#33 - Write your SaaS Growth 📈

Building your SaaS marketing channel strategies in 2023.

January 07, 2023

Welcome to the 33rd edition of Write your SaaS Growth:

In this edition, we discuss:

  • Google Ads: 4 ways it can help your SaaS in 2023

  • Content Marketing: 4 steps to create your 2023 strategy

  • Community: Build a pre-launch community with Reddit comments

  • Growth Marketing: 5 steps to build your unique value proposition in 2023

  • SEO: 3 steps to win in SEO in 2023

Let’s GO!

Growth Tip of the Week! 🚀

Andrew says it's crazy how marketers will segment email & ad campaigns to the nth degree to increase conversion. But, most SaaS products still have a one-size-fits-all onboarding flow.

Question: What tweaks in your onboarding flow are you making to boost activations?

Google Ads

On Facebook or TikTok, your product can "die". With Google Ads, if people are actively searching for your product, it will act as an evergreen sales channel.

2023 can be a great year to test Google Ads for your SaaS. Jackson says running Google Ads will give you these four benefits:

  1. Validate an idea quickly. Not sure whether you should develop the product Create a lead capture page with product features, benefits, and UX shots. Now, drive targeted traffic and gauge interest. Assess the need for your product in the market fast before a major investment.

  2. Capture Traffic Share Fast. Use Spy tools to find your competitor's traffic sources. Use Google to bid on their keywords, or where their customers hang out using the Google display network. Capture interesting traffic even as a newcomer. Get to market quicker.

  3. Only charge for what you use. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad. This helps you reach targeted audiences, optimize your ads with analytics, and track your ad performance. This helps you get more leads and conversions.

  4. Call extensions. Can help enterprise SaaS sell more. For expensive SaaS products, call extensions can help close deals. Otherwise, for $49-$99 SaaS price points, focus on keyword targeting and ad copy.

Do you have ads as an acquisition strategy for your SaaS in 2023? If not, why?

Content Marketing

Your content marketing foundation for 2023 sets the tone for content marketing success for the year. To get the very best out of your content marketing efforts, there are steps you must take to succeed.

Rosemary shares four steps to nail your content marketing for 2023:

  1. Visit the previous year's content. To get the best out of 2023, revisit 2022 content to see what's worth updating, repurposing, refreshing, or trashing. A content audit is necessary to get a better insight into content to ditch, dust, or double down on. There are different SEO tools you can use for content auditing.

  2. Update old content. Content marketing is a continuous process. Continue those marketing campaigns that were working. Rework the content that has the potential to succeed. Update stats, quotes, and other aspects that make your content worth readers' time. Depending on the number of content pieces, you can dedicate the first two months to refreshing, repurposing, and updating your old content. Most importantly, it also saves you a lot of money.

  3. Map out your content collaboration strategy. If you've tried influencer marketing, you'd love content collaborations. Content collaboration is partnering with people who share similar interests and an audience. They don't have to be influencers with large followers. They simply need to have an audience or community you can tap into. Make a list and reach out to them. Collaborate on Twitter posts, spaces, LinkedIn Live, YouTube videos, TikTok videos, Facebook Reels, etc. Content collaborations are a great way to launch a new content marketing campaign.

  4. Launch Q1 content marketing campaigns. One thing updating well-performing old content does for you is that it gives you the confidence to launch Q1 content marketing campaigns. It's a new opportunity to apply the lessons learned the previous year, and patiently work towards the success of Q1 content strategy. You don’t rush it. You don't write off any strategy immediately. If an approach isn't working, you can always rework it until it works. That's what content marketing is about.

Community

If you’re building an audience on social media, you might reconsider utilizing the same efforts to build a community. That is exactly what Richard did as he grew his pre-launch discord for Evoke to 1000 members in a month with Reddit comments.

He shared 5 learning points to build your pre-launch community with Reddit comments:

  • Find the perfect place. Find a subreddit related to your niche and select posts by "hot". Then find recent posts not older than 3 days. The bigger the subreddit, the more recent posts you need to get traction since they get buried much more easily. If you've arrived a little late to the party, reply to a large comment rather than leaving your own to prevent getting buried.

  • Craft the perfect comment. Begin with replying with relevant info, much like how you would reply if you weren't self-promoting. Your comment should address the commenter's reply and add your own opinions + genuine experience. Then add a little self-promo that’s tied with the comment than being abrupt. Be suggestive like "if you're interested/curious" or "feel free to" rather than direct and salesy.

