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Qayyum RajanQayyum (”Q”) is a serial builder with more than 5 startups to his name with 3 exits. He specializes in shipping products fast, and early with an focus on driving traffic across the marketing funnels
Table of Contents
- 1. TikTok ads are on fire!
- 2. Cold emails work for a reason.
- 3. Content marketing as a SaaS founder is tough.
- 4. Community is the next wave in the SaaS industry
- 5. Copy Editing > Copy Writing
- 6. Waiting to do email marketing?
- 7. Do you have a great About page?
- 8. Sales are great to get competitor customers.
- 9. Working on SEO now does not mean you will get customers today.
- 10. It's wise as a SaaS indie-hacker to focus on one social media channel.
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We did some research and curation for about 7+ hours to help you find growth tactics that will result in +10% growth for your SaaS product from June 2022 - 2023 🤓 Thought it might help to share :)
Note: SaaSwrites is a curated growth marketing hub and resource built to help SaaS founders grow their products. We sincerely thank all our experts for their constant value addition to this world.
1. TikTok ads are on fire!
TikTok ads seem to be in a rage! The best audiences on TikTok are broad interest audiences and lookalikes.
No media buying hacks are necessary. You need a simplified account structure and most importantly - a really great product backed with some really good ads.
What to keep in mind?
Are you experimenting with growing your SaaS through ads? There is a lot of debate on when and how you should run your ads.
To begin with ads, you need to have some things figured out! For example, with Google Ads, have a clear picture of your main customer segment and what they search on Google.
Tips:
- 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.
Cold emails work. However, there are certain aspects to cold email that make it work:
- needs experimentation
- hyper-understanding of your customer
- super personalized messaging
- Send campaigns in higher volume
What to keep in mind?
A major part of your cold email campaign is your offer. While personalized lines work and may help your receiver feel good about themselves for a second, it’s always the offer that initiates the reply.
Double-down on your offer.
Tips:
- 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.
Content marketing as a SaaS founder is tough. There might be weeks/months before you see any results.
As a beginner, it can feel that you are making lots of mistakes when you see minimum growth. But every good thing takes time. That's the difficult part!
What to keep in mind?
A healthy way to plan your content is to rank for MOFU (Middle of the funnel) keywords (example: best {category} tool)
Start by creating cluster pages with TOFU and BOFU. Then create a pillar page with your MOFU page.
Link all the intros of TOFU and BOFU cluster pages to your MOFU pillar page and let the linking juice fuel up the ranking of your MOFU page.
Tips:
- 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
The 2020-2030s will belong to the entrepreneurs who can help build authentic communities.
Having an engaged SaaS community can reduce churn, impact upsells and continue subscriber growth.
What to keep in mind?
If you have a set of users that are your SaaS customers - there is a high likelihood that they are on the same journey and state in the business.
Integrating a community on top of your SaaS will bring them a lot more value than just the SaaS subscription.
Tips:
- 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
Copywriting is more about editing and customer research than writing and creative thinking.
Your copy hammer hits the customer nail when you tweak those slight final edits that produce maximum results.
What to keep in mind?
All that matters for your SaaS is conversions from visitors.
Often it’s slight tweaks that help your visitors become customers and then raving fans! Great copywriting starts with persuading the reader. And ends with the reader taking action.
Relook your CTA and make some tweaks to improve your conversions today!
Tips:
- 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:
- Offer
- Promise
- 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?
If you have around 10 customers, you can begin your email marketing. You do not have to wait for 1000 subscribers.
You've got a list? Start sending them emails now! Your customers to your indie-made tools love hearing about your effort and growth on your own product.
What to keep in mind?
If you’re not collecting $ on conversions, collect emails. Build a list along with building an MRR. IF your prospect has come to your website, they share an interest in what you have to offer.
They might not purchase today, but they can purchase tomorrow. All you have to do is nurture them with your emails.
Tips:
- 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?
As per the latest SEO updates, Google is giving a lot more importance to what your About page says. It's a great way to acquire customers and reduce churn too.
The higher your personalization on the About page, the deeper your customers connect with you.
What to keep in mind?
The three biggest acquisition channels for SaaS are:
- Direct Sales
- Referrals
- Piggy-backing.
Direct sales are a must for early-stage SaaS products. Add a referral next to that (incentivizing existing supply to refer new supply) with launching in an existing marketplace (piggy-backing).
Tips:
- 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.
It's very easy for a SaaS product to have competition. It's super easy for you to find their ANGRY customers!
A lot of folks suggest Capterra and other review sites, but a simple question to your prospect asking how they do what they do now, and what problem they face can help you uncover so much.
If they use a competing product and they talk about problems, you have a winner who's ready to pay.
What to keep in mind?
Sales can be overwhelming but it’s all about relationships. B2B enterprise sales also work with relationships and building them.
If you are looking to build a solid pipeline of customers for your SaaS, focus on building relationships. The sales will follow.
Tips:
- 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.
You work on SEO now so you can organically find customers after 12 months. If you are an indie SaaS maker, focus on having another source (like Google Ads, cold emails, etc) to find leads that complement your SEO strategy.
What to keep in mind?
If you are looking to get started with your SaaS SEO journey, start with writing user guides for all your smallest SaaS features.
Then optimize them for SEO by adding a benefit to the title. You’ll create SEO relevance + great customer support.
Now add rich media to these user guides (YouTube video, maybe a podcast, etc) and do links. This will send further strong signals to Google.
Tips:
- 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.
It's wise as a SaaS indie-maker to focus on one social media channel. There will be no surprises if you leverage TikTok as your organic social media channel (great if you can do paid ads).
TikTok is gaining momentum that is so fast and early in the curve that it might beat the OGs in the near future. Get rolling with the TikTok train while it is still gathering pace.
What to keep in mind?
With social media strategy, measure results with revenue and not reach. You can reach millions of people with your social media content but it doesn’t add value if it’s not adding direct revenue to your SaaS.
Having a mix of content strategy and copywriting will help ensure you get the reach and make the most out of the conversions.
Tips:
- 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.
That’s it!
What tactic resonates the most with you? What's working for you right now with your SaaS growth? Let me know in the comments!
Written by
Qayyum Rajan
Qayyum (”Q”) is a serial builder with more than 5 startups to his name with 3 exits. He specializes in shipping products fast, and early with an focus on driving traffic across the marketing funnels
