#34 - Write your SaaS Growth 📈

Building your SaaS marketing channel strategies in 2023.

January 14, 2023

Welcome to the 34th edition of Write your SaaS Growth:

In this edition, we discuss:

  • Cold Outreach: An appointment setting framework that builds your sales pipeline

  • Content Marketing: What’s really working in Content Marketing?

  • Copywriting: Build a higher converting landing page with 7 tweaks

  • Growth Marketing: 5 experiments to test your SaaS growth

  • SEO: 7 rules to apply to your current SaaS blog

  • Let’s GO!

Growth Tip of the Week! 🚀

Mat says Marketing is 10X more important for a successful SaaS. Having the best code won’t make you money. Marketing will.

Couldn’t agree more Mat!

Cold Outreach

A well crafted outreach strategy can help you find your Product Market Fit. Once you do, you can even scale your SaaS with a well defined outreach system.

Francesco scaled an offer from $13k/m to $42k/m with this appointment-setting system to book 100+ calls/m and add $30k - $50k MRR.

  1. 1. Open the conversation with a relevant question. We leverage cold DMs to book meetings. If done well, you can print 10 - 20 meetings a week. Make sure the question is something RELEVANT and doesn’t sound pushy or salesy

  2. Ask permission to ask questions to see if you can send them personalized value according to their situation. Don’t make your lead feel interrogated. Be relevant.“Mind if I ask you a couple questions to see if I can help you with a free resource related to x?”

  3. Find your prospect’s pain points and goals. You should get here by asking 2 - 4 questions MAX. “What’s the biggest thing you’re struggling with when it comes to x?” “What did you try to solve x?” Once you find that burning pain of your prospect, you have two options:

    1. if you’ve built enough trust and authority, ask for a free value call - NOT A SALES CALL.

    2. if you sense your prospect is not sure about your ability to deliver results, record a personalized loom video going over how to solve their burning pain - and then ask for a call.

  4. Once the call is booked, make sure you send out reminders, case studies and valuable resources to your prospect in order to keep their interest high. Don’t have more than 4 days available on your calendar. It’ll give time to your prospect to overthink their buying decision.

Do you have outreach as an acquisition strategy for your SaaS in 2023?

Content Marketing

Looking for inspiration to get serious with your content? Ahrefs shared fresh insights into content marketing: Here we go:

  • According to @HubSpot, 82% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing while 10% report not using content marketing, and - 8% are unsure if their company uses content marketing.It’s good to know marketers investing in content marketing but how can the 8% be unsure about it? IMO, they just don’t know what content marketing truly is which is a better answer than a Y/N 

  • 40% of B2B marketers have a documented content marketing strategy, and 64% of the most successful B2B marketers have a documented content marketing strategy.Have you developed a content marketing strategy? Create a one-pager strategy document for 2023 and your content will actually start doing better. It takes ~2h but imagine the 200hrs you’ll spend without a result?

  • 69% of marketers actively invest time in SEO. SEO is IMO the best inbound marketing channel. Start doing SEO already.

  • 67% of marketers say that content marketing generates demand/leads, 72% of marketers believe content marketing helps to educate the audience, and 63% say that it helps build loyalty with existing clients/customers.That’s a HUGE benefit already with content marketing.

  • In 2022, most marketing teams opted to use video as their primary form of content. This was followed by blogs and images, respectively.As a SaaS, posting short form videos with value within your industry is not a bad idea.

  • 73% of people admit to skimming blog posts.Write blogs that are skimmable (if that’s a word, but you know what I mean, right? {me, while wondering if this newsletter is skimmable}).

  • 51% of businesses that invest in content marketing publish content every day.Content compounds when content is consistently.

  • 32% of respondents say they're overwhelmed by the amount of content available— but the majority (44%) consume three to five pieces of content before engaging with a vendor.Your customers are smart, they are reading your content before making a purchase. A website without content is like an apparel store without trial rooms or mannequins.

  • When it comes to preferred mediums for learning about a product or service, @wyzowl found that: 73% of respondents have a preference for short video while only 11% prefer text-based articles.Short video is how content is now consumed, like it or not.

  • 81% of marketers view content as a core business strategy.Making content as part of your core strategy is never a BAD strategy.  

Copywriting

Shounak after working on 250 SaaS startup landing pages in 2022 shares 7 lessons that you can apply to your startup landing page:

Lesson 1: Use inclusive language targeting all the different personas the product serves. For example, the headline copy on your landing page may be restricting the product's scope to just software companies, whereas it can also be used by creators, authors, designers.

Lesson 2: Show users the after-effect of using your product. Don’t have 50% of the 6 words in the a headline as features (payments, taxes, subscriptions). Instead write about the after-effect of these features, for example, taking away the hassle of running a business as a creator.

Lesson 3: Start your headline with powerful verbs/action words. Do not start the headline on the Landing Page with a noun. Not optimal. By starting with a verb, you enable your users to take action right away and visualize the impact of the product. You also hook them in.

Lesson 4: Use 2 sentences in your sub headline. S1: A pain point S2: A corresponding solution. Reword the sub headline to show a pain point (handling boring biz stuff), a solution (put these things on autopilot), and an after effect (ship more cool stuff).

Lesson 5: Show the "why" behind your product. Show the problem with the status quo + the reason why you exist. It's a good exercise in positioning.

Lesson 6: Give your features TLDR in a neat UI/UX layout. Every feature has a headline, subheadline + a corresponding screenshot.

