Solved: Finding the Right Digital Marketing for Our New SaaS

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

I've had a look over your situation with the new SaaS product. It sounds like a great position to be in – having a solid, working app with a small base of happy users is a much better starting point than most have. The challenge you've laid out, figuring out customer acquisition costs and whether you can scale with paid ads, is a very common one, especially for dev-focused teams dipping their toes into marketing for the first time. It can feel like a bit of a minefield.

I've worked with a lot of SaaS companies, from early-stage startups just like yours to more established players, so I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance based on what I've seen work. Hopefully this'll give you a clearer picture of the path ahead.

First off, let's look at who you should hire...

You've asked whether you should look for an agency, a freelancer on retainer, or a marketing co-founder. This is the first big decision and it's a good question to ask. Each has its pros and cons, and the right choice really depends on your immediate goals.

A marketing co-founder is a massive commitment. It's like a marriage. It brings marketing into the core DNA of the company, which is great for the long term, but it’s a huge decision to make right now when you're still in the validation phase. Your primary goal is to test the waters, get data on acquisition costs, and see if this thing has legs from a paid marketing perspective. Bringing on a co-founder before you have that data might be premature.

A talented individual on a retainer can be a good option. They can be more agile and potentially cheaper than an agency. The risk is that you're relying on one person's skillset. Paid advertising isn't just one skill; it's a combination of strategy, copywriting, design, data analysis, and technical setup across multiple platforms. It's rare to find one person who is a true expert in all of these areas. They might be amazing at Google Ads but have no real experience with Meta, or they might be great at running campaigns but not so good at writing the ad copy that actually gets people to click.

This is where an agency often makes the most sense for a project like yours. A good agency gives you access to a team of specialists for the price of one hire. You get the strategist, the ad copywriter, the campaign manager who lives and breathes the ad platforms day in, day out. For your specific goal – to test, learn, and determine scalability – this specialist expertise is what you need. You're not just paying for someone to press buttons in an ads manager; your paying for the experience of having done this many times before.

The main thing, whether you go for an agency or a freelancer, is to vet them properly. Don't just take their word for it. The biggest red flag is anyone who promises you specific results. In paid advertising, you can't promise anything. There are too many variables. Anyone who guarantees you a certain CPA or number of users from day one is either lying or inexperienced.

Instead, look for proof of expertise. Take a really good look at their case studies. Do they have experience with SaaS? Even better, have they worked in a similar B2B or prosumer space? For instance, I remember one client for whom we got 5,082 software trials at a $7 cost per trial using Meta Ads. For another B2B software client, we drove 4,622 registrations at just $2.38 each, also on Meta. Seeing these kinds of real-world results for similar businesses should give you confidence that they know what there doing. If they can't show you any relevant experience, they'll be learning on your dime, and that's a risky place to be.

Get on a call with them. A good agency or consultant should be happy to have an initial chat, look at what you've got, and give you some upfront advice. This is your chance to pick their brains and see if they sound like they know their stuff. If they're just giving you generic advice, that's a worry. If they're asking smart questions about your vertical, your ideal customer, and your app's features, that's a much better sign.

I'd say you first need a solid plan before spending any money...

Before you spend a single pound on ads, you need to get your funnel right. Your goal isn't just to get "users". It's to find out the cost of acquiring a *paying* customer and their lifetime value. This means your advertising strategy needs to be tightly integrated with your product's user journey.

For a SaaS app, especially one that manages a core part of a user's business, the sales cycle isn't instant. People don't just see an ad and immediately sign up for a paid plan. They need to trust you first. The business cost of switching their customer management system is high, so the barrier to entry needs to be as low as possible.

I've seen this go wrong many times. I remember one B2B SaaS client in the accounting space who came to us because their ads weren't working. The first thing we noticed was they were trying to sell their software directly from the ad with no free trial. Their competitors were all offering free trials, some for several months. Who is going to pay for a new accounting system without even trying it? It's a huge ask. We told them to introduce a completely free trial, and that was the first step to turning their performance around.

