SaaS is considered a lucrative business model. Venture investors prefer this business even in today’s times of economic downfall. With multiple market opportunities available, SaaS businesses need to implement the right growth approach to scale efficiently. Moreover, while choosing the best-suited marketing mix to build customer loyalty and brand awareness can be challenging, SaaS growth marketing is an effective way to scale a SaaS business in 2023 strategically.
There was a time when trade shows, cold calls, eBlasts, and direct mail were a part of marketers’ toolkits. However, with the growth of blogs, Q&A sites, search engines, etc., people started to research the information on their terms. Rambling voicemails were deleted, unknown numbers went ignored, and cold emails went to junk.
Now, SaaS companies need new SaaS growth marketing strategies to acquire and retain potential clients, and forward-looking marketers are obliged. Therefore, we’ve compiled a list of frighteningly-powerful SaaS growth marketing strategies that you can apply easily to achieve sustained growth.
Establish authority through content
When you create and leverage content to meet business objectives, you’re implementing a crucial growth marketing approach – Content marketing. Anyone with experience in the SaaS industry has firsthand knowledge of the impact of content marketing. The ultimate objective of content marketing is to attract, persuade, engage and generate leads from website visitors.
Even though it might seem simple, many SaaS businesses still find content curation difficult, particularly when they must create content for every point of the customer journey. What kind of content will be appealing to your audience? Is the tone in your content appropriate? What channels should you utilize? You must concentrate on a strategy that’ll make you stand out from the competition through your content.
Deliver value with email marketing
Email marketing is a key pillar for SaaS growth marketing to drive user engagement, improve customer retention and increase conversions. When using email marketing, ensure that your audience is aware of a clear intention. Have clear CTAs and a suitable design format to draw the user’s attention. Furthermore, ensure you’re targeting the right audience with the right content. For this, get an in-depth understanding by analyzing user behavior. Use AI-driven tools to send optimized and personalized emails. If the recipient has been on your list for a while, use predictive analysis to deliver a curated message at the ideal time. Besides that, tweaking the email marketing strategy based on data will boost performance and ultimately ROI for SaaS companies.
Bring influencers on board
Referral marketing is a fantastic way to build brand awareness, but if your product doesn’t have a viral coefficient, word-of-mouth will turn into a reliable medium. That’s where influencer marketing comes into play. For successful SaaS growth marketing, find influencers and industry leaders in your SaaS niche that will validate your product claims. Moreover, influencers are not just people with high-follower count; find professionals with experience and solid backgrounds in the industry.
Increase market penetration
The next beneficial SaaS growth marketing strategy is increasing market penetration. This strategy focuses on expanding the company’s customer base. In accordance with market development, this involves defining the target market and creating ways to reach them. Additionally, market penetration is about exploring a customer segment or market that’s not familiar with your products. You can also target a new geographical area, a larger customer segment, or a part of the industry itself.
To penetrate a new market successfully, focus on developing cost-efficient strategies that help build relationships with existing audiences and bring in new customers. This could include special offers, discounts, or targeted advertisement campaigns. Utilize cutting-edge technology like machine learning and artificial intelligence to build customized marketing campaigns and reach underserved customer segments. Lastly, to make your consumers feel valued, ensure the experience you are providing is consistent across all channels.
Diversifying products
When your product has limited capability to penetrate a market, you should’ve multiple software solutions for different types of clients. Offering new software solutions to existing and potential customers is part of this SaaS growth marketing strategy. Moreover, understanding clients’ business requirements and the issues they’re facing will help you create a variety of products and services. To build sufficient capabilities, product diversification requires significant investment in development and research. Besides, product diversification is beneficial for both established and new businesses. By diversifying, you can enhance revenue streams and lower your overall risk of dependence on a single market or product. By thorough market analysis, you can find potential expansion opportunities and develop products that cater to ever-changing customer needs.
