7 growth hack strategies for b2b saas brands to scale up
In a saturated market, how do you ensure that your SaaS product stands out? Many companies employ growth hacking tactics like offering certain deals, side services, etc to boost their product's growth. And it works! Brands like Dropbox, Mailchimp, and PayPal have succeeded in increasing their userbase and growing their revenue using smart growth strategies.
We've heard this term a lot— growth hacking. But, what does it truly mean? Growth hacking is when you set up marketing tactics that are focusing on growing and amplifying your product, rather than just using traditionally slow-paced marketing strategies.
In this blog post shared by the amazing team from FindThatLead, here are 7 surefire growth hacks that have been proven to work with the likes of LinkedIn, Slack, and other well-known B2B SaaS products.
1. Contribute to the larger community
Communities are built to help one another. As someone who has massive knowledge within the field you are in, you can join popular communities within your field and participate. By contributing to the conversation and helping members, you can increase your authority within the industry. Professionals with a Master of Social Work can leverage their expertise to provide valuable insights and support within these communities, further establishing themselves as leaders in their field. Members will view you as an expert and will trust your word more. This way, when you do share your product, they’ll be more likely to listen and engage with you, responding positively and even testing your product.
77% of companies believe that an online community significantly improves brand exposure, awareness, and credibility.
Even if you aren’t promoting your product in the communities, you’ll find that the effort you’ve put in these groups will pay off. With the relationships you’ve built through the community, your potential audience will come to you wanting to try your product and other members will recommend your product to others in the community.
Many brands build their own community. However, if you’re still growing and aren’t sure that you’ll be able to attract members, you can join and participate in their communities. Community marketing isn’t tough. In fact, you can easily get started with just these 4 steps:
- Find groups and communities on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Reddit by searching using relevant keywords.
- Join and start commenting on posts, building a rapport with users. Spend an hour every day just commenting and providing advice.
- Don’t plug any of your products at this time unless someone is looking for a solution exactly like yours.
- Share helpful content without asking for anything in return. Provide value at every turn.
- Promote your product rarely, during large milestones or if you have an exclusive deal.
2. Incentivize referrals
Someone who uses your product probably knows another 25 to 30 people who are within the same industry and in need of a product like yours. Referral marketing allows you to tap into this potential audience by allowing you to incentivize a share.
It makes sense, we're more likely to trust a friend or peer over an advertisement or a sales pitch. In fact, referrals are 4x more likely to make a purchase, with a 16% higher lifetime value.
So, for every new person that a user brings to your product, you can provide them with free credits— a plan upgrade for 1 month, 1 free month, feature unlock, etc.
Many top SaaS products have seen immense growth from referrals. Using referral marketing, Dropbox saw a 3900% growth in 15 months. Dropbox’s referral program is simple but highly successful— For every person you invite to Dropbox, both of you get 500MB of free space.
Asking for referrals is a small ask but with skyrocketing returns!
3. Build a smaller tool that is useful for your audience
What’s one helpful resource that you can provide your audience to give them a better understanding of your product/service without having to install it? Such a resource will exponentially increase your credibility and your target audience will trust and value your expertise more.
Take, for instance, Hubspot. They have a library of resources for their audience— from guides to kits to idea generators, helping their audience in very minute parts of their sales and marketing. Once their audience has leveraged all these tools and seen their impact, they’ll feel more confident in investing in Hubspot’s products.
Do ensure that your audience can use the resource/tool independently without requiring your extensive product or needing to upgrade or pay for the full tool.
4. Integrate your product with other compatible platforms
Let’s say that you’ve built a review management software. Your user wants to connect this with an email marketing app that they can collect reviews more easily. Integrating your product with the email marketing software is the best way to successfully improve your user’s experience with your app.
B2B integrations have been highly successful in simplifying user experiences and enriching the products that the user is commonly working with. By integrating your product with other softwares that are commonly used by your audience, you can make it easier for them to enable a specific need they have.
