If you’re running a SaaS business, you want the company to grow fast. You will need to focus on proven customer acquisition channels while implementing strategies to maximize customer retention.
The success of your business depends on rapid growth, at least in those early stages.
Don’t worry. We’ve got you covered. This article will share eight tips you should consider to scale your business:
1. Consider The Customer Journey
Before you develop your marketing plan, you need to consider the customer journey.
Think about how a lead will encounter your company and what actions you can take to push them down your marketing funnel to become a customer.
A person will normally encounter your company from one of two sources:
- Content you shared through a marketing channel
- A referral from a friend or third party
Map out your idealized customer journey based on the marketing channels you plan to use.
Consider how you’d like to engage with your audience. This process is a bit theoretical for a new business, but it will help you get into a growth mindset.
If you already have a decent customer base, though, you can use a CRM or other marketing tools to track how people interact with your business.
The goal of this exercise is to identify important touchpoints in the customer journey.
Whether you choose traditional CRMs or consider an alternative to LeadPages, focus on identifying key marketing channels and understanding their impact on customer acquisition. You’ll need to review your customer retention metrics as well.
2. Identify Your Primary Sales & Marketing Channel
As an outcome of that initial review, you should have identified which channel is most important for your business. Depending on the small business you are running, it can be:
- Paid advertising
- Social media
- Direct outreach/sales
It’s logical to focus the majority of your marketing efforts on your primary customer acquisition channel.
The advantage of going “all in” on one channel is that you optimize the efficiency of your marketing budget.
You can build a team of specialists, which helps you maximize growth. You’ll need to highlight the pros of working in your SaaS business to get top talent, though.
HR stats show that job seekers consider three top things before sending their applications: attractive benefits (48%), a convenient commute (47%) and a relatively high salary (48%).
Over time, growth rates for your favored customer acquisition channel will decline. That occurs naturally regardless of the marketing channel you focus on.
As that occurs, you can expand your marketing team. Then focus more of your efforts on the next most promising marketing channel.
3. Create Content For The Customer Journey
At the beginning of this article, I touched on the importance of customer retention.
You should invest as much effort in implementing strategies to acquire new customers as retaining existing customers.
To this end, you must create a marketing strategy that aids customer retention to scale your business. The stronger the bond you have with customers, the less likely they are to leave your company.
A good onboarding process helps familiarize new users with the best things about your product or service.
Spend time developing content and systems that improve customer retention. For example, you can build guides providing solutions to some of the most common issues your customers struggle with.
More importantly, you’ll need to produce guides and other similar resources on how customers can use your product or service.
This is especially crucial for a SaaS content writing strategy because it ensures customers get maximum value from your software product. When that happens, the chances of customer churn reduce significantly.
Creating a blog is also essential. And the best part about a blog is that it doesn’t just help you educate your customers. It also helps you with ranking your website on search engines.
The more the topics you cover around your industry, the more search engines will start recognizing you as an authority in that field.
Put simply, it gives you topical authority. This boosts your rankings, which means more visibility for your site. More visibility translates to more traffic and leads. You need this to scale your business.
4. Create A Free Tool
Free tools apart from your own SaaS product are a great way to acquire customers and organically secure new backlinks which help with organic rankings.
HubSpot are masters of utilizing this growth strategy. They have an array of free tools apart from the main one that they provide to people. These free tools include a meeting scheduler app and a chatbot builder.
The tools helped improve Hubspot’s SEO presence. You can see from the screenshot below that this free scheduler generated 686 links from referring domains to the Hubspot site. The page also gets around 1,000 visitors a month.
Creating these free tools is an excellent way of generating fresh leads to scale your business. You also create a lot of goodwill with these leads as your product offering is free.
5. Use Relevant Tools for SEO
Digital marketing is continually evolving, and you need to use up-to-date tools to maintain a competitive edge.
You need SEO tools, for instance, to ensure your content is optimized and ranks in search engine results pages.
So, when users make a relevant query, your content pops up. The result is that users are likely to go to your site where they can convert.
