#43 - Write your SaaS Growth 📈

Welcome 230 Tech Founders and Marketers to the 43rd edition of Write your SaaS Growth Newsletter:

In this edition, we discuss:

• Video Ads: How to create a video for your SaaS product

• Market Research: How to know you are building the right product

• Content Marketing: Ranking your SaaS blog post

• Growth Marketing: 11 ways to scale your SaaS

• Social Media Marketing: Decode your Twitter Algorithm

Let’s GO!

Growth Tip of the Week! 🚀

Dan says “Building a successful SaaS requires patience and perseverance. It can feel slow at first, but focus on retention and marketing, and you will slowly build your MRR. Keep iterating and learning from your customers. They hold the keys to growth.”

How focused are you on marketing your Tech product? That’s the key really.

Video Ads

Mike says a well-crafted video can engage and inspire your audience and become a hallmark of your brand.

He shares how to create an impactful video ad:

1. Identify the target audience. This step is crucial. Understanding your audience's interests, pain points, and motivations will help you create a message that resonates with them. There are several ways to do this, here are a few examples:• Conduct market research -> Google Analytics, Google Trends, SurveyMonkey • Analyze your competitors -> SEMRush, Ahrefs

2. Address pain points and provide benefits. To create a memorable and impactful video ad, it's important to address your audience's pain points and provide them with clear benefits. Perform research, and use this information to create messaging that resonates with them. Highlight the benefits of your product or service and make sure they are relevant to your audience's needs.

3. Use visual elements to enhance the message. Visual elements such as: • Color • Imagery • Typography will enhance your message and make your video ad more memorable. Use them to reinforce your brand identity and to create a video that resonates with your audience.

4. Choose the right music and sound effects. Music and sound effects are SO important when creating a video ad. Choose music that reinforces your brand's identity and sets the tone for your video ad. Use sound effects to add emphasis and create a sense of realism.

5. Use emotion to connect with the audience. Use emotion to evoke empathy, excitement, or inspiration in your audience. By tapping into your audience's emotions, you can create a more memorable and impactful video ad that resonates with them.

6. Optimize for different platforms. Different platforms have different requirements and specifications. Make sure you know the requirements for each platform and optimize your video ad accordingly. This includes aspect ratio, resolution, and file size.

7. Measure the effectiveness of your video ads. Measuring the effectiveness of your video ads is crucial to improving your content marketing strategy. Use tools like Google Analytics or Meta Ads Manager to track metrics such as views, engagement, and conversions.

Use this data to refine your video ad strategy and create more impactful video ads in the future. What gets measured gets managed.

Are you considering making videos for your tech products? Founders marketing in video-centric platforms is highly underrated.

Related: How to grow your SaaS with TikTok?

Market Research

Mat says he’s built 6+ SaaS businesses. And I generate $500K per year with them. But only 2 worked. The other failed.

He shares a simple 5-step process to succeed to win with all your SaaS businesses:

1. Start with a niche and a specific audience. Don't find ideas, find people. That's the first step. Know who you want to help and it will be easier to create a successful SaaS business. And here is the process for finding a niche:a. What are your passions? What do you like? b. What are your friend's/family's jobs that you enjoy? c. About what topic can you talk about for 30 min without preparation

2. Find this niche online/offline. If you have many niches, pick the one you prefer, especially those where people make money. It becomes easier to sell (b2b SaaS). Then you have to know where the people aggregates. Here is how to do it:a. List all the keywords associated and type them on Facebook/Twitter/Googleb. Join all the communities talking about it (Groups, Forums, Discords, Slack)c. Follow all the influencers in this niched. List all the offline/online events you can attend

3. Spend time with them. Here comes the step nobody wants to do. But it's simple. During this step you need to gather information about the niche: a. How they talkb. What are their problemsc. What tools they used. Who they follow

4. Find problems. Now that you know the niche you should already have some problems they have that you can solve. If you don't, talk to everyone in this niche to understand their needs. List all the problems you find.

5. Validate the problem. Once you have the problems you need to know if they're worth solving. a. Post in communities b. Talk about the problem with people And not all problems are worth solving. Here is how to know if you should continue:a. They talk about the problem like a big issue b. They followed up when you said you were working on something for that problem c. They are willing to help you build the solution if you start it d. They are willing to pay for your solution

6. Build the first solution. Start with an MVP and build it with the help of the people. You want them to come up with most features because they know the problem better than you. You should just be a guide, asking the right questions:a. If you had a magic wand, what would you like the tool to do? b. If there is only 1 feature the tool could have, what would it be? And always ask for feedback when building. 2 weeks should be enough for the 1st MVP.Start onboarding the people and iterate with it. You know have a SaaS business people are willing to pay for. You know how they talk so you can use the same words in your copy. You have early users to get traction. You know where to talk about your tool.

It’s an approach that helps you validate what you build. Yes, you cold be wasting 3 months validating the wrong problem, but it will save you 3 years build a wrong tech product.

Content Marketing

Nick has written one blog post for a SaaS company that has generated 450,000+ traffic in the last 12 months

He shares some lessons to write a blog post for SaaS:

1. Start with VERY comprehensive keyword research. Don't just pick out 4-5 keywords every week. Instead, create a Google Sheet and find all possible keywords in your niche. 150 - 300 is a good number for most niches. This allows you to prioritize keywords by difficulty.

2. Your content should be the average of the top 3 ranking articles" WRONG! It should be much better than that. Don't settle for mediocrity. Add extra sections, use visuals to illustrate your point, add examples and case studies... Blow your competitors out of the water

3. Add sources your competitors have never even heard of. Use the Google query filetype:pdf [topic] to find PDFs, eBooks, or journals about your topic. Guaranteed, you'll find some interesting info that your competitors missed.