But, how does this help you grow your business? With such integrations, you can attract your integrated partner’s audience to install or enable your SaaS product without having to go through the entire user funnel.
5. Create a library of content
Content marketing is time-consuming. So, how does it help you growth hack your product? By aggressively sharing content, you can boost your visibility across different platforms. Following Gary Vee’s brilliant strategy, you can create one long-form content piece, share it on different publications, and repurpose it into video, carousels, documents, and more for different social media platforms.
This way, you can get your value out into the world and create a presence for the keywords you truly want to rank for.
“The more content I put out, the more luck I have.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Here are some ways to get started with content, including examples of how Hubspot does it:
- Create an educational piece on how to use your product to fulfill a goal. Hubspot has multiple how-to guides specific to the different products they have created for their users.
- Inform new audiences about the problem your solution tackles. Hubspot talks about the problems that their audience face and solutions for it and then subtly plug their product.
- Provide best practices for your audience for specific requirements they have. Hubspot shares best practices for everything marketing and sales, from subject lines to Facebook covers.
- Provide inspiration with examples of other brands that are finding success in a specific strategy. Hubspot shares examples of ads, emails, etc, and many businesses have followed suit to provide such lists to their audience.
- Showcase the success of your product with a customer story. Hubspot has a range of customer stories where the user gives a detailed look into how they used the product.
- Show how your product works in tandem with popular tools. This blog by Hubspot shows how their audience can use Hubspot and Facebook ads for a specific need.
6. List your product(s) on ProductHunt
If you haven’t heard of Product Hunt, you’re missing out on an opportunity to tap into a new set of users. Product Hunt is a website that allows users to share and discover new products. It works in a voting system where products that are upvoted climb higher within the curated website's lists and gain more visibility.
Products like Nudge have sworn a boost in their sign-ups and conversions thanks to this curated platform. Many B2B marketers promote their small tools and resources on Product Hunt to gain traction and attract subscriptions and sign-ups for the free tool. They can later leverage this subscriber list and convert them on the larger product.
Here are 4 best practices to ensure better reach through your listing:
- Optimize your listing’s copy. Use the right keywords so that people searching for similar solutions can be directed to your product.
- Post during the best hours to get more eyeballs. Check out this microsite to learn when to launch your product on the platform.
- Add images that are catchy and sure to make hunters want to upvote your product.
- Invite your community, through direct messaging and public social shares, to upvote your product. The more engagement you have, the higher visibility you have on Product Hunt.
- Producthunt definitely helps improve your acquisition and kick off juicy product metrics that'll help you value your firm at a higher number
7. Tap into the power of LinkedIn
If there’s just one platform you’re investing your time in, it has to be LinkedIn. With 675 million monthly users, LinkedIn is an effective channel for B2B marketers looking to acquire new users and build relationships with their audience. LinkedIn makes up more than 50% of all social traffic to B2B websites and blogs, ensuring that your efforts on the platform don’t go to waste.
Here are 3 solid ways to harness this professional social platform for your growth:
- Use tools lito build your prospect list on LinkedIn, after identifying your ideal customer accounts.
- Share content on your company page and in turn having your team share the posts. Don’t forget to add relevant hashtags to attract the right audience.
- Play with different formats— images, documents, long-form content, videos. Test out the format that is most effective for you.
- Comment on trending posts via your company page to gain traction. LinkedIn usually suggests topics within hashtags that you are following, making it easy to join the conversation.
Ready to growth hack your B2B SaaS product?
We hope these smart tactics help you find innovative ways to attract new audiences to your product and boost your visibility. There are many ways to make your product stand out and by focusing on setting up growth-oriented marketing tactics, you’ll be able to continuously tap into new audiences and have the opportunity to attract, acquire, and convert them into users.
Want to seriously scale your outreach B2B outreach campaigns? Make sure to check out FindThatLead! We use them at Cenario and highly rate them!
Any other growth hacks you suggest we should include? Let us know! We would love to hear from you :)
.png)
.svg)