Bonus tip: a/b test everything
A/B testing is a crucial element of growth marketing for SaaS companies as it lets you reduce bounce rates, increase user engagement and conversion rates, and minimize risks. Let’s take the example of Netflix. Netflix’s rapid growth is attributed to multiple factors: its innovative business model and understanding of particular behaviors. Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph started Netflix in 1997 as a service that offered to rent DVDs online. At first, they offered a DVD rental service through the post with a “no late fees guarantee.” To offer new DVDs to customers based on their previous DVD rentals, they devised a personalized recommendation algorithm in 2000 as the business was expanding.
To meet consumer demand and the rapidly evolving retail landscape, Netflix started its transition from a DVD-only to an online streaming service in 2007. Netflix had more than 204M streaming members in the fourth quarter of 2020, and its revenue increased to $25 billion in 2020 from $20 billion in 2019, per the Netflix Quarterly Earnings report. While you might consider that Netflix’s success is attributed to the library of on-demand TV shows and movies, the reality is that the company actually makes a significant investment in user experience testing. Moreover, Netflix uses different psychological principles to develop a simple, salient experience that hooks consumers right away – the picture superiority effect and the top-10 effect.
The Netflix experience is fuelled by imagination. Thumbnail images are one of the key parameters tested on the site to make sure that it retains its subscribers. The Netflix Tech Blog describes it further: “Broadly, Netflix’s A/B testing philosophy is broadly about building incrementally, using data to make informed decisions, and failing fast. When we have a complicated area of testing like image selection, we try to demonstrate the hypothesis in small steps with increasing sophistication and rigor.” Given that Netflix tested various thumbnails on large segments of their customers with excellent success, what would be a reasonable first set of variables to A/B test for SaaS companies if they didn’t have access to thumbnails?
Page A/B testing is the key pillar of a decent UX strategy. Analyze your key commercial pages and main landing page. A simple exercise like offering an alternative opening line of the body, headline message, CTA wording, or featured image can reveal insights about prospects and eventually increase conversion rates. Furthermore, even seemingly insignificant changes such as changing the color of the CTA button on an acquisition email will lead to surprising gains.
Thus, test everything available with various user segments and you’ll develop an optimized and successful SaaS growth marketing strategy. Learn more about how tech companies can benefit from growth marketing.
What are the top factors of SaaS business growth?
It takes more than a strategy to grow your SaaS company. If you want your hard work to pay off, your growth marketing strategy should be applied to these elements for optimum growth:
Attraction
This is where your general business model and business proposition come into play. That includes subscription and pricing models too, including Freemium and other customer-enticing offers. What will entice potential customers and keep your present clientele engaged? What are the values of your target audience? Do you receive referrals from current clients and post them on social media?
Engagement
How are you spreading the word about yourself? Engagement involves SaaS marketing (such as SEO-driven content marketing) n addition to sales efforts and paying attention to customer acquisition costs. If the ROI is lower for each customer, it may be worth reconsidering.
Conversion
You want to increase your conversion rates, right? Ensure a seamless user experience, with a clear explanation of what you do and how you can help. And of course a swift checkout (with no payment issues for potential customers).
Retention
Here, the focus is on maintaining a high level of value for your customers. However, that’s just one approach to tackling voluntary churn rates. Involuntary churners are another risk that may be easily avoided by ensuring that payment acceptance is up to scratch.
Tracking
By tracking, you’ll be able to determine what are you doing wrong and which areas need immediate changes.
Wrapping it up
As businesses are evolving significantly using big data insights, so do marketers. A modern marketing manager should possess the skill of combining a creative approach with technical knowledge, which is necessary for growth leaders. So the above-mentioned SaaS growth marketing strategies are a surefire way to increase conversion rates, improve customer loyalty, and ensure sustainable growth.
However, the advertising sphere is evolving constantly and is significantly influenced by changing customer habits and needs. Therefore, you must continually review marketing plans to develop a growth-focused marketing plan for the SaaS business. Define essential key performance indicators and benchmarks for your SaaS growth marketing and start improving them.
