#38 - Write your SaaS Growth 📈

pMax campaigns, content marketing trends, high growth strategies, acquiring and ascending through email, keyword-based SEO strategy.

February 11, 2023

Welcome 170 SaaS founders and marketers to the 38th edition of Write your SaaS Growth Newsletter:

In this edition, we discuss:

  • Google Ads: 7 steps to run highly efficient pMax campaigns

  • Content Marketing: Trends that are on the rise for SaaS content marketing

  • Growth Marketing: high growth SaaS strategies for 2023

  • Email Marketing: Acquiring and Ascending users through email

  • SEO: A realistic keyword-based SEO strategy for your SaaS

Let’s GO!

Growth Tip of the Week! 🚀

Stefan shares simple 5 ways to grow your SaaS in 2023:

  • Regular virtual events

  • Community-based

  • Book demos, not sales calls

  • Partner with micro-influencers

  • Focus on content creation and distribution

This is it.

Google Ads:

Google ads are perfect for a Buyer's Search Intent. You can find your customers when they are looking for a product like yours. For example, when someone searches for ads management tool, your SaaS ad can pop out for the entire brand hero section.

Speaking the love language of Google’s algorithm is now a fundamental skill when working with Performance Max campaigns. To help the algorithm learn who your buyers are, audience signals are key.

How to use performance max to 2X your SaaS revenue in 1 quarter with Google ads. Here's how I did it (and how you can too):

  1. Reasons: pMax campaigns provide an efficient way to optimize ad budget and get your ads in front of the desired target audience. It eliminates the need to manually adjust budget levels for display, search, etc. pMax is designed to get the best performance.

  2. My strategy: I created a plan to focus on promoting their top-performing products. They had been running their own ads and found their clear winners. But their ROAS was poor. So, the strategy...use pMax to maximise the reach of winning products.

  3. Competitor Analysis for Different Creatives: The goal was to increase overall ROAS And to do that we needed to be more competitive. Use tools like Spyfu, Google Advertiser accounts to research competitors and determine competitive angles to use in your asset creation.

  4. Setting Up Creatives: Adding more assets to pMax allows Google to test what works best and bring the highest conversion rates. As a benchmark try to upload: - Between 15-20 images - 4-5 different headers and descriptions... for each campaign.

  5. Uploading Previous Audience Data: Upload past audience data under 'Audience Signals'. Use: - Site Visitors - Product Viewers - Shopping Cart Abandonments. And use them for "observation based" targeting. Optimization for relevant traffic works faster when you do this.

  6. Using the Right Bid Strategy: Maximize conversion value. If your business sells things with varying value you MUST use maximize conversion value. This is so Google can bid more for customers it thinks will buy more expensive shit.

  7. Let Your Performance Max Campaigns Run: Give at least 2 weeks for pMax to learn and optimize. During this time you should avoid making frequent changes that might de-optimize it. Or else you will reset the learning period.

Once set up and running efficiently, with Google Ads:

  • you have a funnel in place

  • the longer you run the ad, the easier it becomes to optimize the ad

  • Potential to lead to higher LTV of your customer

Content Marketing

Carol says if you're not keeping up with the trends, you are already losing the game. Here's Adobe's take on 2023 content marketing trends:

  • Short form video: Video is king, you know it... Everyone knows it. It's for a reason that all the top channels are video based - YouTube, TikTok, Instagram reels. Your audience loves short-form and you should too! You can produce a lot of content in less time OR work smarter and batch content by making one long-form content into many different short-form pieces.

  • Empathy and human-focused content: Remember the times when all businesses were supposed to be formal and professional? Yeah, those times are over! Your audience wants to get to know the REAL YOU - yes you, behind the brand

  • Loyal customers. And loyal customers would pay 75% more to support genuine and transparent brands that they can relate to. How to get there? STOP using hard sales pitches and start finding your own natural voice that draws in your ideal customer.

  • Strategic SEO. With AI on the rise, it is natural that search engines are getting smarter too - it's not about throwing in some keywords and hoping it works out anymore. Write for people, not for search engines.

  • Content-powered revenue. The biggest mistake that old-school brands make is that they post just to show that they exist (maybe better than not posting at all) but... There are tons of ways to get your content monetized if you treat it as a separate wing of the business.

