Hack Growth With SaaS Content Marketing and Other Unusual Methods

The good thing about the SaaS industry is that you don’t need much to be part of it.

You can build something that provides value for a group of people, have a way to monetize it, and now you’re in business.

The bad thing about the SaaS industry is that you don’t need much to be part of it.

And that applies to everyone else who wants to build a product of their own.

With so many products targeting a segment of the market, it can be hard to stand out from the crowd. That’s why having a useful product is not enough and you have to employ other methods to increase growth and brand awareness.

In this article, we’ll explore a couple of different strategies to do just that.

Let’s go for it.

The Power of SaaS Content Marketing

This strategy is becoming more popular and for good reason. Creating and distributing useful and relevant content for the target audience is the most cost-effective way to establish expertise and increase brand awareness.

When we talk about “SaaS content marketing”, it’s not just about putting out regular blog posts on the company’s website. The same can be said about whitepapers and case studies.

These types of content can (and should) be repurposed and posted in social media platforms, added to news aggregator sites, or even shared in relevant online communities.

It might seem like a lot of work for not much gain, but building a content engine is one of the best investments to make so that you’re not solely relying on word of mouth or worse… ads.

With the latest advancements in AI, you can create one piece of content and then repurpose it into many different formats.

Practical example: a podcast episode where the founder was interviewed.

The video of it can get turned into…

• A blog post highlighting insights/lessons of the journey.
• A LinkedIn post summarizing the main points linking to the blog.
• 5-10 pieces of short-form video content.
• 5+ Twitter(X) posts.
• Content for the newsletter.
• Audio for those who prefer to listen than to watch.

You see that’s a lot of content created from just one episode.

This helps keep your company “top of mind” and all that other stuff that marketers talk about. You know, like having great positioning, building thought leadership, becoming a trusted advisor, and so on.

Leverage Good ol’ SEO for Organic Growth

If you’re already aboard the SaaS content marketing train, the next step is to get a good grip on SEO for improving organic growth.

At first, this doesn’t sound like something that applies that much to indie hacking or building a SaaS. It sounds more fitting for the ad revenue from blogging or affiliate marketing space.

And that’s where the opportunity resides to use SEO as a key piece of your product distribution strategy.

The majority of indie builders and SaaS founders don’t understand SEO well enough to leverage its power. After all, their focus is on building something and shipping it fast enough to test the demand for it.

SEO is this intricate part of marketing we have all heard is important but don’t know how to go about implementing.

To top it all off, most of the great resources to learn SEO from are made by companies that built keyword research tools or full-time marketers who don’t speak the indie language.

Fortunately, a great indie hacker like Danny Postma wrote about how he’s using SEO to drive growth to his products without relying on his big Twitter following. 👇

SEO thread

That’s the most practical SEO “course” written from the indie perspective I’ve found (and the best part is that it’s free 😄)

A different kind of SaaS Email Marketing

This marketing approach can be very different depending on the type of SaaS. For our purposes here, think about a small to medium B2B SaaS that is doing well but doesn’t have a strong positioning in the market.

It’s different from traditional email marketing where you get product updates, special offers, and the like in your inbox.

And in case you’re thinking…

“Ah he’s talking about cold emailing people”.

It’s not quite that either. It would more likely be called “warm emailing” prospects.

Yeah, I know, let me explain.

The whole gist of this strategy is to make the connections first, either through social media or sites like IndieHackers/ProductHunt/Reddit and the like.

After that comes the getting the contact details part. You can start the conversation directly on the platform where you found the people or use any of the many email discovery tools out there like Hunter, Apollo, SeamlessAI, etc.

Now, the key part for when you're contacting the person in question is to not sound like a salesman right off the bat.

Don’t use the typical lead generation approach of “spray and pray” sending thousands of emails daily and then checking who replied.

Instead, you want to use a different and innovative strategy called…

Communicating like a normal human being.

Seriously, you don’t need to make assumptions that are mostly wrong here. Talk like a friendly person wanting to help with whatever problem the product solves.

That works for several reasons. But the main one is that you don’t sound like a desperate sales rep trying to meet the weekly outreach goals.

The person who does this better than anyone I know is Ved Rasic, founder of LeadDelta (a LinkedIn CRM).

Even if you don’t get customers from that process, you can get people who would recommend you to someone else, or people open to doing business with you in the future.