It’s not surprising many SaaS businesses use relevant tools for SEO, like Clearscope, Surfer, or Frase, for business growth. These tools use AI to help you identify the most relevant keywords to include in a piece of content.
The example below is one of the most popular articles on BigCommerce. You can see they’ve incorporated all of the main keywords that need to be included in the article for it to be SEO-optimized.
That tells you one thing: the content probably has a lot of customer engagement since it’s visible in SERPs.
If you don’t use these SEO tools, you’ll put yourself at a competitive disadvantage. Your content marketing efforts will have been in vain. How else can people find your valuable content and go to your site if they don’t see it in the first place?
6. Use Live Chat to Generate Leads
In general, live chat is an excellent opportunity for sales and customer support teams to generate leads.
According to GoInflow, one of their clients that incorporated live chat into their site saw an increase in leads, with a 3.84% increase in conversions.
They put this down to their client’s new ability to answer customer inquiries promptly.
But that isn’t the only company reaping excellent results from using live chat for lead generation.
A staggering 79% of companies say that live chat has an impact on lead generation, sales and revenue. In essence, it’s a critical element to scale your business.
That, of course, presupposes that you respond quickly to customer queries. The average live chat response time is six seconds.
To incorporate live chat into your SaaS website, just use live chat software like LiveChat or Zendesk.
Some solutions like LiveAgent allow you to set chat assignment rules so that questions asked by customers are answered by the most qualified agent.
7. Invest In Influencer Marketing
Even if social media isn’t your identified primary sales and marketing channel, it’s a logical avenue to explore if you want to scale your business. Influencers can influence the opinions of their followers.
If they say good things about your brand, chances are, their followers will believe it and support your product.
To run an influencer marketing campaign, you’ll first need to identify suitable influencers. These are influencers who align with your business values.
You wouldn’t want to seek the help of a fitness influencer if you’re selling email marketing tools, for instance. That just wouldn’t make sense, unless the fitness influencer also does email marketing on the side.
When choosing your influencer, consider, too, the social platform where your audience hangs out.
If your target audience is on Instagram, for instance, you’ll need an influencer with followers on Instagram. If they’re on Facebook, then your chosen influencer should have a following on the same platform.
You can use influencer software like Collabstr to look for influencers who fit your criteria. Reach out to them via their social platforms.
Or, if you’re more comfortable with using email, just leverage an email finder to look for their contact details. Then send them your pitch.
Highlight how a collaboration with you can also benefit them.
The key thing with influencer marketing is to also ensure you verify the reach of your audience and track the rate of engagement through to conversion once your campaign is running.
8. Offer A Free Or Cheap Paid Trial Of Your Product
The best way to show the value of your tool is to get them using your software. Free trials or cheap paid trials are one way to get these sign-ups.
Offering free trials is something that most SaaS businesses do. I won’t cover this option in too much depth. Rather, I’d like to focus on cheap, paid trials.
Several SaaS businesses offer paid trials. Two notable examples are Ahrefs, a $7 one-week trial, and Surfer SEO, a $1 one-week trial.
The advantages of a cheap paid trial, as opposed to a free trial, are:
- You get the customer’s credit card details.
- Paid trial customers are more likely to stay once the trial period ends.
- You reduce the number of freeloaders.
Both Ahrefs and Surfer pivoted to a paid trial because the free trial customers required so much support, according to Userpilot.
Transitioning to a cheap, paid trial didn’t impact growth for either company. It did reduce the number of customer support inquiries, though.
Userpilot suggests offering free trials once your business has reached a certain size.
If you plan to use a paid trial, set your price low. You can use A/B testing to identify the optimal price point for conversions.
Wrapping Up
These tips and tricks are proven ways of scaling a business quickly. Time is money, and so ways of improving your business within a short period are crucial if you want to see rapid improvements to your SaaS company.
As long as you keep believing in your brand, products, and services, these helpful tactics should navigate that road to success.
We hope that you have found this blog helpful, and we wish you every success with the future of your SaaS business!
Ella Marcotte
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