  • Value-driven content. As I mentioned above - posting just to show you exist is not good enough anymore. Start giving VALUE to your audience. Guessing here is not the way to go - feedback and data are inevitable parts of that process.

  • User experience matters. Not that it didn't before but now the expectations are even higher, that's why it's important to know your customer's journey. Focus on speed, performance, mobile friendliness, quality, and style. Also try out A/B testing.

  • Podcasts remain dominant. The podcast industry is still on the rise - US consumers listened to 15 billion hours of podcasts in 2021. Consider adding video to the podcast and triple your audience Don't forget to add all those previous points to your strategy, because if you don't bring value with your content - you're not doing it right in 2023. Also, hop on the rising trend of live audio content marketing.

Those are some of the trends of content marketing happening for 2023. Which one do you resonate with the most?

Growth Marketing

Ismail shares some steps to grow your SaaS fast without just relying on email marketing. Here’s what he shares:

  • Understand your ICP, so you can build your beasty offer. You need to deeply understand the pains and goals of who you’re targeting and position your product as the bridge between both. This will make your marketing much more effective.

  • Leverage the attention economy. The more eyeballs you have on what you’re building, the more money you’re gonna make. Simple as Don’t have attention? Build affiliate programs with killer incentives that will make influencers flock to promote your product.

  • Value Stack. Add so much value around your solution (video guides, frameworks, e-books, PDF’s) that your prospects will feel stupid saying no. Need inspiration? Check out websites of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the world.

  • Optimize Conversion. Driving traffic to your website is one thing. Getting them to pay you money is another. Use leveraged conversion assets like VSL’s working around the clock for you to explain the value of your product to the eyeballs you’re getting.

  • Use leveraged platforms. If you want to acquire users left, right, and center. Influencers are great, but I know you’re more ambitious than that. Build your own audience on platforms like tiktok, shorts, and reels where you can have explosive growth.

  • Build communities. ClickFunnels has 40k FB group members. All connecting and sharing ways to leverage the product. You need to funnel traffic into communities of your own. This will increase brand loyalty and your customers will pay you longer for it.

This is it! My suggestion is o focus on one and double-down hard on it. Which one makes the most sense for your SaaS product?

Email Marketing

Are you burning loads of MRR to acquire new users? Muhib says the primary reason this happens is because you don't talk to your users at every stage...

He shares why email marketing is VITAL to succeed in SaaS:

  1. Email is the only direct communication channel you have with your users. Unlike paid LinkedIn or Facebook ads, this allows you to talk one-on-one with the people that matter This is why it’s so powerful...

  2. Acquire Users. No matter what SaaS you have, your goal is to acquire users & this doesn’t happen in 1 shot. You typically have to make 6-8 touchpoints with someone before they become a paid subscriber This is why your 1 off cold emails, twitter DMs, or FB ads don’t convert…Maybe they’ll bring on free trial users or you’ll collect their email in return for a lead magnet, but very few of these will decide to pay you WITHOUT any additional support. Now that you have their email though…You can communicate, build a relationship, & lead to conversion.

  3. Ascend Users. Even after users have signed up to your SaaS on a paid plan… There’s an opportunity to generate more revenue from them. Whether that’s putting users on a higher tier or annual plan. You need to be able to communicate with users to do this.For example, If a user has reached their maximum feature allowance Then, send them an email letting them know they’re at max AND that there is a plan that works for them without limits The focus here is to show how much more your user can get out of it for a small increase in payment.

You see how email marketing lets you ascend customers & generate MORE revenue from the same users? These users are already getting so much value from your SaaS and have built trust in you at this point…

This is why it’s easier to make more cash from customers you already have, than to acquire new users Why would you let this opportunity go to waste?

Just remember, feature limitation is only one example, but there are countless other flows you can implement.

SEO

Derek shares how a SaaS company starting their SEO and content program can do keyword research to help ensure they build the essentials.

  • Choose a feature of your software product

  • List out the specific problem(s) it solves for your ICP.

  • Search for keywords that have an intent related to solving that problem

  • Create content with matching intent

  • Connect that content in a contextualized way for SEO authority and UX

  • Have that content lead back to your product or that feature and include embedded product marketing assets

  • Repeat for each solution of each

He continues to share an example of performing this strategy in full detail.

Quiz of the Week:❓

Answer will be shared in the next edition.

Answer to the last quiz: Price Fence. 100% of respondents got it wrong.

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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