Try SaaS Influencer Marketing

While content marketing and email marketing are more well-known marketing practices, going the route of SaaS influencer marketing is one not traveled too often.

And you know what they say, do what most people aren’t doing to get the results that most people aren’t getting.

But I think I know why this strategy is not so popular or talked about. In a way, it sounds “icky”.

Almost like you will be selling out by getting online cringy influencers making posts and hard-pushing your product in people’s faces (kinda like what some people do with YouTube ads).

But for everything one can try, there are many ways to do it wrong and a few to do it right. In this case, you can do it tactfully by only working with people whose vibe aligns with your product and your content.

You can do this on different platforms like YouTube, IG, TikTok, and such. A good deal of research will be necessary to see which platform has better chances of bringing high-quality traffic to the product and what types of influencers you want to work with.

And if you still think that what I’m saying is too “fluffy” or too good on paper but doesn’t apply in real life…

Let me give you an example of it in action.

Even Pieter had not tried that strategy before (until very recently).

He also mentioned in a podcast that he talked with a TikTok influencer to make posts about PhotoAI (his startup about AI pictures) and MRR went from $12k to $40k from that alone.

So yeah, the possibilities are almost endless…

Create an interactive product walkthrough

A great product walkthrough can help turn visitors into paying users. The walkthrough can also become a marketing asset to drive conversions up and be a literal “show don’t tell” strategy.

And yes, I’m talking about an interactive walkthrough of the main workflow, not just a recorded video of someone going through the process.

The whole fact of people being able to click and poke around can give a potential customer a feel for how it works and what it would be like when using it as part of the daily work (or whatever other frequency).

The other benefit of this strategy is that it can make it easier for people to understand how the interface is structured and how the features work.

You know, stuff like “if I click on this tab or this option, I get presented with this data or these controls and then I can go back to the dashboard clicking this other tab”.

Just from that you can see how people would need less of a user manual or knowledge base. But, of course, you can have one for those other things not shown in the walkthrough.

And if the product walkthrough is something people have access to even before signing up, they could pretty much have done the onboarding process to the platform without realizing it. They’re one step closer to becoming a full-fledged user right there.

And no, this doesn’t have to be a super complicated thing to implement for the product. There are already tools out there that make this process pretty easy. One that comes to mind now is called Arcade(dot)software.

Other “Outside-the-Box” Ideas

If all the other methods discussed above weren’t enough, here are some more unusual ideas to try.

For example, host Twitter Spaces instead of the traditional “online webinars”.  I know Alessio Matara from LiveLogue has been killing it in that Space (get it? Space(s). Alright, ok. Moving on…)

You can collaborate with other founders in your niche that provide complimentary services.

For instance, if your product is a cold DM Twitter tool, you can partner up with someone who runs a Twitter analytics tool.

Or maybe not Twitter but instead LinkedIn, same idea but a different platform.

You can also appear on other people’s podcasts or do guest blogging to grow the brand, increase exposure, and get some mentions and also backlinks.

Something else to try is to build features as if they were standalone micro products that are free to use and launch them on ProductHunt. These products can create buzz and get people to discover the main product through the use of the free ones.

See if you can implement a referral program. Dropbox is the classic example here. Users were rewarded with a sizable amount of free space by referring others to the service. (I know of people who referred their classmates to get lots of free space.)

Depending on your style and what you’re comfortable with you can also employ the strategy of “meme marketing”. That’s where you use the entertaining and potentially viral nature of memes to spread awareness of your product and the problems it solves for a specific audience.

And hey, if you’re feeling daring enough, you can take the marketing out in the real world.

Consider going to events in the niche like workshops or conferences. You can either find people who make up your target audience or potential collaborators whom to join forces with.

This is just a sample of the many activities you can do to bring more awareness to your SaaS and reach a wider audience than the one captured in the first launch.

Conclusion

If you’ve read all the way down here, it is safe to say that you’re well-armed with new weapons for your marketing arsenal.

Using a combination of SaaS content marketing, email marketing, strategic SEO, influencer marketing, and the other ideas mentioned, SaaS products can go from “just another tool” to prime market positioning.

Remember to think outside the box, try unconventional stuff that most people aren’t doing, and record what works and what doesn’t from the marketing experiments.

There’s something out there for everyone and not all strategies will produce the same results for those who try them. So, experiment, figure out what works for your case, and discard the rest.

That’s about it for this time.

Thanks a lot for reading. Hope to see you next time.

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