7 Tips for SaaS Marketing Growth Strategy That Works

Working hard on your marketing strategy is crucial for a SaaS business. Simply put, not growing and progressing in the SaaS industry means that your business will fail – and soon.

Reports indicate that the annual growth rate of this market is 18%. With such tremendous (and growing) competition, it’s hard to get ahead and survive in this market. That is unless you know the proper marketing tricks for growth.

Why SaaS Businesses Need a Great Marketing Strategy?

Right now, there are thousands of similar businesses that use your or similar strategies for marketing and growth. Knowing this, you must tweak your formula to meet the latest trends and demands on your market, but also uniquely appeal to the audience.

How to Grow Your SaaS Faster?

As SaaS is an agile form of software, the things that will benefit your business are also variable. So, there are no strict rules that work for each SaaS. 

The concept of SaaS tools is brand-new but it is also fast-growing. For this reason, most SaaS companies do not rely on only one strategy while they are aiming to grow their business faster. On the other hand, there are cult approaches that add value to SaaS companies in every circumstance. These are:

• Creating a positive experience for customer success,
• Establishing well-performing marketing and sales foundation,
• Measuring the right metrics,
• Building a strong partnership with fellow SaaS providers.

A customer-centric approach is vital in this highly competitive SaaS world. You have to make sure your users on the value you are going to add. Otherwise, they tend to choose other SaaS tools. Both to make existing ones loyal and to acquire new customers, you should check if you have the right marketing and sales foundation. That includes a powerful CRM, marketing automation, reporting and analytics tool which HubSpot provides all from a single place. Once you implement these tools successfully into your strategy, your growth will be inevitable.

Of course, just having SaaS tools in your growth journey is not enough. Running successful marketing performance is only possible if you track the right metrics. As consistency is key in optimizing your visibility, you need to focus your attention on SEO works as well. So, your SaaS SEO strategy should be focused on optimizing your SaaS website and content in order to drive traffic and increase conversions. Semrush, the powerful SEO tool, can support you along the way.

How Do You Get the First 1000 Customers for Your SaaS?

We all know that getting 1000 customers do not happen overnight! It takes time and requires much effort you ever imagined. Setting up smart and achievable goals, allocating resources and tracking the progress should be on your priority list. For example, start with asking yourself “How can I attract my first 50 customers?”. While thinking about this, you should already start analyzing your target customers. This will definitely give you insights into what they need, what kind of websites they visit or how they found you etc.

Then, you should consider the next steps to expand your SaaS tool presence. Below you’ll find some brilliant tips for your new, improved marketing growth strategy.

Enlist Your SaaS Tools to Online Listing Platforms

As a SaaS tool, there are various ways to attract users to your platform. One of the ways as a growth marketing strategy is creating a listing in a trustworthy listing platform. That can place you alongside some of the best tools out there and help your tool get the attention it deserves.

Tips: Digital Agency Network lists the best tools for digital agencies from all over the world. DAN offers various types of membership options that enable a bridge between digital agencies, SaaS Tools and brands.

If you’re not 100% convinced, here are three good reasons to create a tool listing at DAN:

• A boost in your online presence for digital marketing agencies, and small businesses
• Improvement in online visibility for the tool buyers
• Getting qualified leads

In order to make your tool more visible in search, make sure to use keywords that are relevant to your platform and add them to your listing. Getting listed at DAN will also allow you to showcase your case studies & profile page, publish your blogs, definitely do add something here as it would be a missed opportunity not to.

Ask for professional assistance

Most businesses’ marketing strategies fail because of a lack of experience and skills in marketing. If you’ve been thinking: “I’ll do some research online, see what my competition does, and I’ll do my marketing alone to avoid expenses”, we’re sorry to inform you – but that’s the worst decision ever.

Learning and developing yourself is always good, but your marketing strategy is so important for your business, you can hardly afford and allow yourself to learn while creating it. Any mistake can cost you a fortune, not to mention lose many potential clients that you’d otherwise win with a great strategy.

