How to Scale your SaaS Marketing without Increasing your Budget

If you run a SaaS brand, then you’re definitely in a booming industry.

Software as a service (SaaS) is becoming increasingly popular, with the sector holding a projected value of $623 billion in 2023. Here’s the problem. 

How do you compete against companies with a million dollar marketing budget? 

Easy. 

If you’re looking to scale your marketing without blowing your budget through the roof, you need to take advantage of what’s already right at your fingertips – digital marketing. 

As a SaaS company, your product is already online. It’s time to ditch the letterbox campaigns and go digital. How? 

Let me show you. 

If you are looking for affordable SEO services or more helpful information please reach out to us.

How To Get Those Clicks

There are 5 proven cost-effective ways to drive relevant and valuable traffic to your SaaS website:

• Take advantage of content marketing.
• Invest time in improving your website’s on-page SEO.
• Social media marketing via influencers
• Smart referral marketing
• Build industry exposure

1. Take Advantage of Content Marketing

Content marketing is a tried and tested model for improving lead generation for any well-planned out SaaS website. 

Research from Optinmonstershows that 72% of marketers state that content marketing increased their lead generation numbers.

For a start, to get such results and generate more traffic, you need to publish high-quality targeted content on your SaaS website’s blog.

The content you write about must align with your audience’s interest.

For example, if you had a social media marketing SaaS, relevant topics to cover for content could be:

• The best social media strategies to build an email list
• How to use social media to acquire chatbot data
• The cost of social media marketing
• How to use social media for remote collaboration 

The list of relevant subjects you could cover is inexhaustible. You can use tools like Keywords Everywhere or Ubersuggest to find suitable topics to write on based on each topic’s search volume and cost per click (the monetary value of a topic). I highly recommend trying different tools and optimizing for best efficiency. After all, content marketing is an intensive task so you want to make sure you’re working smart by being as productive as you can. Else, you’ll run the risk of burning out and launching bad campaigns

Here’s an example using Ubersuggest for the topic of social media marketing:

All you’d need to do is type in the subject or primary keyword you will write on in the search bar:

Then, you get the results above that show search volume (how many people are searching for this topic) and cost per click (the monetary value of the topic).

You have to optimize the content you write for both the sub-keywords suggested by those tools and for user intent.

By user intent, I mean your content must answer the query a person searching on Google aims to receive.

If they are performing an informational search, they’d be expecting to land on a blog post. But if they were aiming to purchase a service, then they expect to see a sales page.

Quality content isn’t everything you need. To build an A+ marketing strategy, you’ll also need to build backlinks to your content for it to rank well on search engines.

To get the right number of backlinks, try a backlinks analysis on current ranking content on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

For this, try a tool like SimilarContent to check for the average number of backlinks needed to rank for a particular keyword.

You can then reach out to various authority websites in your niche for guest posts. To do this, type in ‘SaaS brand inurl: “write for us”, in the Google search bar.

Next, reach out to these websites via the contact instructions on their “write for us” pages. And pen down a guest post following their guidelines and include a link back (or, rather a backlink) to your website in the article.

2. Improve your Site’s SEO

Of course, nothing works better for increasing your SaaS website’s traffic than search engine optimization (SEO). SEO works hand-in-hand with content marketing.

The idea behind it is simple. Tweak and tailor your website until it ranks as high as possible on the SERPs. I recommend checking out Designmodo for resources on how to optimize your website. 

If your website ranks high, you’ll get more traffic. 

For instance, according to a Backlinko study, the #1 result on Google’s SERPs receives 31.7% of all clicks for the particular keyword.

Here’s a breakdown from the research as to the number of clicks to expect for each rank position.

Source 

With that said, various strands make up for effective SEO. Certain SEO practices and methods work better for some SaaS websites than others. 

So investing your time in SEO will do wonders for scaling your marketing.

3. Social Media Marketing via Influencers

Data from the Global Digital 2019 report reveals that there are over 3.246 billion social media users.

Source 

This statistic tells you that your target audience is definitely on social media and you only need to know how to reach them (cost-effectively) to scale your marketing.

While there are so many ways to use social media marketing, one method that works repeatedly is collaborating with influencers (influencer marketing is a billion-dollar industry).

Take Moz, for example, a leading SEO tool. They worked with an influencer (SEO expert) Cyrus Shepherd to craft a guide to long-form content.

Source 

The result was that the piece went viral on various platforms as many of Cyrus’ followers retweeted the post, which increased the article’s reach.

Now, you don’t have to offer an influencer financial remuneration. If they are experts in your field, they’d need your software service for something.

So you could offer them an extended free use of the tool for their promotion and their promotion sends targeted leads and sales to you.

4. Smart Referral Marketing

Referral marketing involves influencing your current customers to recommend your service to family and friends, usually for a relevant incentive.

It’s a very effective SaaS marketing strategy. Data reveals that 90% of people trust brand recommendations from friends and family.

Source 

Trust is a huge factor in motivating purchases for consumers and referral marketing offers that effortlessly.  

However, even your most satisfied clients may need an extra push to refer you to their family or friends.

That’s where smart rewards or incentives come into play.

For instance, Videoblocks, a huge library stock footage, run in a widely competitive industry, competing against the heavyweights like Shutterstock and Getty.

This meant that they had to be very effective with customer acquisition so as not to blow their marketing spend trying to out-advertise the big names.

So the Videoblocks team analyzed their sales data and discovered they had a lot of purchases coming from word-of-mouth referrals.

They created a referral program that offered cash rewards for existing customers when they refer a new person, as well as a discount for the new customer referred.

The result?

Videoblocks has made over $100,000 in sales via referral marketing.

The idea is simple, influence your happy existing customers with a relevant incentive to tell their friends who need your service about how good it is and to purchase from you.

You just have to ensure that whatever you give as a reward or incentive must be useful to the customer and enticing enough to make them talk about your service.

It’s best practice to ensure that the spending of the referred new customer must be enough to cover the cost of the reward you’re giving out.  A great example of this is a loyalty program that offers discounts after a certain number of purchases. Great idea, great customer service. 

5. Build Industry Exposure  

People have a lot of faith in reviews. A recent BrightLocal study revealed that 91% of 18 to 34-year-olds trust web reviews as much as personal recommendations.

So scale your marketing efforts by building your SaaS brand’s industry exposure on the various SaaS review platforms available.

The best example of such platforms is G2:

Getting a positive review for your brand will help boost your website’s traffic, branding efforts and general consumer perspective about your service.

It’s very effective to get a listing for your business on as many review platforms as possible. While you may not get featured on all of them, it’s worth trying.

Having a presence across such websites helps convince potential prospects of the viability of your brand.

SaaS Marketing is all about Connections

Without web traffic, there’s no sense in SaaS marketing. And all your marketing budget is used to send relevant traffic to your website in the hope of sales.

So how do you scale your marketing (which means get more traffic that’s likely to spend) without increasing your budget?

Get yourself relevant traffic for free using excellent SEO. All it takes is some practise, a computer and a little bit of marketing know-how. Scale your marketing without blowing up your budget, and embrace revolutionary marketing.