How to Brief a SaaS Digital Marketing Agency for Better Results

As a team that's worked with dozens of SaaS companies at Aimers Agency, we've seen what happens when founders nail the brief—and when they completely miss the mark.

The difference? It's whether your partnership becomes a growth engine or an expensive lesson in miscommunication.

Most SaaS founders approach agency briefings like they're ordering pizza. They know they want something, but they're not entirely sure what. Then they wonder why their campaigns feel generic or why their agency doesn't "get" their product.

We want to get it. But we need your help.

Understanding the Current SaaS Market Landscape and Agency Selection

The SaaS market isn't what it was five years ago—like trying to follow GPS directions while the roads are being rebuilt around you.

With over 30,000 SaaS companies competing for attention and customer acquisition costs that would make your CFO weep, choosing the right marketing partner has never been more critical. Everyone says they're different. Everyone says they're disrupting something. Meanwhile, your potential customers are drowning in pitch decks and demo requests.

Why B2B SaaS Marketing Agencies Are Essential in 2025

Your in-house marketing team is probably amazing at what they do. But SaaS marketing in 2025 requires a level of specialization that's hard to build internally unless you're already at significant scale.

The modern SaaS buyer's journey looks like a pretzel—twisted, confusing, and somehow still satisfying when you get to the end. They'll hit your pricing page six times before reading a single blog post. They'll download your white paper, ghost you for three months, then suddenly show up ready to buy your enterprise plan.

B2B SaaS marketing agencies live in this complexity every day. We've seen the patterns across hundreds of companies. We know that your freemium users typically convert to paid plans 14% faster when they've engaged with educational content first; we know that your enterprise prospects need an average of 11 touchpoints before they'll take a demo.

At Aimers, we've helped companies like Mixpanel refine their paid acquisition while driving down cost per lead. We've seen Originality.AI increase their Google Ads sales by 100%. These aren't accidents—they're the result of understanding SaaS-specific conversion patterns.

Our analytics team often tells clients, "Marketing rarely fails because of low traffic. The real leak is often deeper in the funnel." That's why we focus on the entire conversion path, not just getting clicks.

Identifying the Best B2B SaaS Marketing Agencies for Your Growth Stage

Not all digital marketing agencies are created equal. Some agencies think SaaS is just B2B with a subscription model. Those agencies will kill your budget faster than you can say "churn rate."

You want to work with a marketing agency that specializes in SaaS companies and gets excited about your customer lifetime value calculations. The best B2B SaaS marketing agencies don't just run campaigns—they understand your unit economics. They know why your free trial conversion rate matters more than your click-through rate.

When you're evaluating agencies, ask about their SaaS portfolio. Have they worked with B2B SaaS companies in your market? A great agency for e-commerce might be terrible for B2B SaaS. It's like asking a Formula 1 mechanic to fix your lawn mower.

Defining Your SaaS Business Goals Before Choosing a SaaS Marketing Partner

Before you brief any agency, you need to get crystal clear on what success looks like for your SaaS business.

And no, "growth" is not a goal. Neither is "more leads" or "brand awareness." Those are the things people say when they haven't done their homework.

What's your current customer acquisition cost? What's your target CAC for the next quarter? What's your average deal size? How long is your sales cycle?

If you can't answer these questions off the top of your head, stop reading this and go figure them out. Your agency brief should start with these fundamentals, not some fluffy mission statement about changing the world.

We see this constantly: founders who want to "increase leads" without understanding that not all leads are created equal. A lead from content marketing might convert at 2%, while a lead from a demo request might convert at 30%. Your goals need to be specific, measurable, and tied to revenue.

The best briefs we've received start with something like "We need to acquire 50 new customers per month at a blended CAC of $1,200 or lower, with at least 60% coming from our enterprise segment."

That's a brief we can work with.

Essential Information Every Top B2B SaaS Marketing Agency Needs

When you're briefing a digital marketing agency, you're handing them the keys to your SaaS brand. The quality of information you provide directly correlates to the quality of results you'll get.

Your SaaS Product and Competitive Positioning

Start with the obvious: what does your SaaS product actually do? But don't stop at the feature list.

Actually, can we talk about feature lists for a second? They're useless. Every SaaS company has "advanced reporting" or "seamless integrations." Your grandmother's knitting app probably has "advanced reporting."

Help us understand the problem you're solving and why it matters. What happens to your customers if they don't use your product? What's the cost of inaction?

