Building a successful venture is hard. But when it happens to be in a crowded market like SaaS, it just touches the roof.
With new application software coming into the market space for every industry vertical, attracting attention from your target audience is becoming more difficult. But don’t get bogged down by the stiffness of the competition. Yes, it is challenging but not impossible.
All you need to do is look at your business from a fresh, strategic perspective. In this crowded market, if you have to attract attention, you need to start with developing a product differentiation factor coupled with growth marketing techniques.
You would have to undergo a fair share of experiments, tests, and investment of resources to find out what unique tactics work for your brand. But this would need some significant investment of time as well, which is usually scarce for any startup.
But fret not. We have got your back.
In this post, we bring the top 10 growth marketing techniques to help you lay the foundation of growth marketing for your SaaS business.
10 tactics to growth hack your SaaS business in 2021
The core of every growth hacking venture is made of 3 elements: rich data, heavy testing, and optimization. But that is not all. Taking these core principles into account, a single Northstar metric is determined to contribute to the startup’s positive growth. For a SaaS business, it is generally the adoption rate.
Anything that boosts the adoption rate of your product is prioritized while other tasks take a back seat. With this approach, you can deploy different strategies. Let’s see the highest ROI (return on investment) in the following section.
Partner with a SaaS marketing agency
You already know how vital collaborations with a SaaS marketing agency are nowadays. But this collaboration does not limit only to competitors and influencers in your industry.
Partnering with agencies and vendors to create momentum in your business is one of the best investments you can for your SaaS business. They are your growth partners who optimize resources, reduce costs, and bring high value to your business.
Adopt a freemium model
In a market where almost every software claims to have the same features and benefits, choosing one software over another is hard. Psychology even has a fancy word to define this situation of your target audience, overanalysis paralysis.
Optimizing your product adoption channel for the least friction is critical. A freemium model is one of the best ways to do this. You can experiment with several strategies here. From giving access to limited but powerful features to complete feature access but restricted monthly usage or a 30-day trial window can be a great head start.
Word of mouth marketing
The most effective and sustainable companies are the ones that dominantly depend upon word-of-mouth marketing. But more than often, that is easier said than done; however, not impossible.
Your existing customer base can help you successfully create a viral product. But for converting your first customers into brand evangelists, you need to ensure you have a proven system of building a strong product that your audience loves.
There are so many ways you can nudge your audience to do so. You can initiate loyalty programs like special discounts for premium customers, special access to resources like premium conferences, tools, and more for highest level subscribers, and so much more.
Viral marketing
Although there are many definitions of viral marketing according to the internet, creating a viral marketing campaign is relatively simple.
Any strategy that earns responses from a significant percentage of a target audience within a short period without paid promotions can be termed to be a viral marketing strategy. The problem is coming up with one isn’t always easy.
However, you can still do so much from the known path.
Referral schemes for customer acquisition are a great way to create a viral effect. But you need to make sure you add value to both your customers, the existing and the new acquisition. Incentivizing your current customers through cashback can be a great way to retain your customers.
Another way to create a viral effect is to conduct giveaway contest alerts. Conduct free premium memberships to winners for participating in the contest. This can gain a lot of traction and new eyeballs on your startup.
Content marketing
The approach to content marketing for saas startups is a little different than lifestyle startups. It is more about being helpful and works as an automated sales process in the long term.
You can do so much through content. Optimizing your knowledge base for search engines is a great way to benefit both the process of marketing and product education simultaneously. Again, you can conduct free webinars, lead magnets like cheat sheets or report downloads, guest blogs on indirect competitor’s blogs to get traction.
You can even use UGC (user-generated content) for preparing case studies between your and your competitor’s product to help your prospective buyers to make a decision.
Branding
If there is one element that can boost your SaaS product adoption rate, it is building a community. This is where branding becomes critical. Done right, you can even capture the size of your total market.
You can try so many strategies here. From influencer marketing, collaborations, press reviews, search engine optimization with backlink generation to affiliate marketing, and so much more. However, the best way to nurture brand-customer relationships is through an email newsletter.
But at the core of every strategy you adopt, you need to ensure that all your collaborators and partners have a lookalike audience with similar interests.
Be aggressive on optimization
Conversion is synonymous with growth hacking. But for scaling your SaaS startup, you would need to take a multi-level optimization process. From microelements like landing pages, websites to macro elements like processes like product development, marketing, feature selection, everything together achieves the desired goal.
But on the whole, you need to optimize the experience of your target audience, end-to-end from the zeroth moment of truth to the final conversion. This will establish an authentic relationship and improve the LTV (lifetime value) of your customer base.
Create API integrations
There is no other method that growth hacks your way up through collaborations and partnerships. Not only do you get an opportunity to pitch in front of a new audience, but you also get strong positioning in the industry vertical you are working in. This is where API (application programming interface) comes in.
Developing an API helps you to integrate your product with the product of your partner successfully. This means a win-win situation for both you and your partner.
A pro tip here is to be strategic about your partnerships. You wouldn’t want to integrate your product with another product that does not cater to the same industry. Your product needs to be the extension of the value that your partner renders to your audience.
Paid marketing
Although the most sustainable way of marketing is organic, you cannot keep paid marketing out of your strategy entirely. Infact, what organic marketing cannot achieve for you, paid ads exactly do so.
Be it short-term traffic and sales spikes, or high-quality lead generation, or a pre-product launch that you are undergoing, paid acquisition plays a critical role. However, just running ads without any optimization process will not yield desired results. Chances are you would end up investing significant resources on a low-performance channel. This makes strategic paid marketing critical.
There are so many ways you can do so. From headline testing to adapting the AIDA model (awareness, interest, desire, action), you can run your paid marketing campaigns targeting your audience profile. But to make the most of your campaigns, having an omnichannel approach that retargets the audience with contextual time-sensitive offers is essential.
Invest in building trust and authority
Whenever you are trying to get your product in front of your target audience, trust is an incredibly important issue.
This makes building authority critical for simplifying your product adoption process. A great way to do so is to gather peer reviews. ProductHunt is a great platform to do so. You can even submit your software to review sites like G2 to build trust within users.
Another critical area is the payment gateway. Having safe, sound, and simplified gateway systems create confidence around your software.
Conclusion
Creating a successful SaaS startup in today’s crowded market demands both hard work and consistency. There is no shortcut to building a viral product. You have to keep on optimizing your product to build momentum. This makes building that flexible mindset critical for long-term success.
The above tips are sure to give a launchpad for your SaaS startup, but keep your customer feedback loop open to see the real growth unfold in front of you.
Your users are the goldmine that can make your product popular amongst your target audience. Use the feedback to optimize every process of your brand, be it marketing, product development, or sales.
So now, when you know how to drive growth for your SaaS business, there is just one question left to answer.
When are you planning to deploy the growth levers for your startup?
Author bio
Atreyee Chowdhury works full-time as an Instructional Designer and is passionate about writing. She has helped many small and medium-scale businesses achieve their content marketing goals with her carefully crafted content that is both informative and engaging. She lives in Bangalore, India with her husband and parents. She loves to read, experiment with different cuisines, travel, and explore the latest content marketing and L&D trends in her free time. You can reach her on Linkedin or write to her at [email protected] to discuss your content marketing requirements.
