Growth Tip of the Week!

The key to success in the SaaS world is to constantly innovate and stay ahead of the curve. This means being open to taking risks and experimenting with new ideas. The pace of your growth is capped by the pace of your experiments.

~ Denis Shetalin

Positioning

Lately, my understanding is how positioning can help you outclass your competition. As I deep down into reflecting and understanding how positioning can help my SaaS, here are some questions I thought I’d quickly share to help you position your SaaS better:

1. Who is your customer?

2. What is your customer’s point of view on the problem?

3. How are you solving their problem?

4. What are some alternative ways to solve this problem?

5. How are you different (uniquely) from the alternatives?

6. Why does your uniqueness matter?

7. What are some characteristics of your ideal customer?

8. Where is the context of your problem appearing for your customer?

9. What is your Unique Value Proposition?

10. How is your USP obvious to your ideal customer?

Cold Email

Your SaaS business has an easier sales funnel and relatively lower price points. So you'll get more conversions doing cold emails.

Jan has 6 tips that will help you become a pro with cold email

• One offer, one target, one goal: Make 1 campaign per the offer you have, with one exact ICP in mind

• Relevancy > Personalization: Relevancy of your message will always be more important than complimenting your latest LinkedIn post. You might get more responses with deep personalization.

• Understand your frame: Use a low barrier call-to-action, like these: “Might this be something you’re interested in?”, “Open to exploring further?” Don't ask for meetings right away...If what you do seems interesting to them, a call/meeting is the logical next step anyway.

• Use unsaturated lead sources: Only 1-3% of your market is ready to buy at any particular moment. So don’t send messages to leads your competitors can find easily. Instead, get creative by scraping built your own lists in the sales navigator, directory like Y combinator, and Twitter

• Volume vs efficiency vs consistency: The number of deals you’ll close will depend on your volume X your efficiency. Focus on campaigns that are easier to maintain for longer. If you are booking >1% of prospects on a call. Increase volume.

• Follow basic principles but be creative: When writing cold emails from scratch, follow basic principles like open curiosity loops, give first, then ask, keep it short & about them

Email Marketing

There’s a lot of buzz from email marketers for SaaS products. And it makes sense! Email is a great medium for SaaS products to help with audience nurturing + retention! Here’s a slight change that I’d be looking differently at with emails:

Look! I get it, it’s tough and it’s hard to do email marketing with everything going on! The best I do is send some updates on my SaaS every month (apart from the onboarding email sequence setup). But here’s what I’m going to do differently starting in 2023.

Target my MOFU audience!

I’ll write educational pieces for my subscribers. I’ll help them with content that builds their business. While making them remember how my SaaS can help them get there faster.

Help them move down the ladder from the middle of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel. I’ll Avoid just sending BOFU content just because they signed up and showed interest.

I’ll also repurpose this content for my blog posts and PR activities. It might be a lot of effort but well worth it if the plans and systems are in place. What are your thoughts and plans for emails in 2023? Reply to this email and let me know.

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

Content Marketing

A SaaS company grew more than 5237% by making one simple flip.

• Earlier: Creating content: 80%; Distributing content: 20%

• Now: Creating content: 20%; Distributing content: 80%

That’s how important content distribution is!

Alex Garcia shares 8 steps to distribute your content:

1. Create With Intent: Understand the why behind a piece of content to create with intent. Ask yourself two questions: a) What is a goal your audience is trying to achieve? b) How can you make this easier? Use these two questions to create content that earns attention and creates intent.

2. Treat your content like a shoe drop: No one knows your content is getting published other than you. How do you create excitement for your content? Talk about what’s coming, What to expect, and When it’s coming.

3. Launch & Distribute: When it comes to distribution, there are two categories of channels: a) Money Channels like Twitter (Channels with high competition and high audience fit) and b) Rocket Channels like YouTube shorts (Channels with low competition and high audience fit).

4. Experiment: Let’s say you have written an article, you’d now experiment with creating an infographic, creating quick tips, writing a thread, creating short-form videos, creating long-form videos, running ads, sponsoring newsletters, publications, posts, podcasts, or videos. Test, refine, optimize and then scale.

5. Repurpose: What’s published in one format shouldn’t be left to die in that format. It should be remixed to other channels too. Here’s a great content remix formula you can adopt: Newsletters → Article → Twitter Thread → Podcast → Short Form Clip

6. Reshare: Instagram pushes new posts to 10% of your followers in the first hour. For LinkedIn, it’s 15%. And for Tiktok, it’s even less. If your post performs poorly during this window, that means >85% of your audience will never get to see your content.

7. Syndicate: Most people set up their content channels to work in isolation. When really, they should be working as a syndicate. For example, if you write an article based on an earlier YouTube video, embed the video in the blog post. The same goes for infographics, tweets, etc.

8. Optimize & Update: Content is a fast-paced game. That’s why it’s important to take periodic inventory. Every 6-12 months, pull up your content library and update it. Identify trends/events/updates that changed since you first posted and use them to optimize your content.

Related: How to do Content Marketing for SaaS Founders

Social Media Marketing

Here’s how to grow your Startup with Twitter:

Boring SaaS Guy studies how Andrew Gazdacki grew his startup (@microacquire) from 0 to $2.1M ARR in 24 months by posting simple tweets. 75.55% of traffic came from Twitter. Here’s a full breakdown of his growth strategy (+ examples):

• Growing his profile: Andrew is posting general content on Growth, Startups, CEO advice

• Attract a large pool of his ideal market (startup founders) - Talk about broad topics, create a mini market of relevant people, and channel the ICP to his product

How to apply Andrew's growth strategy:

1. Identify your broad audience

2. Pick topics you're passionate about and have personal experience and knowledge

3. Use validated templates to package your ideas

4. Create a collection of templates and spin between them

To drive traffic to the site, he's posting specific content for his ideal customer:

a) creating valuable resources: What resources can you create that ONLY your ideal customer would find valuable?

b) posting results: What relevant results you can post to provide proof to customers on the fence?

c) client stories and case studies: What client stories can you post to remove limiting beliefs?

Related: How to grow your SaaS with Twitter?

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