One of our clients initially described their product as "workflow automation software." After digging deeper, we learned they specifically help marketing teams reduce time spent on manual campaign setup by 75%.

That's positioning we can work with.

Your competitive landscape matters too, but not in the way most founders think. We don't need a comprehensive competitive analysis—we need to understand how you're different and why that difference matters to your ideal customer. Are you the Rolls Royce or the Toyota Camry of your category?

Target Audience and Customer Journey Mapping

This is where most briefs fall apart completely.

Founders will say "Our target audience is small business owners" and think they've provided helpful information. That's like saying "our target audience is humans who breathe oxygen."

We need specifics. What size companies? What industries? What roles are involved in the buying decision? What keeps them up at night? Where do they hang out online?

The best customer journey maps break down each stage and identify the questions prospects have. Early-stage prospects might be asking "Is this even a problem worth solving?" while late-stage prospects are asking "How quickly can we implement this?"

But honestly? Most customer journey maps are fiction. Reality is messier. People don't move through your marketing funnel in nice, linear stages. They jump around. They disappear and come back.

Current Marketing Strategies and Performance Metrics

Be honest about what you've tried and how it's performed.

If your content marketing hasn't generated a single qualified lead in six months, tell us. If your Google Ads account is burning through budget with nothing to show for it, we need to know.

Maybe your content marketing strategy is sound but your distribution is weak. Perhaps your Google Ads targeting is too broad. We can't fix what we don't know is broken.

Share your analytics access. Let us dig into your conversion funnels. Show us your email marketing open rates, your demo-to-close ratios, your churn rates. The more data you share, the better we can work together.

Though honestly, half the time the data is wrong anyway. Attribution is broken in most SaaS companies. People are crediting conversions to the wrong marketing channels, double-counting leads, or making decisions based on Google Analytics' last-click attribution model.

How to Evaluate Digital Marketing Agencies for SaaS-Specific Expertise

Not every marketing agency that claims to work with SaaS companies actually understands SaaS marketing.

Some red flags: if they're pitching you on Instagram influencer campaigns for your B2B security software, or if they think "virality" is a legitimate KPI for enterprise software, run.

Content Marketing Agency Capabilities and Case Studies

Content marketing for SaaS is different from content marketing for consumer brands. We're not trying to entertain people—we're trying to educate buyers who are researching complex purchase decisions.

When evaluating a content marketing agency, look at their SaaS portfolio. Do their blog posts actually drive conversions, or are they just cranking out keyword-stuffed articles? Can they create content for different stages of the buyer's journey?

Most agencies can write blog posts, but can they write blog posts that actually move the needle for your SaaS business?

Great SaaS content marketing agencies understand that your best content often comes from your customer success stories, your product team's insights, and your sales team's objection handling. We know how to turn those insights into content that converts.

But let's be real—most SaaS content is terrible. It's either too technical for humans to understand or so dumbed down that it's useless.

Full-Service SaaS Marketing Agency vs. Specialized Partners

There's an ongoing debate about whether to work with a full-service SaaS marketing agency or to piece together specialized partners. Both approaches can work, but they require different management styles.

Full-service agencies like Aimers offer the advantage of integrated marketing campaigns. When your paid search team talks to your conversion optimization team daily, you get better results. When your landing page designers understand your email marketing strategy, you create more cohesive customer experiences.

We've seen this firsthand—marketing campaigns that work in isolation often fall apart when you look at the bigger picture. A client might have great click-through rates on their Google Ads, but if their landing page isn't designed for conversions, they're just paying for expensive traffic that goes nowhere.

Specialized partners might offer deeper expertise in specific marketing channels, but coordination becomes your responsibility. If you're a founder wearing seventeen different hats—and let's be honest, most of you are—full-service usually makes more sense.

Setting Clear Expectations with Your SaaS Digital Marketing Agency

Expectation setting is where most agency relationships go to die. Founders expect immediate results, agencies under-promise and over-deliver (or over-promise and under-deliver), and everyone ends up frustrated.

Defining Success Metrics for SaaS Growth

If you're launching Google Ads from scratch, don't expect profitable campaigns in week one. It typically takes 4-6 weeks to gather enough data for meaningful changes, and another 4-6 weeks to see stable performance. We've learned this through managing hundreds of SaaS marketing campaigns—the platforms need time to learn your audience.

Content marketing moves even slower. A new blog post might not generate its first conversion for 3-6 months.

