6 Tips on How to Grow a SaaS Business

How to grow a SaaS business is a question that often gets asked by new business owners and entrepreneurs experimenting with the SaaS business model, but also with experienced CEO who reached a plateau in their growth and would like to know how to bring their SaaS company to the next level. In order to help your online business, stand out in the competitive online technology sector, we suggest some tried and tested online marketing strategies, specifically designed for SaaS companies.

1 – Start by Defining Your Goals Clearly

The first step may sound simplistic but will fundamentally shape your approach on how to grow your SaaS business and will greatly influence your decision-making process. The first thing you want to do is to define and set your goals. No matter whether your business model is purely B2B or pure B2C, the very first thing that you should ask yourself before drawing up a Digital Marketing strategy is what exactly do you want to achieve? Do you want to attract more traffic to your website? Do you want to focus on improving the conversion rate of the existing traffic? Would you rather focus on existing customers and find the best way to upsell and reduce churn?

Coming up with a goal should push you to ask yourself the right question and structure your strategy. It will help you assess the current state of your business and become comfortable in the direction you will eventually chose. Setting clear goal will that will make achieving your desired results a smoother process.

The purpose of a goal is to guide you in the right direction. For example, you may be interested in growing your revenue by increasing sales of a specific products or service, but you should also know where the revenue is going to come from, and where it is going to be reinvested to go. This way you can easily track the progress and set new goals, when necessary.

2 – Plan and Write It All Down

You must always remember to keep a plan for everything that you want to achieve. If you have set a specific goal, you should keep all details about it, including the time frame, the target audience, the products and services that you are offering, and the various online marketing strategies that you have. This is because you want to keep your plan to action structured, and you want yourself and your team to have a clear path to follow.

If the path you’ve chosen is the right one, it will serve as invaluable SOP and help you delegate and scale faster. If something goes wrong, you can look back at your structured plan and identify the difference between expectation and actual results, brainstorm on how to improve the weak or underperforming parts of your roadmap and pivot when necessary.

Keeping written notes of the discussions and decision is also a great practice to ensure alignment of the team. Making sure that everyone can go back to agreed decision when in doubt helps making sure that your co-workers will deliver what you expect. Really, it can feel cumbersome to write or summarize everything which is discussed, but the extra time is more than worth it. Really.

3 – Focus Your Efforts On Key Actionable Items

The focus of a Digital Marketing Strategy is to make one’s business online presence successful, increase brand awareness and reach the right targets to drive inbound, qualified leads which are all extremely important to grow your SaaS business.

You should remember that digital marketing for SaaS business is not just a simple box to tick, but a very serious driver on which will often depend the success of your online business. It requires knowledge, lot of hard work and dedication to get to a point where your campaign are on point, efficient, and yield a positive ROI. Therefore, if you want to achieve these objectives, then you should concentrate on a few key items, improve them, iterate, test, pivot and accelerate once you found the right formula.

Trying to do everything you’ve heard of at once won’t yield satisfactory results. Find the tools, channels and strategies that you think are best for your business, and become an expert in these few areas, which is how your business will grow and flourish. And if you want to get there faster, get some help from Digital Marketing experts and subcontract the work to a reliable partner!

4 – Optimize Your Website / Landing Page

Any successful online marketing campaign does not only involve great ad spend or the right identification of the right market to target, the first thing you want to make sure even before trying to drive traffic to your website is to make sure that your website is actually optimized.

By optimized we mean that it should be responsive, have a clean layout, a modern look, the right amount of text, clear interface and relevant call to actions. It would be useless to call pedestrians to your shop if they are not going to pass the door!

5 – Clearly Define Your Core Target Customer

A trap founders often fall into is to want to address the WHOLE market. Trying to sell to EVERYONE. This will NOT be efficient. Almost Never. You must choose your core target from the many available in the market and adapt your positioning, your message, your brand, your sales strategy and your digital marketing strategy to that market. If you are trying to catch all the types of fish at once, your marketing and sales efforts won’t be optimized and you will just get poor ROI.

6 – Use Effective Tools

There are plenty of really great tools to automate your tasks (think Zapier, Hubspot, etc) or to optimize your SaaS digital marketing (SEO optimization, keywords finders, etc.). If you are already well experienced with digital marketing, there exist plenty of solution leveraging artificial intelligence or simply smart algorithm to help you optimize your Pay Per Click, help you promote your site, improve your content or maximize your social media outreach.

To grow a SaaS business, a lot of hard work is OK. A lot of smart work is better

No matter how you look at it, growing a successful business will require a lot of work. But working a lot won’t be sufficient if you are not working smart.

By applying the few rules that we described above, knowing what you want to achieve, keep track of all your efforts and conversations, identify and focus on key actionable items, make sure your website is neat and optimized for conversion, focus on a defined target group and get the help of the productivity tools available online your efforts should be made to good use!