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What are the Top Strategies for SaaS Platforms to Grow?
What’s your number one focus as a SaaS company? Growth, of course. Skyrocketing success is expected from you. It’s vital to your long-term survival:
Even if a software company is growing at 60% annually, its chances of becoming a multibillion-dollar giant are no better than 50/50.
McKinsey & Company
Month-over-month (MoM) growth is essential to covering the losses from churn that SaaS companies generally experience. To beat expectations and keep you in the green, it’s time to get your strategies set for growth in 2019. There are always new emerging strategies, growth hacking tricks, and tools to help you boost your growth.
SaaS Growth Strategies
Here are a few fresh strategies for boosting growth for Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms.
Driving Traffic and Creating Awareness
- Getting the right content in front of the right audience: As you’ve likely heard, content is king and very much still is, especially with SaaS. Users expect a lot of information to help them make a buying decision and expect your brand to have high authority. Developing the right content that attracts and keeps potential customers engaged is essential. You can use tools like Spyfu and Google Keyword Planner to determine what your top keywords are and what your target audience is searching. A few strategies are sharing your content as a guest post on another blog with a similar audience, using platforms like Medium and publications, and using ads and boosting to reach the right audience.
- Using Personal Branding: An often overlooked growth strategy is using the personal branding of your founders and the experts on your team to reach an audience better. People love interacting with and learning from real individuals online. If someone from your team has a skill or expertise that can provide helpful information, it’s a great way to promote your brand inadvertently and authentically. Plenty of Founders are writing on Medium and Quora; some have their blog series or podcasts that provide a lot of insight that your target audience will be interested in. It builds trust, credibility, and a personal connection to your brand. Sharing what you know and your experiences can help you organically reach and engage your target audience.
Lead Generation (LeadGen)
- Providing a free tool or resource: Another excellent growth strategy is to offer a free tool or resource on your website that attracts your target customers and continually brings them back, giving your brand some authority. In exchange, they ask for your email. Create a helpful tool for your target audience, or you can do something as simple as providing a guide on how to do something in exchange for their email address.
- Ad optimization tools: You can use plenty of tools to optimize how you create and display ads. You can use Adroll to retarget users visiting your site long after leaving it. Over 90% of the users that come to your site will likely bounce and never return. Adroll targets them with an ad elsewhere with an offer specific to their interest on your site. If they look at premium packages, Adroll will target them with an ad for a premium discount and bring them back. Especially for something like SaaS, it takes a little bit more decision-making to go through with a purchase. A big part of your effort will be keeping your potential customer in mind and bringing leads back.
Onboarding and Reducing Churn
- Improve your onboarding progress with a progress bar and social elements: A huge part of maintaining growth is simultaneously reducing churn while you sign up new users. If you’re signing users up, but a big percentage is dropping in the first month, you’re not growing. This is a massive problem for SaaS companies. To prevent churn, ensure that users are well-versed in your product. A good way to ensure users go through all the actionable steps of your onboarding process and keep them on for all the lessons is to include a checklist or progress bar. When users see this, they are much more likely to go through the whole process and not miss important info. If you can, include social elements like adding friends or colleagues. The more social engagement there is, the more users are likely to return and begin using features together immediately.
- Engage new and returning users with updates – You want to keep users and potential users in the loop by effectively announcing your updates and new features to show your team is working hard to improve your product. It builds trust in your brand and keeps users loyal when they see you providing what they ask for. Try Beamer on your site or in your app. Beamer is a changelog and newsfeed that opens up when users click a What’s New tab in their navigation or an icon in their app interface. A sidebar stream of updates opens up with the latest: new features, deals, updates, news, content, etc. It’s a central place where you can update everyone. You can use push notifications to reach users off your site or app and bring them back with exciting updates. It’s a great way to boost engagement, reduce churn, and keep those on the edge potential customers returning.
Feedback and Peer-to-Peer Marketing
- Collecting feedback: Creating winning SaaS products involves listening to customers and adapting. Make it a point to collect user feedback effectively and frequently at all stages. Many tools can help you embed surveys and quick ratings into your website and app to collect easy feedback. You can use Beamer to gather input: users can leave their reactions and comments to your latest updates in your feed so you can gauge responses. Collecting feedback and applying it to updates and new features ensures your product evolves correctly.
- Incentivizing sharing your product: To reach a target audience just like your current customers, an effortless way is to incentivize and make it easy for them to share your product. You can ask users to invite more users in exchange for something. In the beginning, Dropbox asked you to share their link with 5 or 10 people and get extra storage space on Dropbox in exchange. It was wildly successful. Make it easy to share your product on social media or via email. A lot of users will do so, especially if it’s incentivized with a perk like an extra feature (Dropbox’s storage place), an extended trial, or a discount.
- Referral marketing systems: A straightforward way to get in front of more users like your current users is to use your current users as advocates for your brand through referral marketing programs. Tools like ReferralCandy can help you easily set up a referral program for your product, and your current users and enthusiasts help you sell while they also benefit. Social proof and peer reviews are powerful; their words are more persuasive than yours! You can even offer your referrals and affiliates content and material to help better sell your product. Chances are good they already have access to the target audience. They will communicate with them in a much more authentic and genuine way than you can do with ads.
Any of these are easy to implement, and just a few can help boost your growth quickly. Give them a shot and tweak them to match your target audience and your goals. Additionally, try Beamer as a really easy way to boost engagement on your site and better communicate with potential and current customers.
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