  • Reddit comment SEO? A question on Google can result in a Reddit comment in the post. Reddit actually has really good domain authority and SEO. Firstly, like with all SEO, make your comment relevant and helpful. Secondly, focus on low volume long tail keywords.

  • A numbers game. Post post post. Become a commenting machine. If you're not good at self-promo or shy about it, practice by just posting a relevant comment without self-promo. Making comments is much easier than posting, so do it frequently.

  • You don't need to hit it big. Most of your comments will not get any upvotes.You can still get clicks and discord joins from these comments. That's the magic of Reddit comments. You can get no engagement on the platform and still have plenty of visibility.

It’s a great opportunity to build a community if you’re building your niche SaaS. The ROI on your efforts can be much more than building a partially invested audience.

Growth Marketing

Matthew says every single marketing tactic is useless... If you have half-baked value propositions. Here are the 5 basic rules for creating growth-oriented value propositions:

  1. Benefits over features. Be clear + concise. Explain the benefits of your products or services. Focus on improving your customers' lives: Save money, Lose weight, Find love, Save time. Stack as many as you can.

  2. Different, not better. Your value proposition should highlight what sets your products or services apart from your competitors. It shouldn't even be a comparison. Unique features, Higher quality, Pricing model (not price point).

  3. Appeal to one customer. Your target market. Pretend like you're speaking to one person only. Solve their problems. Their desires. Your value proposition should be tailored to your target market and speak to their specific needs/desires.

  4. Be easy to understand. Your value proposition should be easy to understand and free of jargon or complex language. Pro Tip: Write for an 8-year-old. Be clear and straightforward, so that even someone who is unfamiliar with your business can understand it.

  5. Be memorable. You’re going for sticky. The best value props are portable (easily shareable). People generally don’t buy things the minute they find out about them. Make your value props memorable so they think of you first when they are ready to buy.

He shares an example of a good SaaS value proposition: Canva makes complex design tasks simple and easy for users of all skill levels. 

SEO

The single most important goal of SaaS SEO is to drive user sign-ups and ultimately revenue. Not organic traffic. So, ideally, your SEO strategy should differ from traditional SEO strategy which is more focused on organic traffic. Organic traffic does not mean you get more users.

Barret shares steps that are guaranteed to work for your SEO: He says:

“When a prospect discovers your site in Google the close rate is 10x higher than a paid ad. Why? Google's recommendation passes its authority onto your company, instantly building a high degree of trust. When prospects trust, they buy.”

  1. Keyword Research:

The goal is to attract ready-to-purchase visitors by focusing on high-intent transactional keywords. How would your customer describe you? For us this was... Ex: "Commercial Storage" It's valuable because companies pay BIG $$$ to solve their space needs.

Also, identify 10-20 related keywords. Ex: "Commercial Storage Unit" Related search terms have similar intent but vary slightly. They're important because targeting them builds topical authority, improving the odds of becoming Google's go-to resource on a subject.

  1. Create Blog Content: 

Write a 3-5K (or more) blog that has: a keyword in URL, keyword in the title, keyword / CTA in meta description, keyword in the H1, related keyword sub-headers (h2), image w/ keyword in alt text. Bonus: custom infographic.

Next, turn each sub-header into a 1-2K article (10-ish in total). Use the methods mentioned above and also add internal links to make navigating between content easy (Google loves this). Aim for 5-10 internal links for every 2k words and embed the link under a related keyword.

  1. Acquire backlinks:

When another website has a link back to yours, that's a backlink. They are Googles' way of determining how trustworthy your website is. The more high-quality sites that link to yours, the more authority and better rankings you'll have.

Think of backlinks as algorithmic votes of confidence. They can be confusing, but the whole goal is to rank content faster and higher (and sometimes drive referral traffic). Great links are from high authority, high traffic sites *in your niche*.

So, how can you land backlinks? - create detailed content that others will link to as a source (data, quotes, etc.) - cold email blog editors and offer them something (guest post, etc.) - outsource via a backlinking service to get niche link placements.

Growth Recommends:

Subscribe to the Big Bang Launch newsletter - Go behind the scenes of products that ranked Top 3 on Product Hunt. Uncover the launch strategies and secrets straight from the mouth of its makers.

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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