Your MVP having paying users is fantastic, but to scale with ads, you almost certainly need a frictionless entry point. This usually means a free trial (e.g., 14 or 30 days) or a freemium model. This is your "offer". The entire goal of your initial ad campaigns will be to get people to sign up for this free trial. That's the conversion you'll be optimising for.

So, the funnel looks like this:

Ad -> Landing Page / App Store Page -> Free Trial Signup -> User Onboarding -> Activation -> Conversion to Paid -> Retention

Your ad campaigns will be focused on the first three steps. Your job (and the app's job) is to handle the rest. The key metrics you'll get from the ad campaigns are:

• -> Cost Per Click (CPC)
• -> Landing Page Conversion Rate (% of clicks that become signups)
• -> Cost Per Trial Signup (this is your initial Customer Acquisition Cost, or CAC)

Then, you'll need to track what happens *after* the signup to calculate the true value. What percentage of trial users become active? What percentage of active users convert to a paid plan? How long do they stay subscribed? Answering these questions gives you your Lifetime Value (LTV). Once you know both your CAC and your LTV, you can determine if paid advertising is a profitable and scalable channel for you. If it costs you £50 to acquire a user who only ever pays you £40, the model is broken. If it costs you £50 to acquire a user who pays you £500 over their lifetime, you have a winning formula you can scale.

You'll need to pick the right channels to find your customers...

Once your offer (the free trial) and your tracking are in place, the next question is where to find your potential users. You don't want to just throw money at every platform. You need to be strategic. Based on your description of a customer management app for a specific vertical, here's how I'd think about the main platforms.

1. Google Search Ads:
This is for capturing intent. These are people who are *actively searching* for a solution to a problem they already have. They're going to Google and typing in things like "customer management app for [your vertical]", "[vertical] business software", or "best crm for [your vertical]". This is often the best place to start because the traffic is highly qualified. They are already problem-aware and solution-seeking. The downside is that the volume might be limited depending on how niche your vertical is. You'd want to do some keyword research to estimate the search volume for relevant terms.

2. Meta Ads (Facebook & Instagram):
This is for generating demand. Unlike Google Search, people on Facebook or Instagram aren't actively looking for your app. Your job is to interrupt them with an ad so compelling that it makes them realise they have a problem you can solve. Meta's strength is its powerful targeting. While its B2B options aren't as granular as LinkedIn's, they can be incredibly effective, especially if your users are small business owners or have identifiable interests related to their profession. You could target interests related to the vertical, professional associations, trade publications, or even target people with job titles like "small business owner" or "business page admin". We've had huge sucess with Meta for SaaS. I recall one client for whom we drove 4,622 registrations at just $2.38 each. It proves that you can definatly reach business users effectively if you get the targeting and creative right.

3. LinkedIn Ads:
This is the premium B2B platform. Its targeting is second to none for reaching specific professionals. You can target by company size, industry, job title, seniority, and more. If the decision-makers in your vertical have a strong presence on LinkedIn, this could be a goldmine. For example, if you're targeting founders or managers in a specific industry, LinkedIn lets you reach them directly. However, this precision comes at a cost. LinkedIn is generally the most expensive platform in terms of cost-per-click and cost-per-lead. We ran a campaign for another client targeting B2B decision makers and achieved a $22 Cost Per Lead, which they were very happy with, but you can see it's a step up in cost from what you might see on Meta. It's probably a channel to test, but maybe not on day one unless your vertical is very clearly defined by job titles.

4. Apple Search Ads:
Since you have an iOS app, this is a no-brainer to test. It's similar to Google Search but inside the App Store. You can bid on keywords so that when someone searches for "customer management app" or a competitor's name, your app shows up at the top of the results. This is bottom-of-the-funnel traffic; these people are literally in the marketplace looking to download an app. The volume might not be huge, but the quality is typically very high. I remember working with an app and growing it to over 45k signups using a mix of platforms, and Apple Ads was a key part of that mix for driving high-intent installs.

You dont need to be on all of them at once. I'd reccomend starting with two. Probably Google Search (to capture existing demand) and Meta (to test generating new demand). This gives you a good mix of strategies to test.

You probably should set some realistic expectations for costs...

