Last updated on November 9, 2022

A SaaS marketing audit is a comprehensive assessment of your current SaaS marketing strategy – from the perspective of an experienced SaaS marketing consultant. It gives you a perspective from a seasoned Head of Marketing on what you’re doing right, what you’re not doing right, what needs to be fixed and what should be your priorities.

Why to get a SaaS marketing audit externally?

Audits are a great way to make sure you’re on top of your marketing game

An external audit is a great way to get a fresh perspective, objective feedback, unbiased advice, and second opinion on how you are marketing your product.

It’s also a great way to unlock solutions to problems that may have been bothering you for a while but have been too busy or stuck in the weeds to see the bigger picture.

When to get a SaaS marketing audit?

That’s an excellent question! If any of the following scenarios sound familiar, you might want to consider getting a SaaS marketing audit.

You are out of ideas on how to grow your SaaS product

If you’ve tried a lot of different tactics to grow your SaaS product and you’ve run out of ideas on what to do next, a SaaS marketing audit will help you get new ideas as well as a new perspective on tackling the old ideas.

You don’t have experience with “marketing”

If you don’t have experience with SaaS marketing (a problem for many SaaS founders), the audit will understand your business and give you some recommendations on how to market your SaaS product (so you can avoid making mistakes).

You’re not getting results from your existing marketing efforts

You’re investing a lot in marketing, but it’s not converting to revenue for the business. You don’t understand what you’re doing wrong. A SaaS marketing audit can help you assess your SaaS marketing strategy and get an outsider’s perspective on what needs to be fixed to get those results.

You’re not able to grow or scale marketing faster

You’re a mature marketing team. You’ve done a lot of marketing stuff. You got a lot of signups. But the marketing channels that worked to get you to your current stage of business have maxed out. Growth has been flat for the last couple of weeks/months. You’re stuck in a rut about how to grow your SaaS product from here. You’re trying to find the next scalable growth opportunity to invest in.

A SaaS marketing audit will give you a clearer picture on what are the growth opportunities, which ones can you double down on and invest further.

What to expect from a SaaS marketing audit?

I’ve actually gotten a couple of SaaS marketing audits done myself when I was a Head of Marketing.

I’ll be honest: the 80:20 rule applies here— the bulk of the recommendations will be things that you already kind-of know (but should do anyway), but there will be these one or two golden nuggets of information in which provide 80%+ value to the SaaS marketing audit.

Here’s the thing though – an auditor needs to go through those 80% recommendations to uncover those 20% recommendations. It’s part of the process!

By the end of the audit, you should get clarity on the following things as a business:

1. What are you already doing well and should continue doing?
2. What are the issues that need to be fixed?
3. What are the low hanging fruits?
4. What should be the focus areas in the short term and long term?
5. Next steps

A couple of things to remember:

1. A good SaaS marketing audit shouldn’t be a criticism document about what you’re doing wrong with marketing. It’s an objective review of your SaaS marketing strategy which includes identifying the things you’re doing well and should continue investing in and also the things that you’re not doing well and should improve on.
2. A good SaaS marketing audit should give you clear next steps. You should be clear about what you need to do immediately. It’s great to get all these marketing recommendations from a SaaS marketing auditor, but nobody has the time or resources in the world to do everything together at the same time. So with whatever time, resources and goals you have, you should be clear what the best next step should be from the SaaS marketing audit.
3. A good SaaS marketing audit tells you how to implement the next steps. Sometimes the consultant will offer to help with implementing some audit recommendations and other times they may suggest hiring an additional resource (agency or contractor or internal team member) to do this work.

How much does a SaaS marketing audit cost?

It depends on the size of your company and the complexity of your current marketing setup. Costs range from USD 2000 to USD 10000 for a SaaS marketing audit.

There’s usually quite a time investment from a SaaS marketing consultant to do an audit, like:

1. Getting on calls with the founder to understand the business and history of marketing efforts
2. Analyzing the competition
3. Looking at your business’s own analytics data
4. Processing that information into a easily digestible document for you

Depending on the size of your business and complexity of the audit, it can take 2-4 weeks to complete a SaaS marketing audit.

If you’re ready to get a SaaS marketing audit done, I can help.

How to implement the recommendations from a SaaS marketing audit?

Most times, a SaaS marketing audit acts as a pre-cursor for a SaaS marketing consultant to work with you. Not only is this audit helpful for the business, it’s also gives the consultant a better understanding of your business so they can help you further.

So it’s likely that if you’re getting an audit from a consultant, they’ll also suggest where they can help implementing your SaaS marketing audit.

For example, every-time I do a SaaS marketing audit done for a SaaS business, I also highlight the areas where I can help them further. For example, if I recommended that a business should in implementing a particular style of content strategy, I also offer to do the same for them.

Is it worth getting a SaaS marketing audit?’

Yes, it is. If you’re looking for a fresh perspective on your SaaS marketing strategy and want to know where you could be doing better, then getting an audit from a consultant is a great way to get that insight. It’ll also give you the chance to ask them any questions about their recommendations so you can be sure of what they’re suggesting before putting it into action.

Let me explain the value of a SaaS marketing audit with a short success story from my own experience.

When I was Head of Marketing at a SaaS company, we had the challenge of scaling SEO. We wanted to triple signups from search traffic in nine months but considering our numbers and time frame, it seemed impossible—I didn’t know what to do. We had already reached a point where the number of keywords that we could rank for was limited.

I sought advice from my board of advisors, posted on community forums, and asked for feedback from peers. No one had a good solution to our problem.

Then we got recommended an SEO consultant to do a thorough audit of our site. The audit uncovered useful information and also confirmed some things we already knew, but it yielded one major revelation—one that would shape how we scaled our SEO channel moving forward.

That recommendation helped us change our quarterly plans for the rest of the year and we were able to double sign-ups within nine months from SEO!

Madhav Bhandari

SaaS marketing audits have helped me find a solution to a nagging problem, that even my board of advisors couldn’t help me with. Sometimes when you’re stuck on a problem, you consult a board of advisors. But it’s hard for them to give good advice because they don’t have full context: They don’t know what other options you’ve tried or haven’t tried yet.

But with a SaaS marketing audit, the auditor is going to spend time and effort understanding where you’re at and get full context. And then recommend suggestions based on their experience so that you can unlock your constraints.

Looking for a SaaS marketing audit?

If you are looking for a SaaS marketing audit, I’d be happy to help. I’ve conducted many marketing audits for a bunch of SaaS companies.

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