The SaaS market is on its way to the top and so is the competition. And that’s good news because the entire digital space is creating opportunities left, right and center for growth-hungry SaaS startups.
The growth of the industry can be attributed to its rising expenditure. The spending in SaaS reached $16 billion in 2019. The projections show this expenditure to rise as high as $55 billion by 2026.
With the growing popularity and fierce competition, it’s going to take innovation, unconventional strategies, and subtle growth hacking techniques to stand out. Let’s have a look at these 6 tactics to market your SaaS business.
1. Advertise the Hows
The best way to advertise your product is to show how it's done. Promoter.io did exactly that and nothing else when it launched its services back in the day.
To stay relevant with recent ongoings, the cunning start-up developed an engaging tool. This tool used its technology to predict presidential elections.
And with just a few months under its name, the brand has been featured in a series of publications. Showcasing the features and benefits of a system is a great way to connect your audience with your value proposition.
2. Interact. Engage. Reddit
Reddit is very generous when it comes to generating traffic through a third party. The segmentation of the community at Reddit into hyper-focused subreddits helps you reach out to your target audience.
SumoMe understood the significance and weightage of the Reddit community. The brand created organic, high-value exhaustive content within the subreddit, rather than spammy cheap links. It was followed with information and links via private message to Redditors who requested more information.
As per AppSumo’s Wilson Hung, the initiative generated a lot of positive discussion and branding that fetched up to 1,000 unique visits per Reddit post.
3. Be generous with referrals
There happened a Nielsen research once, and according to it, 92% of consumers say they trust recommendations from friends and family, over advertising media.
Unfortunately, it’s not simple to control word-of-mouth. However, you can always give your best shot like going big with the referrals can nudge people in the right direction mostly.
That’s how Dropbox grows its user base incredibly every day. The major player offers quite a lot of free extra storage space for every friend you bring to the table.
Even Elon Musk’s PayPal took the same approach in its nascent days. The website offered $10 referral bonuses. And guess what, it worked.
Its referral program helped it reach 10% daily growth, increasing its user base to 1 million+ by March 2000 eventually reaching 5 million users by the end of that year.
4. Giveaways
It is a classic growth-hacking strategy, yet it’s not widely employed in the market. Giving something for free garners you a lot of buzz and with it comes the influx of new users. Some of those users will happily upgrade to the paid premium services. Even Evernote tried this route and pulled it off spectacularly.
5. Customer is the King
So many companies focus on growth hacking, search engine optimization, Social media marketing. And in between this whole gimmick, they forget the one thing they should care about- their customers.
If your goal is to grow your audience, then you gotta provide what the audience seeks. So Be direct. To the point. Ask them, literally, what they want from you.
6. Integrate and Complement
People are busy. Also, they have a shorter attention span. You must do something really extraordinary to stay in their head. Or what else you could do, is that you stay everywhere around them.
The year was 2007. A new up and coming startup wanted to sell a product that was already being regularly pushed on Craigslist. Their products were vacation homes and rentals.
Instead of investing a hefty budget into competing with craigslist and other existing services, the start-up found a workaround. Now, whenever a user added a listing to the startup’s website (oh, which was Airbnb…btw), it was also added to Craigslist.
Conclusion
So, you should think about ways you can integrate with existing networks and platforms to market your product. As an additional step, also consider collaborating with other non-competing SaaS firms functioning in your industry. This cross-promotional integration is beneficial for all the mutual parties involved.