#45 - Write your SaaS Growth 📈

Google Ads Competition-Analysis, 6 Unique Content Formats, Craft a Cold Message in 2023, real truth about PLG, 5 Title Tips for CRO

April 22, 2023

Welcome 238 Tech Founders and Marketers to the 45th edition of Write your SaaS Growth Newsletter:

In this edition, we discuss:

  • Google Ads: 5 Google Ads Competition-Analysis Strategies

  • Content Marketing: 6 Unique Content Formats for SaaS

  • Cold Outreach: How to Craft a Cold Message in 2023  

  • Product-Led Growth: The real truth about PLG

  • SEO: 5 Title Tips for CRO

Let’s GO!

Growth Tip of the Week! 🚀

Boris says “Don’t say “I’m going to scale my SaaS to $10k”.

Say you will:

  • Focus on your user

  • Do your best to find and remove friction

  • Keep working on the basics and don’t chase growth hacks

Habits create results. Talking about results doesn’t do anything.”

It’s all about creating value to onboard and providing satisfaction to retain the next customer, really!

Google Ads 📈

Google search engine is quite cool. You know how many people search for a product like yours. You can also know the audience that is visiting your competitor pages.

Colin shares 5 advanced Google Ads competition analysis strategies you can implement this week:

  1. Competitor Website Traffic: You get to know how much traffic your competitor pages are bringing. This is easiest to do! How to use? Campaign Type(s): > Display > Discovery How To Use > Create "custom audience" > Input competitor URL > Target "search term"

  2. Competitor Website Similar Traffic: You leverage Google's indexing of other similar websites that you may or may not know about. Tip: use this as a secondary test Campaign Type(s): > Display > Discovery > PmaxHow to use? Create "custom audience" > Input competitor URL > Target "people who browse websites similar to"

  3. Competitor Intent: Do you have a search campaign that is killing it? Then you're going to love this strategy. Campaign Types > Search (observe/target) > Display > Discovery > PmaxHow to use? custom segment > input: competitor names or product names > target: "people who searched for any of these terms on Google"

  4. Perfect Competitor Audiences: Combined Audiences can get VERY detailed. You can match competitor website traffic WHILE making sure it's cold trafficHow To use? Combined Audiences > Target 1. competitor website audience (audience must be already created) 2. AND -> another competitor website audience (this narrows your audience down to must-have visited BOTH) 3. Exclude: website visitors (of your site)

  5. YT Video "Borrowing": This one will not be available for most use cases but let's say a YT vlogger reviewed your product alongside a competitor. You can actually use that video (no permission needed) for your own YT ads CRAZY RIGHT?!How to use? In Video campaign / ad group > search for video/channel/ URL

What are your thoughts on competitor research with Google Ads? Have you ever used Google Ads? If not, this might be a good case study to find your audience through your competitors. Let us know in the comments how it goes or what you think about it.

Content Marketing 📈

There is more to content marketing than the usual blogs and social media posts. Often these content formats can bring you way more traffic than traditional formats.

Kuba shares 6 content format types that you can creatively apply to your SaaS:

  1. Interactive Quiz: People love taking quizzes! Create an interactive quiz that aligns with your business and engages your audience!

  2. Infographs: Visuals are the new black! Infographics are an excellent way to communicate complex data in a visually appealing format.

  3. 𝗩𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗼 𝘁𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗼𝗻𝗶𝗮𝗹𝘀: Customer reviews are great, but video testimonials are even better! Seeing and hearing a satisfied customer can help build trust with potential clients.

  4. 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁𝘀: Did you know that over 100 million people listen to podcasts every month? Consider starting a podcast to connect with your audience in a new way.

  5. 𝗪𝗲𝗯𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗿𝘀: Educate your audience on your products or services with a live or pre-recorded webinar. This format allows for interactive Q&A sessions with potential clients.

  6. 𝗘-𝗯𝗼𝗼𝗸𝘀: Showcase your expertise and generate leads with an e-book. Not only will it provide value to your audience, but it can also be used as a lead magnet for your email list.

What are you going to create differently? Remember one piece of content going viral can bring 1000s of potential leads for your SaaS.

Cold Outreach 📈

A good outreach campaign can take your SaaS business to a direct triple-digit growth jump. But it gets messy when the messages are done right. It takes practice - yes, but you can always learn the basics. Use this and you’ll get users automatically!

Nik understands this. He shares how to send a good outreach message:

I've been sending amazing cold emails since 2014, and have met amazing people as a result. I get about 1,000 emails per day. Here's how to do it well:

  1. Clear Intro Don't ask how someone is doing. Get straight to the point. You're in someone else's inbox — you don't know them. "Hi, my name is Nik and I run a company called Sharma Brands. We scale brands online like Everlane, Feastables, and Jolie." 

  2. Setup the Context Help the reader understand the context or the lens of why you're reaching out in the first place. "I ordered your Trifecta Skincare Set as a gift about 3 weeks ago, and it's changed my skin, completely. I'd love to talk about how we can enhance your online shopping experience to get more customers in the door." 

  3. Explain Why They Should Care Numbers, facts, and social proof win here. "On average, within 6 months we're able to lessen CPA by 25% for brands like XXXXX, and have taken many brands from $20M/year to $90M/year in revenue." 

