Growing a small or medium-sized business has always been challenging, no matter the industry. But for a SaaS company, the challenges are even more difficult to overcome.
Pushing through the oversaturated markets to reach people who will care about your innovative products is not an easy-peasy lemon squeezy thing. And that is exactly why you need growth hacking ideas! Trust me, the right B2B SaaS growth hacks can do wonders to your SaaS business if you can implement them correctly!
Growth hacking helps SaaS companies stand out in a market that is already flooded with competition. It allows software-as-a-solution businesses to acquire new customers, that too within a short time and in a cost-effective way.
Wondering how you can quickly hack your way to GROWTH in 2022? Then let’s dive deep into this article. But before revealing the growth hacks, here is a quick idea about growth hacking for those who are still not familiar with the term Growth Hacking!
Do not confuse growth hacking ideas with traditional marketing techniques. While traditional marketing focuses on boosting sales over a long period, growth hacking is more about using the most efficient ways to bring massive growth in a short time. It is a holistic function and a branch of digital marketing that refers to iterative and targeted processes which focus mainly on testing, prioritizing, hypothesizing, refining, and analyzing strategies that can deliver tremendous growth in a short time and for little money.
Airbnb, Dropbox, Hotmail, PayPal, Uber, LinkedIn, Slack, and even Tesla are some globally renowned businesses and rising startups that have successfully applied growth hacking ideas for brand development, customer acquisition, and in the approach to their products.
One of the finest growth hacking examples can be of DropBox, which offered simple incentives instead of paying for expensive ads to grow its registered user base. And guess what, it worked like a charm!
Remember, growth hacking is not just a buzzword for SaaS entrepreneurs. It is a viable business solution, empowering small SaaS businesses to scale quickly, that too, on a limited budget. Growth hacking focuses more on data and ROI than hierarchy and brand awareness.
Given the dependence of investors and team members on the company, SaaS businesses do not have the privilege to wait to be found by the customers. Plus, the competition in the market is only getting tougher. So, implementing growth hacking ideas becomes critical for software-as-a-service businesses. If you are a SaaS business owner, here are some growth hacking techniques you can use to optimize astronomical growth!
Email marketing is considered one of the most effective product marketing strategies that help businesses nurture leads. And for SaaS companies, it might be one of the perfect growth hacking 2022 ideas.
After all, there are real people behind every email on your email list whom you can follow up with, encourage to buy from you, and offer similar content through blog posts, which can boost sales. You can use your email list to invite the contacts to email you back with questions, queries, comments, answers, etc., to keep the line of communication open. As said by the New York Times Best Selling author, Jon Acuff, “Email matters. People don’t change their email addresses. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, people join and drop that pretty often. But changing your email address is a hassle.”
Take AppSumo, a successful SaaS startup, as an example. It has built a massive email list containing around 700,000 addresses. And we already know that the bigger your email list gets, the higher your chances of getting new customers and widening your reach become.
Free trials are one of those marketing techniques that even the top SaaS bigshots like Netflix follow. When you provide a service that your audience finds very useful and offer that service for free, what do you think will happen? Well, it will attract a larger audience!
Free trials are an effective on-invite basis growth hacking formula where you allow warm leads to get familiarized with your services/products before they need to pay for it. Free trials give SaaS businesses the perfect opportunity to demonstrate their product value and gain traction without investing upfront.
The freemium model is one of the many elements that have played a crucial part in making Slack, a workplace messaging app, one of the fastest-growing SaaS businesses ever.
Content marketing is undoubtedly one of the most effective and affordable growth hacking B2B or B2C tools. Properly optimized content for SEO can bring organic traffic to your SaaS business, raise awareness of your services/products, and channel inquiries towards your sales force. And high-quality content drives three times more traffic than paid ads, as per growth hacking analytics.
Take HubSpot as an example, which has used content marketing deftly to fuel its growth and stand apart from the competition.
And even if you lack the resources or energy to create new content for your content marketing, you can always recycle pre-published content! Yes, you can repurpose your old content as a growth hack. Just pull a previously published content from its vault, polish it with some latest information, infographics, images, etc., and republish it. Who knows, you might end up reaching more new customers and also those who missed your content the first time and now are in love with the repurposed one.
Another successful and long-running SaaS growth strategy is setting up a customer referral bonus program.
First of all, studies show that people are 4-times more likely to make a purchase when referred by a friend. As per one report by Neilsen, 92% of consumers trust earned media, like recommendations by their friends and family, more than other forms of advertising. So, yes, nothing works as well as word of mouth. People tend to trust other people, especially when they directly recommend a product that changed their lives. And secondly, when you incentivize the referral process where referrals will get rewarded, it will encourage anyone who is getting value from your services to share that value and recommend your SaaS business to others.
Take Outlook (previously Hotmail) as an example that used emails as a means of making people recommend them, or Dropbox that offered extra storage space to those who referred their service to others.
To boost the growth of your SaaS business, not always working hard is enough; you need to work smart, too. And to begin with, make sure you know what your competitors are doing and what they can be doing. One game-changing B2B SaaS growth strategy is to be present on relevant channels, especially where your competitors have not arrived yet.
Usually, SaaS businesses first focus on the big platforms. And that is cool when you have a six-figure budget for marketing! But, if you are a small SaaS business, you need to play smarter. Hence, along with the big ones like Facebook, LinkedIn, Forbes, etc., make sure to be on smaller channels like Quora, Reddit, Stackoverflow, and other message boards that are still a rage.
Apart from these five easy and effective growth hacking ideas, there are other SaaS growth hacking tips to hack unbelievable growth, such as:
Remember, there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to growth hacking! What growth hacking ideas will work for you depends on your unique target audience and product solutions. While some growth hacking strategies can help you market and operate in the long run, others fetch new users immediately. And this makes implementing the techniques of growth hacking frustrating.
But, we, Klizo Solutions, are always there to help you out with our custom-made B2C and marketing growth hacks! We perfectly understand how powerful tool growth hacking is for businesses with a limited budget. Our affordable growth hacking solutions suit businesses of all sizes, even small startup businesses.
Connect with us today to boost your business growth and win millions of users in the least amount of time!
Previous article
Joey Ricard
Klizo Solutions was founded by Joseph Ricard, a serial entrepreneur from America who has spent over ten years working in India, developing innovative tech solutions, building good teams, and admirable processes. And today, he has a team of over 50 super-talented people with him and various high-level technologies developed in multiple frameworks to his credit.
Subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest tech updates.