Running a SaaS company differs immensely from running a customer-based company. Not only do your marketing tactics need to be different and focus on different audiences, you will need to adjust your products regularly to maintain a competitive advantage. But, this is well worth it as the SaaS industry is growing at a rapid pace. In fact, studies show that 75% of all businesses plan on swapping their business plans to swap all systems to SaaS. This means more and more demand for SaaS and more opportunities for existing SaaS businesses.
So, how do you expand your business to cope with the ever-growing demand? What do you need to do in your business to ensure that you not only meet your customers' needs but maintain a competitive advantage? We unpacked some of our top hints and found out what you can do to expand your business.
In order to expand your business, you will need to know what its current state is. Take a step back and take a look at your business. Outline a company blueprint where you unpack your worth, customer base, competitors and what your financials look like. Once you have a good idea of the current state of the business, you might be able to spot some growth points or places to improve upon. Think of it as a working business plan that you are putting together,
Once you have this together, map out a strategy for your business to expand. Keep in mind that selling SaaS business at the moment is extremely lucrative, and will only improve in the future. So, keep those numbers in the back of your head as you work on the places to expand and improve your business.
Digital marketing will be your right-hand man when it comes to expanding your business. Not only is it budget-conscious, but it is easy to use and can help you reach highly targeted and global markets that you might not be able to reach traditionally.
Focus your efforts on generating sales leads through every platform that digital marketing has to offer. You will need the following:
The trick to all of this is to create a content marketing strategy throughout the year and share content across all of the channels. You will want content to be going out all the time to make sure your audience is constantly seeing it.
Make sure the content is uniform but differentiated for each channel. So, your Facebook content will match the email but just be formatted specifically for the Facebook format.
Many companies, especially SaaS companies, miss out on the crucial step of having a clear customer map. You need to know basic demographics like their location, price points, and company sizes, but also delve into their needs, interests, and behaviors.
Although each company runs differently from others, if you know that a client wants something specific to expand their services, you might want to offer the same thing to other clients who might not know that they need it. Spend time getting to know their operations, their processes, their needs and their own expansion plans.
Once you have an insight into this, you will be able to adapt products and services to what they want as well as reposition your marketing to be able to speak directly to them. So, if you know that they are focussing on a specific area of growth, you will be able to include this in your messaging and convert them swifter and easier. Just take the time to engage with them and understand them.
Without knowing the stats of your business, and having raw data on hand, how do you know what your business is doing? Measuring your metrics is going to be your way of knowing where your company is standing and where growth is needed and attainable.
Marketing metrics are a great example and are really easy to actually get your hands on. You will be able to track each campaign and all content that you post across all of your platforms. From your social platforms to your email tool, each will give you information like your open, click-through and bounce rates for you to know what works and what doesn’t.
From there, you can also track traffic on your site with Google Analytics. This provides you with data about your organic traffic, your campaign traffic and how it behaves on your site. With this, you can plan future marketing and expansion.
Expanding your business is really a case of experimenting, trying new things and seeing what works and what doesn’t. Keep an eye on those metrics and monitor your ROI, and make adjustments where necessary.