The SaaS field has revolutionalized our perception of software. It is becoming more dominant year by year – thousands of people use SaaS solutions worldwide. In fact, there are more than 34,000 SaaS in 745 industries, and many people already use them daily: from simple email-sending tools to giants like Salesforce or Netflix.
Such popularity of SaaS implies a higher level of competitiveness and market saturation. You'd likely find a few alternatives to a product with the same features and functionality. As a SaaS business owner or SaaS marketer, you must promote your product to spread the word, find a niche, attract new customers, and retain them. Here SaaS growth marketing comes in handy.
This year should become a time for your business to affirm successful growth marketing strategies. And the following guide will help you with the first steps in growth marketing for SaaS.
Here's an overview of the contents of this article:
- What is a SaaS Growth Strategy?
- 5 Steps to Start with Growth Marketing for SaaS
- Highlights: SaaS Growth Marketing
What Is A SaaS Growth Strategy?
The whole point of opting for SaaS means never to worry about updating a desktop app or the underlying infrastructure. Tailor-made software (a product) that performs well and meets customer expectations is the first essential condition for your growth strategy.
There is also a second important point of the SaaS growth strategy's success. It is an ability to promote the product and attract the audience with product features, for which marketing for SaaS is responsible.
Based on the two points above, a SaaS growth strategy combines product development and marketing activities to get more customers and satisfy them. Let's examine the two inseparable hemispheres of SaaS growth marketing.
SaaS Product Strategy
If there could be one branch where growth marketing peaks, it's SaaS. Today, software as a service is a $167 billion industry, expected to grow by 17% in the coming year. While these numbers will catch your breath, there is another less pleasant statistic: 9 out of 10 SaaS companies fail. How come? Businesses need to comply with a lot of rules to grow, and they must do it consistently.
In terms of a highly competitive environment, it becomes difficult to differentiate yourself from competitors, attract and obtain customers, and make them satisfied enough to maintain the purchased services steadily.
Those companies that sell software as a service do not have it easy, especially those that have yet to invest in product strategy and still think that cold sales, weak brand communication, and complex pricing proposals are better for them.
SaaS Marketing Strategy
Another cornerstone is creating a marketing strategy for your product.
If you want to win in the arduous battle for a potential user of your SaaS solution, you must be able to differentiate yourself. And for that, you need to implement marketing approaches that position you as a leader in the industry.
There are definitely strong points about your product that you are proud of. That is what you need to highlight to start marketing activities that can help you promote your SaaS offer, improving the visibility and positioning of your brand.
You'll need a strong team to start SaaS marketing, or if you have difficulties, it could be helpful to consider SaaS marketing agencies to ignite the momentum. And more about tactics, you'll find below.
So it's time to know more about the first steps of growth marketing in SaaS.
5 Steps to Start with Growth Marketing for SaaS
For this article's section, we highlighted essential steps to elaborate on your growth marketing activities.
- Align Product And Marketing Goals
- Build Your SaaS Social Media Marketing Strategy
- Automate Processes For Expansion
- Build Your SaaS SEO Strategy
- Dive Into Marketing Analytics
- Experiment With Other Growth Marketing Strategies
1. Align Product And Marketing Goals
A SaaS marketing strategy will work only when you can align your SaaS product and marketing activities to support the product.
For this purpose, you'll need to start with needed specialists in your team or outside. Particularly, think of demand generation, marketing channels, lead nurturing, sales, etc.
Let your team members participate in high-level tasks, such as developing a marketing strategy and executing plans. Use modern tools to help your team work better – marketing automation software, CRM software, lead generation platforms, and others.
To align product and marketing goals, create a well-organized marketing plan through brainstorming sessions and team meetings.
Find the perfect combination of marketing activities and channels to market your SaaS product. It's possible through competitor and market research, A/B testing, and quick experimentation.
Finally, track marketing and product metrics, including CLV, gross margin, and customer acquisition cost. This will help you evaluate your SaaS marketing success.
2. Build Your SaaS Social Media Marketing Strategy
Sharing some social media posts periodically won't bring many results. You need to think of social media from a wider perspective – as an essential growth strategy for SaaS.
By using social media channels, you can easily interact with your customers, deal with their feedback, engage with relevant audiences, increase the visibility of your product, and inform customers about product updates. This means that social media opens up a great source of customer data to check on their behavior, needs, and preferences.
Social media offers you a fast way of reacting to issues with the product or product features. For instance, when your app is under maintenance for a few hours, you can take to Twitter to inform your users about the same.
Regarding particular activities, consider including these in your SaaS social media marketing strategy:
- Building communities around your product(s)
- Collaborating with niche influencers
- Using social media for direct selling
- Experimenting with content types (images, videos, textual posts, etc.)
- Distributing your blog content
- Explaining your product features and use cases
- Trying social media advertising
These activities can impact your brand's growth, which means social media marketing should be an essential marketing strategy for SaaS growth.
However, it's important to use resources for social media activities properly. In the following step, you'll see an example of how you can streamline social media marketing to contribute to the SaaS growth strategy.
3. Automate Processes For Expansion
Process automation helps reduce human errors, smoothen workflows, and scale teams fast.
When all processes are running strong, completely transparent, and automated, you can easily synchronize your teams' efforts.