Knowing this, if you lack experience in marketing for growth or your past strategy hasn’t yielded great results, you might want to request some professional assistance. Today, many reasonably priced and perfectly rated SaaS marketing agencies offer their assistance.

Thanks to Skale, SaaS companies can enjoy fast and long-lasting growth for as long as their professionals work for them. This brand can help you get higher in search results, attract your target audience, and tailor a perfect link-building strategy for your brand.

Always have your buyer persona in mind

No matter which path you decide to take with your strategy, it all begins with who you’re selling to. Understanding your buyer and defining the buyer persona is key to creating a successful strategy. Why?

The answer is simple – how will you market your products to the right people if you don’t know who they are?

This being said, you need to focus tons of time on finding out as much as you can about your audience. From surveys and questionnaires to evaluating testimonials and using a variety of analytics tools, gathering such information is much simpler today.

When you do this, keep one very important thing in mind – you can never know enough about your buyer persona. Their desires and needs will change, as well as their expectations, so you must keep analyzing and gathering data continuously.

Essentially, finding out who your buyer persona is will do the following:

• Reveal the problem that your customers need help with and give you an insight into how you can resolve it
• Show you who your competition is and what’s the best way to attract the audience
• Learn where your buyer persona hangs i.e. where to post your content and when
• Discover how your buyer persona wants to be approached, what keeps them interested, and what engages them
• Discover the perfect pricing for your products and services

Embrace the power of content

Content is the core of your marketing strategy. Most of the strategy of SaaS businesses is either directly or indirectly related to content. Whether it is the text you create for your blogs or website, social media content, images or videos, or other types of content – this is something that you should focus on greatly.

SaaS businesses have the opportunity to take advantage of content marketing as their main strategy for business growth. From creating unique, top-notch content to repurposing content to boost engagement, there are tons of things you can do to boost your success.

This sounds easier than it actually is. It’s not just about creating a couple of blog posts. If you want to compete – and win in the SaaS marketing space, you need to create consistent, persona-driven, high-quality content with keyword optimization and other SEO characteristics.

When thinking about content, you need to get your creative side out. There’s much more to content than just written text and some images. Generally speaking, there are three categories to consider:

·        Awareness content: blogs, guides, checklists, eBooks, and whitepapers

·        Information/consideration content: webinars, case studies, catalogs, spec sheets, free samples, etc.

·        Purchase content: trials, demos, coupons, quotes, etc.

Utilize marketing automation tools

The hardest work of marketing is keeping track of everything, sending emails, creating and publishing posts, replying to messages, etc. This will take up most of your time and even if you focus on it greatly, you can easily make a mistake.

That’s where automation comes into the picture.

With so many automation tools at your disposal, it is a waste to spend your time and energy on the most basic things such as sending emails or spending hours creating reports. You can use such tools to make your marketing communication faster and more personal, track the behavior of your customers and improve your strategies, and generate more leads with minimal effort.

Refine your ad campaign

Ad campaigns have brought many companies ‘into the light’. They make for a fast way to get visible and show your content to the right people. You cannot really succeed based on paid ads only, but if you combine this with amazing content and some automation, it can yield tremendous amounts for your lead generation.

Therefore, take some time to consider where you can place your marketing content, for which amount, and to attract which audience. Thanks to social media platforms, this is now very simple – and very personalized. You can create ads for your target audience without much effort as long as you know your buyer persona.

Try remarketing

Have you heard of remarketing? This is a practice where SaaS businesses use the search data and web traffic to market directly to the buyer persona i.e. people interested in theirs or similar products.

This sounds amazing and it works wonders for a business. Here is how it works.

When you pull up a tab in search engines and make a search for a product you’re offering, a few results will show first. You can open them to show interest. Next time you go to social media, you’ll see that the sponsored posts showing up are related to your search.