  4. Go for the Ask Again, don't waste time here. "I believe the Trifecta can be marketed in a stronger manner. We have the creative and design team to make it happen, and I've attached a deck with our capabilities, for you to see." 

  5. Finish with a CTA You want to get a "Yes", "No", or a "Talk to this person" response. "Is this of interest? If so, let me know who to speak with for next steps."

Stop sending bad outreach messages. It's 2023, and everyone's inbox is already crowded. Make it personal, make it short, and make it actionable.

Product-Led Growth (PLG) 📈

A SaaS product has the potential to grow on its own. With no marketing! At least that’s the basis most first-time developers have when they develop a SaaS. While it can work on some cases, most cases it doesn’t.

However, I always keep product-led growth a part of my overall marketing strategy. It does have the potential to bring more users and retain a lot of them.

Dani shares some insights on how she grew from to 1k to 20k users in 1 year:

  • In PLG, the product does the heavy lifting. It sells itself. It onboards the user. PLG helps the user build a habit and share with others. Product-Led Growth truly means the product grows the company. There is no shortcut to a good product.

  • It takes time, iteration, constant feedback, a great team, and hard work. We spent 18 months iterating to reach PMF so that we could start to grow. It was challenging. It was a ton of work. But there is no shortcut.

  • The bar is high for your product. Really, really high. Think about it – when was the last time you signed up for a new product and added it to your daily workflow? Probably it was a long time ago. That’s because you, like everyone, have a high bar for which products you are willing to spend the time to learn and incorporate into your day-to-day.

  • In PLG, your product can’t just be good. It has to be wow good. It has to be worth someone’s time and effort to learn how to use it and incorporate it. I like that about PLG. You only get to grow if you have delivered sufficient value to your users. Talk about incentive aligned.

  • If by using your product, people will share your product, then you will achieve viral growth. This is hard to see in the early days, when you’re dealing with small numbers.

  • If you have 100 retained users and they each bring in another retained user, 200 is still a small number. But when you see 10,000 become 20,000 in 3 months, you will go “Aha!” If users will naturally share your product while using it, then focus on building a product people will use a lot, and the growth will come organically.

  • Retention is the most important metric in PLG. What retention actually means: your product is good enough that people are investing the time to learn it, incorporate it into their day-to-day workflow, and then sticking with it. Retention is the most effective way to track: “are people really using this”.

  • Retention was the #1 metric we tracked as we developed Jam to PMF through 4 major iterations (and countless minor ones). As we worked towards PMF, my co-founder shared the latest retention numbers with the entire company every Monday. In the early days, this was done with a simple spreadsheet. That simple retention spreadsheet was what gave us the clarity we needed to find PMF (so that we could start to grow).

  • Solve the cold start problem by doing a little bit of classic marketing to get people in. You need to get the flywheel going by getting some initial users in. This is the part that looks like traditional marketing, but it’s just to seed the flywheel.

  • We launched on product hunt, ran a couple of small reddit ads and partnered with influencers we admired. Then if your product is doing the work and retention is good, those users will start bringing in others, and quickly you will see the spark start to spread. 

Some solid advice on how to truly understand the retention and product led growth of your product. You can read her detailed tweet here. It’s a wonderful read.

SEO 📈

You get up early on a quite Saturday morning → go for a nice workout → Take a cold shower → make delicious coffee → and sit down to write that perfect blog post for the week.

You take 3-4 hours to complete and click Publish. Finally! I’m on my way to $10k MRR! But after two weeks - you see 7 clicks and no sales. The coffee tastes yuck too!

This happened to me! I’ve understood now that the thing I neglected the most is actually the most important thing - optimizing your blog posts title for CRO.

Alek shares how to write the perfect SEO Title Tag:

  1. Write engaging title tags that contain your primary keyword. For example, you’re writing a blog post about the best vacuum cleaners for pet hair. A good, engaging, and well-optimized title would be 10 Best Vacuum Cleaners for Pet Hair [According to Pet Owners].

  2. Differentiate it for the audience: Your primary keyword is “best vacuum cleaners for pet hair,” and “according to pet owners” will help you differentiate from the others. It will create some trust and help you with click-through rates.

  3. For info blog posts, put the main question in the title. For example, “How to Clean a Vacuum Filter”.

  4. People mistakenly think that title tags and H1s are the same. Most sites copy the title tag and put it as an H1 for clarity and consistency. The title tag is visible on the SERP and your browser tab. On the other hand, the H1 tag is the displayed “title” on the actual page.

  5. Remember to keep it concise. If you want your complete title tag to be visible on the SERP and not truncated, make it up to 55-60 characters long.

You can also use ChatGPT3 to generate some great title prompts.

Marketing Tech Stack to Add this Week! 🧰

If you’re a tech business, creating videos about your products is still an untapped opportunity. Imagine Instagram reels and TikTok getting viral on your use case. That’s the power.

Offeo has access to over 3M+ stock images and videos. You just upload a picture and it generates an out-of-the-world video ready to be shared across your social channels and ads.

Over 500,000+ businesses are creating unique brand designs for social media with Offeo today. Your competitor is probably not doing this!

Offeo is also offering a lifetime deal which quite honestly is a steal!

Try Offeo (affiliate link)

How can I help you further? 🥅

  • Are you providing any marketing services to SaaS and tech companies? 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,

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