Lesson 7: Leverage strong social proof. Use case studies, customer quotes + branded guides to showcase its credibility. When I come on the page I have no doubt in my mind that these guys know their s**t. First impressions matter. Build trust my fellow founders.

If you’re considering a revamp to your SaaS landing page, apply these 7 golden lessons. And the biggest lesson: Keep it simple.

Growth Marketing

Fed 5 ran 5 SaaS growth experiments in 2022 (and how he think they went). This is a very helpful tweet that shows a lot about experiments for growth.

1. Lifetime Deals Promotions: I sold a private lifetime deal to early adopters for a span of 2 months earlier this year I'd consider it as success, and have no regrets (LTDs get a bad rep sometimes because it doesn't always go this way)

  • Pros: Tons of revenue (validation), Influx of great customer feedback, Many new affiliates & great word of mouth.

  • Cons: MRR decreases during LTD due to subscribers purchasing LTD, Lots of customer support DURING promo, Slightly higher server & support costs afterward.

2. Scrapping the landing page I made a version of the landing page with just a simple value prop & signup button, to optimize for conversions. Conversions went from 11% to 17%, and even peaks during times of high WoM (like right now it's at 26%).

  • Pros: More users (duh) - Those that want to read more content find it, and don't get confused

  • Cons: Slight reduction in user activation (people sign up for product without all the context of what it can do). Have to focus more on in-app onboarding to educate (not that bad).

3. Positioning to Reddit. A year ago GummySearch was a social listening tool that supported Reddit (with ambitions for more platforms). It did Reddit better than any alternative, but folks that buy social listening tools want support for ALL platforms. I made a big decision. There's a big market for social listening tools, but I didn't want to go down that path Instead, I doubled down on Reddit, and started building a fully-featured audience research tool. Social listening became a feature, not the full product. Probably biggest decision I've made.

  • Pros: Unique positioning, More use-cases & customer types, more interesting features to build

  • Cons: No playbook for success, or other products to copy, Less customers that only want a social listening use-case, Writing copy for a general research tool is not easy

4. Require credit card for free trials. Previously, I had a free trial for all users, and after 7 days they could start a subscription or lose access, Now there's a limited free tier, and free 7-day trial for pro that requires a credit card. This one's been tough to assess, and I'm still working on it

  • Pros: More subscribers (MRR doubled in 2mo), More committed users

  • Cons: Higher churn, Complaints that free tier is too limited, Many fraudulent failed payments using prepaid credit cards

5. Sell day passes. I added the option to buy a day pass instead of signing up for a subscription (some folks hate em!) Sold to about 40 customers, and those that bought it loved it. But those sales have dropped off a lot since experiment.

  • Pros: Captured revenue from 40 customers that might not have purchased a subscription, Some people really loved it!

  • Cons: Didn't bring in that much revenue in total, Adding another way to buy makes it a bit more confusing (and might cause analysis paralysis)

What growth experiments are you planning on building this year? 

SEO

DSR shares how eattheblocks,com can increase their traffic by at least 1400% via SEO. Here is an easy-to-implement 7 steps (+ bonus) you can also use for your own blog.

First, who's Eat The Blocks? A leading online coding school focused on web3 development.

  • Target Audience: web2 devs learning web3 tech

  • Income Source: Subscription to courses Let's proceed with the 7-step plan to increase SEO and get more devs.

  • Why an 1400% increase? According to Ahrefs, Eat The Blocks peaked at 800 monthly visits on April 2nd, 2022. Today traffic is close to 40 visits monthly, despite high backlinks from pubs like Vice, Ethereum, and more. A sharp drop.

  1. Multiple H1 Tags:

There are 18 pages with too many H1 tags. SEO experts agree the best practice is to use one H1 per page. Headers help keep content structured for both Google and readers. Action: Convert multiple H1s into proper H2-H4 to improve the content's hierarchy.

  1. Light Content: 

There are 33 pages with light content including core Solidity posts that should rank highly. According to Yoast, chances of ranking in Google are higher if you write high-quality posts of 1000 words or more. Action: Update each post with more in-depth content.

  1. Performance Issues 

85 pages take >500ms to load. 57 pages take >2s to load. 6.5s for largest paint. Score of 63 on Google PageSpeed. Ideal is >90. Google says that improving performance increases rankings and user experience. Action: Reduce JS. Keep requests low. Use CDN.

  1. Missing OG Tags 

132 pages are missing critical social open graph meta tags. Good OG tags help make content eye-catching on social. They tell people why content is important from a glance. Action: Add at least og:title, og:url, desc and og:image for priority pages.

  1. Missing Meta Descriptions 

Google says that meta descriptions are like a pitch that convinces the use the page is exactly what they’re looking for. Action: Make sure meta descs are on point for important posts and include the ranking keyword.

  1. Missing Title Tags 

There are 183 pages with missing or empty title tags. Google recommends matching H1 tags to title tags to prevent inaccurate article titles from showing up on search results. Action: Add title tags to priority pages even if H1 copy.

  1. Main Blog Page 

This page is a chance to show your best content, not just a list of your latest posts. Separate posts into sections like best, Solidity, and Solana is good. Action: Add H1 to make it clear to the audience what the blog is about. Add H2 subheadline to clarify.

BONUS: No Lead Magnet

Eat The Blocks has fantastic Solidity content. They even created a great cheatsheet. But, none of their posts link to it. There's opportunity to get readers that won't ready to convert yet. Action: Convert cheatsheet to PDF. Add email box to every post.

A pretty good checklist to ensure your SaaS meets your SEO goals.

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

See you next Saturday.

Ricky,

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