That’s what remarketing is about – following people’s behaviors and providing them with the information they need via ads. This is also a great way for businesses to find the customers who search for their products and services.

To make it possible for people to get to your product, the one related to their search, you need to create quality keywords, meta descriptions, and other things that will bring them to your site. And of course, there’s the option to place sponsored ads on social media, making it more likely that Facebook or other platforms will point them in your direction soon.

Google has some great ideas for better remarketing. To do this, you should:

• Use dynamic remarketing and auto-targeting
• To optimize conversion, use a variety of bid strategies
• Similar target audiences, as well as your app and website visitors and users
• Re-target the users who have abandoned shopping carts
• Show a variety of product categories
• Cross-sell and up-sell to your existing customers
• Reach out to your buyers after they completed a purchase with a message

Such strategies will show that your business values the loyalty of those who bought from it and would benefit the ones who haven’t greatly. The hardest part is to find your target audience. If you have the right kind of content, the rest will be easy. Once they notice your brand, it is your content’s job to reel them in and convince them to make a purchase.

But, first, you need to get them there. It’s not important how great your content is unless people can find it first. This is why this strategy is highly important.

Examples of SaaS Marketing Case Studies

It can be overwhelming to think that there are so many SaaS tools joining the highly competitive industry every day. This competitive environment pushes forward them to offer more customizable solutions for every need. But there is one thing that comes to the forefront: persuasion. 

SaaS tools need to make themselves accepted among the one-time-buy products. Even though offering custom solutions make them preferable, there are still businesses that rely on physical products. SaaS marketing activities is the most effective way to prove their value. There are a myriad number of actionable SaaS marketing case studies to get a better understanding of how SaaS marketing works. We would like to mention the most inspirational ones below:

Semrush: The $100m Black Sheep Of SaaS

Semrush, the SEO industry leader, was established in 2008 by two Russians as an answer to the question “How to get more traffic from search engines?”. SEO software is skyrocketed in a short period of time with the right marketing strategies. But how?

The company only invested three points rather than converting customers exponentially. These are more data, more features and more users. By doing that, it started serving great value to its existing customers. Within this strategy, Semrush’s revenue doubled organically in 4 years up to $1m. Not only for this reason but it also provides a comprehensive solution and a well-performing affiliate program to help them hit $100m in 2019.

HubSpot: HubSpot’s $271 Million Inbound Lead Generation Machine

Another successful growth story belongs to the inbound marketing engine, HubSpot. Only in 8 years, HubSpot reached $100M+ revenue. That’s a huge success, right? Let’s have a look at how this came true.

HubSpot embarked on several tactics which made it a leading player in the world of online marketing. By implementing these tactics into its marketing strategy, HubSpot scaled up its revenue from $181.9M to $271M last year. Here are the 6 key tactics we think would be beneficial for growing your SaaS tool better.

#1: Increase website traffic by botbook content collaboration with top industry players.

#2: Gather Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs in guest writing for the blog.

#3: Promote content on the biggest social media channels like Youtube.

#4: Pay a lot of attention to content marketing and SEO.

#5: Create a community marketing learning online hub to help marketers to learn new tricks and lessons from fellow marketers.

#6: Invest paid searches funnels in order to reach out to more people.

Of course, there are many more tactics are adopted by HubSpot but these six of them could be the secret of its success. Now, HubSpot has an audience of more than 6 million people and it has been positioned by Gartner as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms.

Final thoughts

Every day, we hear new tips and tricks on how to grow SaaS businesses. This is an industry with amazing growth, as well as growing competition. As time goes by, the things that worked yesterday stop working today. However, some things are there to stay. The things in this list have been effective in marketing forever – and will continue to do so.

Your job as a marketer is to find out what changed in terms of content and SEO, remarketing, PPC, and more – and leverage it to boost your strategy and bring growth to your company. Good luck!