Growth Tip of the Week!

Dan Kulkov shares 30 time-proven ideas to grow your startup. You can apply any/some/most/all to your list of marketing activities for your SaaS:

• User Acquisition: Run a Twitter giveaway, partner with other brands. improve your on-page SEO, launch on AppSumo, sponsor a newsletter issue

• Activation: Start doing product demos, improve your product onboarding, create a welcome email sequence, offer part of the product for free, and write better user documentation.

• Conversion: Add parity pricing, write a case study, get testimonials from opinion leaders, improve your pricing page, create a limited offer

• Operations: Run a usability test on your landing page, analyze your competitors, define your marketing metrics, brainstorm marketing campaigns, and conduct customer interviews.

• Strategy: Define your positioning, understand your marketing funnel, complete your story brand framework, define your ideal customer persona, describe your tone of voice

• Personal brand: Share your progress on Indie Hackers, start a newsletter, define your content matrix for Twitter, connect with five startup founders in your niche, and start posting on LinkedIn.

This post is so good that it was also featured in the Indie Hackers newsletter. Experiment, pick what works, and double-down on the activities!

Content Marketing

2023 continues to see the rise of content. It’s the best leverage you have to market your SaaS. Write tweets, comments, blog posts, emails, newsletters, documentation, reviews, ads, etc. And then there's audio + video!

It’s not about what you want to say. It’s about what your audience wants to hear. 82% of marketers actively use content marketing. 56% who leverage blogging say it’s effective and 10% say it generates the biggest ROI!

Linda Grasso shares 7 reasons to share content:

• Educates your audience

• Positions you as a thought-leader

• Builds a relationship with your audience

• Facilitates customer loyalty

• Encourages audience engagement

• Improves SEO

• Boosts business growth

Related: How to do Content Marketing for SaaS Founders?

Customer Interviews

The best method to put your SaaS marketing on steroids is to talk to your current customers. This is the most neglected yet the most important activity for SaaS founders to market and scale their products.

But do you know what to talk about? Here are 10 questions that will help:

1. Can you tell me more about your business? This will help you understand the demographics of your customers better. When you understand where your customers are and what type of businesses your customers are building, it is easy to identify your target ICP.

2. Can you retrace your buying journey in detail? This will help you have a bird’s eye view of the entire buying cycle of your customer. From the problem they felt to the payment for your solution, there are multiple factors and touchpoints that happen.

3. How did you find out <product>? Understand where your customers are learning about your product. Did they find you in a Twitter thread, Blog post or a Sub-reddit comment? Now, go build your marketing strategy. Put energy into where your current customers are buying.

4. What was the trigger that made you think to sign up for <product>? There's one trigger that helps your customers sign-up. A hidden desire. For example, a creator signed up for a scheduling tool to free 45 mins to drop their kids at school. Put this trigger in your website copy!

5. What made you pay for <product>? This is your key competitive advantage. There's a simple reason why a customer will buy from you and not your competitor. It can be ease of use, platform familiarity or a well-defined community. Identify this and position your SaaS.

6. What were the biggest hesitations and doubts before the purchase? A customer abandoned my cart and signed up for my annual plan an hour later. Clearly, there's info on doubts that I failed to acknowledge for the buyer. Put this on your pricing page and write blogs on it!

7. What job were you trying to accomplish with <Product>? A feature can perform multiple jobs for your customers. Identify what job it replaces. Understand it in detail and make your SaaS the best job replacement for your customers.

8. What is your biggest pain point with this job? The bigger the pain, the higher the price. You as a SaaS founder should know the depths and feels of the pain point you are solving. Include this in your website copy, email copy, pricing page, and pricing strategy

9. Why do you think this job is important? Your SaaS might be replacing a small job or a task, but does it provide a HIGH ROI for your customer? Understand this to include these benefits to your website copy, email copy, pricing page, and pricing strategy

10. How do you think <Product> can be better? This will give you all the direct feedback you need to build your product roadmap. This list will give you more insight into your next set of features, your compliment advantage, and your refactoring activity.

You can check out 10 more questions on my Twitter Thread here.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing for SaaS is a high ROI activity, particularly in customer retention. You can segment your audience to buyers and prospects and retain/sell to your interested users periodically!

Fed says If you run a SaaS, sending an occasional product update email is an incredibly high ROI activity. If you haven't updated your users in a while, this is your friendly nudge to do so!

For some reason, email marketing isn't considered as sexy as other channels, but it works.

• Show customers you're always improving (reduce churn).

• Introduce new features in a personal way (get quality feedback)

• Remind your free users about your value (convert more customers)

Even if it didn't have an impact on revenue (it does), the replies you get from users getting excited about your updates makes it well worth the time spent putting together the email.

Related: 50+ Expert Email Conversion Tactics to Exponentially Crush Your ROI

Growth Marketing

Let’s say you’re shopping on Amazon and looking for a specific niche product that lasts a long time. You shortlist two products.

Product A looks dope and promises all the value, and appears better than product B. product B doesn’t look that great but promises to get the job done. However, you see only 3 comment reviews for product A with an average rating of 4.83 while product B has 789 comments with an average rating of 4.7.

Which product will you buy?

Olly says Social Proof is one of the most critical tools you can use to grow your SaaS business. He shares 8 specific examples of social proof and how you can apply them to your SaaS:

• Include social proof in your outbound messages

• Address objections with relevant testimonials

• Add testimonials of similar companies in your sales proposal

• Turn social proof into images and post on social media channels

• Include social proof on your landing page to improve conversion

• Add social proof to your 'Request a Demo' page

• Share tips from existing members highlighting their journey to success to increase your SaaS activation

• Showcase your employee testimonials to hire top talent

Related: How to acquire your early-stage SaaS customers? (2022)

SEO

Joe Speiser says most founders ignore SEO. And you can use any SEO tool to find a search query that fits this criteria:

1. Query is hyper-relevant to the problem your SaaS fixes

2. No big website ranks for this query

3. Has a search volume of >50K

50K visitors per year for 15-20 backlinks. That’s quite HUGE! And then…

Pierre says the worst thing you can do when starting SEO for your SaaS is not tracking conversion. You're in the SaaS business, not the blog business. He continues saying for top-of-the-funnel content, anything > 1% for visitor -> PAID users would be considered very good.

Always keep analyzing (I’d say at least once a month). Optimizing for conversion could literally double, triple, or even quadruple your revenue.

My 2 Cents: All it takes is a content strategy and one blog post per week. Your MRR will look different after 12 months. If you're still looking for a growth strategy that will scale your SaaS to greater heights, do SEO!

We’re all playing a long game anyways, aren’t we?

Related: The only Content Strategy you need for your SaaS SEO

Get your SaaS Marketing consulting session

I'm experimenting with a new way to help SaaS founders. Get my brains on how you can market your SaaS with a 30 min session (no charges). Reply to this email to set up a time. I'll help you with my perspective on how you can market and grow your SaaS.

Thanks for reading! SaaSwrites is a humble attempt to help SaaS founders and marketers grow their SaaS.

See you next Saturday.

Ricky,

SaaSwrites