10 SaaS Growth Marketing Trends for SaaS Founders

1. TikTok ads are on fire!

• Ads should either be at an idea validation stage or at the scale stage. Not at the stage when you are looking to grow.

• Ads are a great way to validate, find your target market, or scale your SaaS. If you are a SaaS founder, what is keeping you from running ads for your SaaS?

• If you are looking to validate/grow/scale your SaaS with ads, make sure you know what you are doing. If you do not know, hire someone who knows. You don’t want to waste your time and energy on running paid ads until you are an expert in running them yourself.

• When you run ads for your SaaS, make sure you are empathetic with your customer. Target them when they would want to see the ad. Not when they would not want to. For example, building a procurement B2B SaaS? Target them when they are looking for procurement or talking to vendors. Add that context and it will do wonders!

2. Cold emails work for a reason.

1. needs experimentation

2. hyper-understanding of your customer

3. super personalized messaging

4. Send campaigns in higher volume

• This is SUPER basic but if you are sending a cold email to prospects, get yourself an email with a domain. Unless you are sending it to your friend or family!

• It’s easy to write a lot in a cold email! The problem is that your prospects are busy. Help them make a yes/no decision and your outreach will succeed

• Cold emails are counter-intuitive. The more you are non-salesy, the higher your sales get. It’s an art to provide value in little words, yet help the prospect do business with you. Pulling a market based on your cold emails is an art that will grow your SaaS with haps of prospects.

3. Content marketing as a SaaS founder is tough.

• Your content can be creatively published. Do make sure your website is fully functional for content marketing to wor

• You can add a Help section and Tutorials on how to use your SaaS for every process, transaction, and feature

• Content marketing takes time. Do not get discouraged if nothing happens to your initial published content. Just stay focused and keep publishing

• Do you enjoy scrolling through memes? It’s wild how memes are transforming SaaS business through content too! I’ve seen a Twitter account explode with super-relevant memes. Companies are also officially hiring meme-makers! Add 1-2 memes to your content marketing strategy, they are the future.

• A content calendar is very tactical, it documents the specifics of how you will execute the content strategy you’ve developed. Content Plan includes details such as the key topic areas you will cover, what content you will create, when and how to share your content, and specific calls to action you will include. Building a content calendar will give you a good head start!

4. Community is the next wave in the SaaS industry

• You give your customers a chance to connect and help each other.

• Do not get overwhelmed with managing a community (yet!).

• Having an engaged community for your SaaS can bring you so much ROI! However, it’s difficult as a solo-founder to build a community along with everything else! However, it is possible to bootstrap a community in a niche and create tons of value for your users. Something to think through this weekend?

5. Copy Editing > Copy Writing

• Your promise is everything in your copy. It’s not about your fancy words or indulging in your market’s imaginative senses. It boils down to three things:
1. Offer
2. Promise
3. Simple words

• Write your SaaS copy with conviction if you know your SaaS can solve your user’s problem.

• Do not complicate your writing. Your landing page. Or your cold outreach. Be direct. If you are not, people who are interested will become confused and leave.

• Features sound good for someone developing the app. It helps you boost your ego! Your customers do not care about the features. They might not even care about the benefits. All they care about are RESULTS! Show them how your SaaS can bring them their desired results.

• Are you building traffic on your SaaS landing page but lacking conversions? It’s mainly because your SaaS landing page lacks clarity on what users should know about your product. You also might need to look at why they want to know, and what they want to know. Continue to talk to your users and understand their goals, and tweak your copy accordingly!

6. Waiting to do email marketing?

• Tons of factors to help your emails get ROI. One of the rarely discussed is the from field. Who should be sending out the emails? Your brand or your company? Personally, as a founder building, a personal brand is great! So your email surely needs that personal touch. But people might not know you (yet!). So having this template works for me: {name} from {SaaS tool}.

• Only send emails when your customer wants you to. A newsletter is NOT the only email marketing strategy. Here is a creative tip to get more signups by pulling your customers from a transactional email.

• With everything that your SaaS does, keep building your email list. That’s an audience you own and can solve a lot of your problems with respect to staying in intimate touch with your customers.

7. Do you have a great About page?

• Direct Sales

• Referrals

• Piggy-backing.

• Growth can come in multiple ways. But fancy terms will not bring you growth. I see growth as one big wheel moving forward with all levers supporting it. Growth always comes together, not individually.

• Growth is often an overrated term. It signals that there are tons of different things that need to be constantly performed. But it gets easy and simple when you go back to the basics. And focus.

• Know your audience -> Know where they are -> Know what you are good at -> Know how to deliver value to them

• There are so many opportunities for your marketing and product to shake hands. Find unique creative ways to help your users with marketing while they use their product? Having user-generated content on one of your key aha moments is one good example.

8. Sales are great to get competitor customers.

• The best growth and marketing strategy is to sell. Selling today is mostly done behind the curtains (cold email outreach/content marketing/SEO), but closing B2B sales will need you to talk to your customers - face-to-face. As a founder, embrace selling. Embrace talking to your customers.

• Sales need to be ultra-specific too. Imagine your sales outreach with a SaaS tool that is for all agencies vs a SaaS tool that helps agencies doing $100k ARR to grow to $250k ARR. What will have a bigger impact?

9. Working on SEO now does not mean you will get customers today.

• SEO is a big effort! You need to create quality content plus optimize your pages!

• Include quality custom images. It seems easy to just pick up an image from the internet, but adding a custom enhances the quality of a page. This extra step will help!

10. It's wise as a SaaS indie-hacker to focus on one social media channel.

• Twitter is amazing! I know founders that are growing MRR by sending #buildinpublic tweets! Just a reminder to restart your Twitter engagement if you are not already (and a small reminder for me too!). Plus the maker community on Twitter is awesome.