Let's view examples with social media. It can be a time-consuming, yet efficient growth marketing strategy. To improve this process and scale it, social media automation and management platform will help you.
Using a social media management tool like Statusbrew can help you build you social media strategy. Statusbrew can help you schedule posts to all your social media accounts, giving you more control over your content and reducing the amount of time you need to spend on these tasks. It also provides comprehensive analytics, so you can monitor the performance of your posts and identify what is working and what is not.
Additionally, Statusbrew can help you engage with your followers and customers and establish real connections. You can track individual conversations, respond in a timely manner to messages, and use the data to gain insights into your followers’ behavior. This will eventually help you boost your growth efforts.
Book a free demo today and learn more about Statusbrew's capabilities!
Worth noting, automation doesn't end with social media. You should introduce process automation to other marketing areas, such as.
- Email marketing
- Content scheduling and posting
- Paid ads
- Notifications
- SEO
- Marketing backlog
- Marketing analytics
Except for automating marketing activities, you can align team efforts by using lead generation, sales, customer service, and project management automation software.
4. Build Your SaaS SEO strategy
Building a solid SEO strategy for your SaaS growth marketing is an imperative step. Many pieces of the research highlight that SEO and content marketing are extremely impactful for SaaS products. For instance, Mike Sonders admits that the highest traffic share for SaaS brands is organic. It means that conversions from that traffic are also substantial.
Respectively, a well-structured SaaS SEO strategy will help you draw more organic traffic to your website. And content marketing with website optimization converts those visitors into paying customers.
An essential part of a SaaS SEO strategy is informative and keyword-rich high-quality content production. Search engines (in most cases, Google) appreciate high-quality content, so the authority of your website grows as well as the trustworthiness of your blog posts.
The below screenshot demonstrates the types of content that customers consider to be the most valuable while purchasing any software:
Apart from blog content, you also should optimize key pages of your website, such as product pages and your homepage, to gain a higher rate of conversions.
Has it been too long since you last upgraded your website? Then do a quick upgrade now.
Optimize your website with keywords to make it SEO-friendly. Put a mobile-responsive design. And work on improving your website speed. After that, experiment with different forms of content: engaging blog posts, case studies, ebooks, infographics, videos, etc.
Combine your SEO and content marketing with multiple channels, including social media, emails, etc.
5. Dive Into Marketing Analytics
Marketing analytics, a part of the analytics for SaaS, can play a crucial role in your product growth. From the marketing data analysis, you'll be able to boost data-driven decision-making that, in turn, impacts marketing growth.
In this step, you gather valuable insights and answers from the raw data collected during your growth marketing experiments, marketing campaigns, customer analytics, and similar. That's how you will be able to find out hidden issues and new opportunities to provide transparency.
Proper data analytics required for SaaS growth marketing involves different activities like data synchronization, management, data visualization, and data analysis itself to get insights.
Choosing the right data analytics model depends on your SaaS product, business goals, company size, etc. If you have a small or medium-sized organization, you may not need a complex data analytics infrastructure. Using simple data analytics tools for SaaS growth would be enough to provide valuable insights from your raw SaaS business data.
In any case, the particular thing that you should take into account is automating marketing analytics. SaaS growth marketing needs fresh data and periodical results evaluation. So you need to find a tool or a set of tools that will help you with automating data synchronization, building live dashboards, and creating reports.
One such option is to choose an all-in-one data analytics platform like Coupler.io, Google Analytics, Adverity, Looker, or alternatives.
6. Experiment With Other Growth Marketing Strategies
We discussed that social media marketing could immensely help businesses widen their reach to the potential target audience and even markets. Also, SEO and content marketing as core strategies for SaaS growth.
Except for these approaches, you should consider creating a multichannel marketing strategy and experimenting with other marketing tactics. Particularly, initiate an affiliate or partner program to promote your product among the target audience.
Experiment with podcasting and event marketing to spread the word about your product and increase brand awareness and authority. The same goes for influencer marketing. It might be a cost-effective way to promote your SaaS solution among influencers and experts in the niche. As a result, more potential customers will know what you do and can sign up for your product.
While experimenting with growth marketing strategies, it's important to find the combination of effective channels for your SaaS growth. For example, participating in webinars can be boosted through paid ads and social media posting. Or you can distribute your blog posts on social media.
Highlights: SaaS Growth Marketing
Building a great product is paramount. But the world needs to know about it, and you need customers. That's why growth marketing in SaaS will be a key factor in 2024. Let's wrap up the guide with key highlights from the article:
- You should align a SaaS growth marketing strategy with a product strategy, pricing strategy, and product feature development.
- You should create a social media strategy as one of the impactful growth activities.
- What works for other SaaS companies might not be a good fit for your company.
- To succeed with the first steps in growth marketing, build a team of specialists and consider process automation (marketing automation tools).
- Find the combination of growth marketing strategies: core channels + additional (experimental) activities.
- Evaluate your actions and adjust the next steps – marketing analytics will help.
Setting up a Statusbrew account and using it to promote your SaaS business is a great way to optimize your marketing efforts and maximize your ROI. Start your free trial now and see the results for yourself!
Statusbrew is an all-in-one social media management tool that supports Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and even Google My Business.
Explore the Statusbrew range of social media tools
Cancel anytime!