4. Make your content scannable. When I land on your article, I want to be able to find whatever information I'm looking for in <5-10 seconds. If your headers aren't clear (what is X, X benefits of Y, etc.), I'm bouncing.

5. Use a CLEAN URL structure. Good example: /snowboarding-shoes/ Bad example: /best-snowboarding-shoes-guide-for-2023/ This helps improve CTR & gets you more clicks.

6. NAIL your introduction section. This is SUPER important - if your introduction sucks, no matter how good your article, your readers are going to BAIL. Use this formula to create KILLER introduction sections: PAS: Problem + Agitate + Solution (ChatGPT can help here)

7. Keep your introductions SHORT. Think, 50-150 words TOPS. Mention my problem, explain how you'll solve it, give me a ToC, and you're DONE. The longer your intro, the less likely I'll actually read it.

He shares a lot more tips on how you can optimize your blog post to start ranking in his tweet. He also shares a checklist to see why your blog isn’t ranking.

Related: How to do competitor analysis for your SaaS Blog Post

Growth Marketing

At $1M monthly revenue he didn't know how to do $2M. By $5M it was clear how he could get to $10M. Here's what Brian has learned about scaling a startup:

1. Scale is proportional to VALUE x AUDIENCE SIZE. If you're not addressing a fundamental need for a large group of people or companies, true scale is unlikely. Scalable niches: health, wealth, relationships, etc.

2. Scaling requires unprofitable experiments: The initial challenge is not just to validate that people want what you're selling: You have to be able to reach them efficiently through marketing. Early LTVs can be low, which makes this hard. It helps to have money in the bank.

3. There are only a few marketing strategies that scale: • paid acquisition • organic • product-led growth Most products don't sell themselves. A single big channel can make your business. Defend it with additional channels in parallel.

4. Your message may matter more than the product. If you have the right product but wrong message, you won't scale. Most consumption is based on "satisficing": people aren't looking for the best, they're looking for "good enough". There are exceptions.

5. Differentiation wins. The paradox of disruption is that newcomers mimic the establishment because they want credibility. The only way to outperform is to do what others don't. This can be branding, messaging, product differentiation, etc.

6. The internet is larger than you think. Many startups rely on the same 3-5 ad platforms. There are thousands of ways to buy ads online. Direct publishers are also eager to sell their own inventory. Venture out...

7. Scale is about more than marketing and product. Early growth may lean heavily on marketing or product. Scale comes from compounding gains across all teams. Examples: Better data -> better marketing insights Better product -> higher conversion rates Better CS -> higher LTVs

8. Fixing mistakes is a powerful strategy. Every team has gaps in competency and areas of expertise. "Good enough" can hide some glaring defects. We've seen this in wasted ad spend, faulty tech, broken processes. Search for flaws, fix them and add to the flywheel.

9. Treat your marketing engine like a machine. You need certain inputs to produce desired outputs: People: specialization of critical expertise Budgets: tradeoffs of scale, margin & quality Creative: always be testing Campaigns: systematic optimization Analysis: deep insight

10. Defy the law of shitty clickthroughs. You'll have to increase the effectiveness of your marketing funnel faster than scale robs you of it. Ex: if CPAs at 2x scale are 2x higher, you'll need to 2x your CVR to keep CAC steady.

11. At scale, EVERYONE is your competitor. You're competing with ALL advertisers for wallets and attention. If your funnel can't monetize as well as a dating app or weight loss program, you won't be competitive in the biggest arenas.

Some solid advice on how to truly scale your tech product.

Social Media Marketing

Aakash shares how to grow your Twitter with the revealed algorithm.

A few tweaks to their plan was all it took. Here’s what he did:

1. Likes > Retweets > Replies Here’s the ranking parameters: • Each like gets a 30x boost • Each retweet a 20x • Each reply only 1x It’s much more impactful to earn likes and retweets than replies. 

2. Images & videos help. Both images and videos lead to a nice 2x boost.

3. Links hurt, unless you have enough engagement. Generally external links get you marked as spam. Unless you have enough engagement.

4. Mutes & unfollows hurt. All of the following hurt your engagement: • Mutes • Blocks • Unfollows • Spam reports • Abuse reports

5. Blue extends reach. Paying the monthly fee gets you a healthy boost.

6. Misinformation is highly down-ranked. Anything that is categorized as misinformation gets the rug pulled out from under it. Surprisingly, so are posts about Ukraine.

7. You are clustered into a group. The algorithm puts you into a grouping of similar profiles. It uses that to extend tweet reach beyond your followers to similar people.

8. Posting outside your cluster hurts. If you do “out of network” content, it’s not going to do as well. That’s why hammering home points about your niche works.

9. Making up words or misspelling hurts. Words that are identified as “unknown language” are given 0.01, which is a huge penalty. Anything under 1 is bad. This is really bad.

10. Followers, engagement & user data are the three data points. If you take away anything, remember this - the models take in 3 inputs: • Likes, retweets, replies: engagement data • Mutes, unfollows, spam reports: user data • Who follows you: the follower graph

What’s your biggest takeaway from these findings? Let us know in the comments?

Related: How to grow your SaaS with Twitter

How can I help you further?

• Are you providing any marketing services to SaaS and tech companies? Or know someone who does? We’re vetting marketing experts to help SaaS companies hire specific marketers. You can apply here.

• Let me help you build a marketing channel strategy for your Tech Product. Book a session.

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

See you next Saturday.

Ricky,

SaaSwrites