That doesn't mean content marketing is ineffective—it means it's a long-term play. Some of the best things in life take time.

Set leading indicators and lagging indicators. Leading indicators (click-through rates, email open rates, demo requests) tell you if you're moving in the right direction. Lagging indicators (new customers, revenue, CAC) tell you if the strategy is working.

But can we talk about how impatient everyone is? Founders will launch a marketing campaign on Monday and ask why they don't have customers by Friday. Marketing isn't a vending machine where you put money in and customers come out.

Budget Allocation Across Marketing Channels

Most SaaS companies should be spending 10-20% of their revenue on marketing, but that doesn't mean equal distribution across all channels.

Early-stage companies might allocate 70% of their budget to paid acquisition. Growth-stage companies might shift toward content marketing and SEO for more sustainable growth. Enterprise companies might invest heavily in account-based marketing and LinkedIn campaigns targeting specific decision-makers.

Be transparent about your budget constraints. A good agency will tell you if your budget is too small to be effective in certain marketing channels. We'd rather work with a smaller budget on focused campaigns than spread ourselves too thin.

Timeline and Milestone Planning

Create quarterly checkpoints to evaluate progress and adjust strategy.

Marketing isn't set-it-and-forget-it, especially in SaaS where product development, competitive landscape, and customer needs are constantly evolving. If we discover that your email marketing is converting better than expected, we might want to reallocate budget from paid social.

Red Flags When Working with Best SaaS Marketing Partners

Not every agency that claims SaaS expertise actually has it. Some warning signs to watch for—and trust us, we've seen all of these.

If an agency promises guaranteed results in the first month, they're either lying or they don't understand SaaS marketing. If they can't explain why they're recommending specific tactics, they're probably using a template approach.

Marketing agencies that focus exclusively on top-of-funnel metrics without understanding your conversion rates and customer lifetime value are missing the point. SaaS marketing is about quality leads and long-term customer relationships, not just traffic and clicks.

Be wary of agencies that won't provide regular, detailed reporting. At Aimers, we believe in complete transparency. You should know exactly how your budget is being spent and what results we're driving.

Moreover, run from agencies that use too much jargon. If they can't explain their marketing strategy in plain English, they probably don't understand it themselves.

Maximizing ROI from Your Full-Service SaaS Marketing Agency Partnership

The best agency relationships feel like partnerships, not vendor relationships. You're not just hiring us to execute tactics—you're bringing us in as strategic advisors who understand your SaaS business.

Ongoing Communication and Feedback Loops

Set up regular communication rhythms. Weekly check-ins for campaign performance, monthly strategic reviews, quarterly business reviews. But also create space for ad-hoc communication when opportunities arise.

Share customer feedback, sales insights, and product roadmap updates. If your customers are consistently asking about a specific feature, that's content marketing gold. If your sales team is hearing new objections, we might need to adjust our messaging.

Performance Optimization and Scaling Strategies

The best marketing campaigns get better over time. We should be constantly testing new audiences, creative approaches, and funnel improvements. But this requires patience—statistical significance takes time to achieve.

As campaigns prove successful, document what's working so we can scale effectively. If a specific audience segment is converting at twice the average rate, let's figure out how to find more people like them.

Think beyond individual campaigns toward integrated growth marketing strategies. How does paid acquisition support content marketing? How does email nurturing improve paid campaign performance?

McKinsey's research on marketing effectiveness shows that companies with integrated marketing approaches see 2.4x higher revenue growth than those with siloed campaigns.

The magic happens when all marketing channels work together.

Briefing a SaaS digital marketing agency effectively isn't about providing a comprehensive document that covers every possible scenario. It's about creating a foundation for ongoing collaboration and shared understanding.

The agencies that drive the best results for SaaS companies are the ones that become true partners in your growth journey. We don't just execute your marketing tactics—we help you identify new opportunities, improve your entire funnel, and scale what's working.

At Aimers, we've helped companies like ShipBob increase their conversion rates and supported startups like Uppbeat grow from young companies to well-known brands. But those results didn't happen because we had some secret marketing formula.

If you're wondering where your ad budget might be silently leaking, we'd be happy to take a look. Occasionally a fresh perspective on your marketing campaigns can spot issues that have been hiding in plain sight.

We offer a free marketing audit where we analyze your current campaigns and identify opportunities for improvement. Ready to get started? Get in touch with our team and let's talk about your growth goals.