This is the million-dollar question: "What should it cost?". The honest answer is, it depends. It's affected by your industry, the country your targeting, the quality of your ads, and your landing page. But I can give you some ballpark figures based on what we see across many accounts, particularly for SaaS trial signups in developed countries like the UK, US, or Canada.

Typically, you might see a Cost Per Click (CPC) somewhere between £0.50 and £1.50. A good landing page for a free trial offer should convert somewhere between 10% and 30% of the traffic it gets. So, let's do the maths:

• Worst-case scenario: £1.50 CPC / 10% conversion rate = £15 per trial signup.
• Best-case scenario: £0.50 CPC / 30% conversion rate = £1.67 per trial signup.

Your actual Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) will likely fall somewhere in that range. When you start, it will almost certainly be at the higher end. The whole point of the initial campaigns and ongoing optimisation is to push that cost down towards the lower end. I recall a case where we reduced a client's CPA from £100 down to just £7 for a Medical Job Matching SaaS. That wasn't an overnight fix; it was the result of methodical testing of audiences, creatives, and landing pages over time. Your initial budget should be seen as a learning investment to find a baseline CPA. From there, the work begins to improve it.

Here's a simple table to show how these numbers interact. This is the kind of basic modelling we do to set expectations.

So if you have, say, a £3,000 test budget, you could aim to get anywhere from 200 to over 1,500 trial signups. That's a huge range, which is why testing is so vital. You need to find out where on that spectrum you land and what levers you can pull to improve it.

We'll need to look at your messaging and your 'shop window'...

You can have the best ad targeting in the world, but if your ads and your landing page don't resonate with the audience, you'll just be wasting money. Your website and your app store pages are your digital shop windows. They need to be spotless.

For your landing page, it should be hyper-focused on one single goal: getting the user to sign up for the free trial. That means:

• -> A clear, powerful headline that speaks directly to a pain point in your vertical.
• -> Persuasive copy that explains the benefits, not just the features, of your app. We almost always use a professional copywriter for our clients, especially for SaaS, because it makes a huge difference.
• -> High-quality visuals or a short video showing the app in action.
• -> Social proof! This is huge for trust. Testimonials from your existing happy users, logos of any well-known companies in your vertical using the app, etc.
• -> A very clear and obvious call-to-action button, like "Start Your Free 14-Day Trial".
• -> No distractions. Remove links to other parts of your site, your blog, etc. The page should have one purpose and one exit point: the signup button.

The same principles apply to your app store listings. The icon, screenshots, and the first few lines of the description are your ad. They need to be compelling enough to earn the tap and the download.

For the ads themselves, you'll want to test different approaches. Don't just run one ad. A good testing structure would involve trying:

• -> Different creative formats: A static image ad, a carousel ad showing off multiple features, and a short video ad. We've seen some SaaS clients have great results with simple, authentic User-Generated Content (UGC) style videos.
• -> Different messaging angles: One ad might focus on saving time, another on increasing revenue, another on reducing errors. You need to discover which value proposition resonates most strongly with your target audience.

This process of constantly testing creative is how you lower your CPC and find winning ads that you can run for a long time.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

Putting it all together, here is a phased approach that I would typically reccomend for a company in your position. This provides a structured way to use your budget to get the answers you need about scalability.

Following a structured process like this removes the guesswork. Every pound you spend has a purpose: to buy data and learn. Once you find a profitable formula in Phase 3, that's when you can confidently scale up the budget, knowing that for every £X you put in, you'll get £Y back over the lifetime of the customer.

This might all sound like a lot of work, and to be honest, it is. Getting paid advertising right, especially for SaaS, is a complex process with a lot of moving parts. This is why many companies at your stage decide to work with a specialist agency. It's not just about saving time; its about leveraging years of experience to get to the answers you need faster and more efficiently, avoiding costly mistakes along the way.

I hope this detailed breakdown has been helpful and gives you a much clearer framework for your next steps. The key is to be methodical, data-driven, and patient.

If you'd like to chat through this in more detail and see how we could apply this process specifically to your app, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation. We could take a look at your app and your goals and give you some more tailored advice.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh