Building a business from scratch can be daunting. You’ve spent lots of time coming up with a unique SaaS idea that generates value for your target audience, and now you just want to see your company grow.
There’s plenty of room for SaaS businesses to grow, from customer delight to acquisition strategies. But growth doesn’t come easily, considering how competitive the SaaS market has become.
That means you will need to find ways to hack your way to growth. Here are 6 tips to help you speed up the growth of your SaaS business.
1. Use Social Media to Grow Your Client Base
There’s nothing more fulfilling than starting a company from scratch and watching your customer base grow over time. But how exactly do you grow your customer base?
The SaaS market has become seriously competitive. You have to drum up some creativity and use direct engagement methods in order to get on your target audience’s radar and stand out from the crowd. This is what makes social media, especially LinkedIn, such an effective method for building a customer base.
LinkedIn provides the ideal platform to build your customer base. A simple search, using the right keywords, can help you find hundreds of potential clients. If you include a blog and write useful articles, you are sure to stand out as being an expert in the SaaS industry. Using LinkedIn automation software will make the process much faster by helping you publish your content for the right audience at the right time, and maximize your reach in no time.
2. Get Organized
Growing your SaaS business is impossible if you are all over the place. If you have lots of paper forms laying around or a bunch of electronic docs that need to be filled in, you can’t properly focus on anything else but dealing with the mess. You need to find a way to search and analyze all the data effectively across all the forms and if you do it manually, the chance of making an error is quite high.
Microsoft Power Apps allows your Saas business to provide electronic, web-based forms to both your team members and clients. The data is stored in a single secure location that can only be accessed by those who need to use it.
And the best part is, you don’t have to have a dedicated IT team in order to make the most of the Power Apps; you might only need a Power Apps consultant in NYC to help with technical questions and make sure your apps are running smoothly.
3. Create Quality Content
When it comes to building organic traffic for your SaaS business, having a solid SEO and content marketing strategy is a must. The problem is how do you determine what type of content works. The solution? Think about what your customers worry about and try to ease those worries with your blog posts. Build your entire site around the idea of helping your prospective customers, and you’ll establish yourself as an authority in your field.
Content types like ebooks and white papers have a huge potential for generating leads but they take time and money to produce. To get the most value from your efforts, look into repurposing your content. For instance, you can turn an ebook into a series of blogs, a YouTube video, an infographic, or a series of emails. Repurposing content allows you to connect with different audiences in the medium they prefer.
4. Offer Free Trials
The days when people had to talk to a salesperson in order to decide whether they liked something are long gone. Nowadays, anything you want to know can be found online and free trials are simply an extension of that.
The millennial generation is used to the self-serving option, which makes freemium pricing a great example of a millennial-friendly model. Research has found that there are about 75 million millennials with an estimated buying power of $600 billion per year. It is also estimated that in 2020, millennials spent $1.4 trillion.
Free trials are also an excellent way to maintain an email marketing campaign where you can inform prospective customers of the value of your service.
5. Leverage Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing doesn’t need to be costly, but you need to be smart and strategic about it.
You can use sites that specialize in helping you find influencers in your industry, then reach out, and start building relationships with them by following them on social media, engaging with them, and sharing their content. Once you feel you’re more familiar with the influencer, send an email offering a free license for a year or a personal demo. However, avoid sending automated outreach blasts as those tend to be ignored.
Stay in touch with the group of influencers using your software to see if they have any issues and how you can help them. Over time, these influencers will continue to reference you, and give recommendations and shoutouts.
6. Launch a Referral Program
Did you know that only 1 in 4 B2B companies have a formal referral program? If you are one of them, you’re missing out on important opportunities. Organizations that do have referral programs report lower acquisition costs, a stronger relationship between their marketing and sales teams, as well as increased sales.
The good news is, setting up a referral program is relatively easy. If done right, it can significantly boost your growth. Just think of Dropbox, which is valued at $12 billion today. The company used a simple referral program (they gave 500 MB of bonus space for each friend the users referred) to get from 100k to a staggering four million users in only 15 months!
Final Thoughts
When it comes to growing your SaaS company, it all comes down to bringing in more customers than you lose. If you fail to do so, your competitors will devour your market share. In order to speed up growth, SaaS businesses can’t just rely on the traditional marketing tactics and strategies. You need to try out multiple channels, analyze the return, and find out which works best.
The 6 growth strategies offered in this article are low-risk and high-yield opportunities that you can try today and start seeing results in no time.