of the business. But hiring them too early, before you've figured out your core messaging and offer, is one of the fastest ways to burn through your funding. They'll be very efficient at scaling something that doesn't work.

The decision on whether to build a team or hire an agency is a common headache for founders, but it comes down to whether you need to buy a system or build one.

What should you expect to pay in the UK?

Price is obviously a huge factor, and this is where you see a big difference between the two models. Don't just look at the monthly fee; you have to consider the total cost and the potential return. The cheapest option is almost always the most expensive one in the long run because of wasted ad spend and lost time.

Consultant Pricing Models:

• Day Rates: This is very common in the UK. You'll see a massive range, from £400 for someone more junior to £1,500+ for a top-tier strategist with a proven SaaS track record. You're buying their focused time for a day or a set number of days per month.
• Project Fees: This is my prefered way to engage. A fixed price for a fixed outcome. For instance, £5,000 for a full paid ads account audit and strategic build-out. It aligns incentives perfectly – you know the total cost, and the consultant is motivated to deliver the result efficiently.
• Monthly Retainer: For ongoing advisory, you might pay a consultant a retainer of £1,000 - £4,000 per month. This gets you a set amount of their time for strategy calls, oversight, and troubleshooting. It's not for day-to-day management.

Agency Pricing Models:

• Flat Monthly Retainer: This is the most common model for B2B SaaS. It can range from £2,000 for a very basic service to £10,000+ per month for a multi-platform, full-service engagement. The fee is based on the scope of work, not your ad spend.
• Percentage of Ad Spend: You'll see this a lot, typically 10-20% of your monthly ad spend. Tbh, I'm not a huge fan of this for most SaaS businesses. It can incentivise the agency to simply spend more, rather than spending more efficiently. It makes sense at a massive scale, but for most, a flat retainer is better.
• Performance-Based: Run a mile if an agency offers you a purely performance-based deal from the start. "You only pay per lead!" sounds great, but without a solid baseline of data, they will either generate rubbish quality leads to hit their numbers or it's a sign of desperation. A hybrid model (small retainer + performance bonus) can work, but only once you have a predictable funnel.

The crucial thing is to see this as an investment. A £1,000 day rate for a consultant who uncovers an issue that's costing you £15,000 a month in wasted ad spend is a phenomenal bargain. A £2,000 a month agency retainer that just treads water and produces glossy but useless reports is a complete waste. The price tag is less important than the value being delivered.

How to find and vet the right partner in the UK

Okay, so you've decided whether you need a brain or a team of hands. Now comes the hard part: finding a good one. The UK market, especially around London's tech scene, is flooded with options, and many of them are not up to scratch.

Where to Look:

Forget generic Google searches for "SaaS marketing agency". You'll just get a list of companies who are good at SEO, not necessarily good at marketing SaaS products. Instead:

• Your Network is Gold: Ask other SaaS founders you trust, especially those who are a step or two ahead of you. Who do they use? Who did they have a bad experience with? A warm referral is the best place to start.
• Niche Communities: Spend time in places where your peers hang out online. Subreddits, Indie Hackers, specific Slack channels, or Facebook groups for SaaS founders. Look for people who are consistently giving valuable, non-salesy advice. That's often where the real experts are.
• Case Studies, Not Pitches: Look for agencies or consultants who publish detailed case studies. I'm not talking about a logo on a page. I mean a proper breakdown of the problem, the strategy, the execution, and the results. For example, we've published detailed walkthroughs on how we got a $22 CPL for B2B decision makers on LinkedIn or generated 5,082 software trials on Meta. That's the level of proof you should be looking for.

The Vetting Process:

Once you have a shortlist, you need to grill them. Do not let them control the sales process. This is your chance to see if they're a true expert or just a good salesperson.

1. The Discovery Call Test: This first call is everything. A bad partner will spend 30 minutes talking about themselves and their process. A great partner will spend 25 minutes asking you sharp, insightful questions about your business, your customers, your numbers, and your goals. They should be diagnosing your problems on the call, giving you "aha" moments before you've paid them a single pound. If you leave the call not having learned something valuable, they're not the one.

2. The "Who's on the Tools?" Question: This is for agencies specifically. Ask them point-blank: "Who, specifically, will be managing my account day-to-day? What is their experience level?". You need to avoid the classic bait-and-switch where you're impressed by the senior director in the sales process, only to be handed off to a 22-year-old graduate with six months of experience. Insist on meeting the actual person who will be in your ad accounts.

3. Ask About Failures: My favorite question is, "Tell me about a SaaS campaign you ran that didn't work out, and what you learned from it." If they can't answer this, or they claim they've never had a campaign fail, they are either inexperienced or lying. Paid advertising involves constant testing and iteration. Failure is part of the process. An expert is honest about this and can show you how they learn and adapt.

4. A Contrarian Take on References: Many founders ask for client references. Tbh, I see this as a bit of a red flag from our end. If we've shown you detailed case studies with real numbers, spent time on a call providing a free audit and strategy advice, and been completely transparent, and you *still* need to call another client to be convinced, it signals a lack of trust from the outset. A partnership has to be built on trust in the demonstrated expertise. If the evidence provided isn't enough to establish that trust, it's probably not a good fit for either party. It's crucial to understand the full playbook for vetting and hiring the right partner to avoid these misalignments.

The Best Solution? Maybe It's Both.

We've framed this as an either/or choice, but the smartest SaaS companies I've seen often use a hybrid approach as they scale. It looks something like this:

Phase 1 (Strategy): They hire a senior consultant on a project basis to build the initial paid acquisition strategy, set up the foundational campaigns, and prove that the channel can work.

Phase 2 (Execution): Once the model is proven and generating a consistent, positive ROI, they need to scale it. At this point, they hire an agency (or a full-time in-house manager) to take over the day-to-day execution and optimisation of the playbook the consultant built.

Phase 3 (Oversight): They might keep the original consultant on a small monthly retainer for high-level strategic oversight. They'll join a monthly performance call, act as a sounding board for the agency, and help troubleshoot any major new challenges that arise. This gives the founder the best of both worlds: a dedicated team for execution and a senior strategic brain for guidance, without the cost of a full-time, C-level marketing hire.

Ultimately, choosing the right support comes down to being brutally honest about what your business needs *right now*. Don't hire an agency because you think it's what "real" companies do, and don't hire a consultant to do the day-to-day busy work. Match the model to your current problem. Are you stuck on strategy or are you bottlenecked on execution? Answer that question, and your choice becomes much, much clearer.

If you're still wrestling with this decision and want an expert opinion on your specific situation, we offer a free, no-obligation strategy session. We'll take a look at your current marketing efforts and give you some straight, honest advice on which path makes the most sense for you. Feel free to get in touch.