7 B2B SaaS Growth Hacks For Scaling Fast
The SaaS market is densely saturated. For startups and small businesses, achieving growth when you’re up against SaaS giants who dominate search engines and social conversions can feel daunting. Sometimes even impossible.
But it isn’t.
SaaS growth hacks are go-to strategies for growth-focused companies that are looking to generate more leads, conversions, and revenue without breaking the bank. And, when they’re used consistently and strategically, they can scale your business sustainably to help you retain a lucrative position.
But exactly what are B2B SaaS growth hacks? And how can you use these high-impact strategies to expand your user base and skyrocket revenue? Let’s get started.
What is a SaaS growth Hack?
SaaS growth hacks refer to techniques and strategies that are renowned for their ability to drive rapid growth in a strategic, cost-effective way for SaaS companies. They’re typically used by tech startups and small businesses looking to scale their user base, exposure, and revenue with minimal resources and expenses.
Using creative marketing techniques, data analysis, and powerful technologies, B2B SaaS growth hacks hyper-focus on generating leads and curating experiences that fast-track customers to conversion.
7 B2B SaaS Growth Hacks To Scale Fast
The SaaS growth hacks we’ll look at today are tried-and-tested white hat strategies that are capable of driving quick, sustainable growth. So, let’s get into it.
1. List your SaaS on a popular B2B SaaS marketplace
To gain visibility quickly for your SaaS, tapping into an established community of SaaS buyers is an effective growth strategy. Especially if you want quick exposure.
NachoNacho is the best SaaS marketplace for well-established SaaS companies as well as new tools. By listing your company, you can gain exposure to hundreds of thousands of businesses looking for tools like yours.
If you are interested in listing your SaaS on NachoNacho, visit this page to submit your tool.
2. Prioritize creating accurate buyer personas
B2B SaaS growth strategies rely on an intricate understanding of your audience. If you’re not targeting the right audience to begin with — or you’re targeting them in the wrong way — you won’t generate the high-quality leads you need to propel growth.
In fact, the two biggest challenges faced by marketing teams are improving lead quality and conversion rates (54%), followed by lead generation at 41%.
So, to get better results from your SaaS growth hacks, first create buyer personas that accurately represent your target customer/s. Aim to understand their unique product needs, purchasing motivations, pain points, favored channels, and content preferences to develop growth strategies that resonate with them.
To further enhance the effectiveness of your SaaS growth hacks, incorporate comprehensive sales training programs that equip your team with the skills to meet the unique needs and challenges of your target customers.
To do this, you’ll need data. CRM SaaS systems, such as Freshworks or Hubspot, provide vast information on customer demographics, firmographics, interactions, purchasing behaviors, and more.
You can also conduct market research and build customer surveys. Tools like SurveySparrow enable you to create detailed, highly engaging surveys. You can use this tool to enhance your buyer personas while turning feedback into growth opportunities.
3. Partner with SaaS and B2B influencers
Influencers not only have established audiences that you can gain exclusive access to. They also yield remarkable power over the products and services that their thousands — sometimes even millions — of followers purchase.
In a recent survey, it was found that 50% of consumers have made a purchase based on an influencer’s endorsement. This makes this SaaS growth hack so effective for customer acquisition.
So, if you’re looking to quickly grow your audience, find influencers with a following that consists of your buyer personas. Follow them and engage with their content via likes, comments, and direct messages. Once you’ve built rapport, propose a mutually beneficial partnership.
Make sure to use SaaS tools to streamline influencer marketing and boost its success. You can find deals on influencer marketing tools via NachoNacho’s vast SaaS marketplace, including Upfluence and Saral Influencer Tools.
4. Embrace referral marketing
Referral marketing is the strategy of encouraging existing customers to promote your product or service via word-of-mouth marketing.
It’s one of the most effective and low-cost SaaS growth hacks around, specifically for increasing brand awareness and generating high-quality leads.
In fact, it has the highest research-to-purchase ratio of all marketing strategies at 40%, beating digital ads, social media campaigns, and email. And, referred customers are more likely to become loyal customers, too.
Referral marketing’s power lies in its ability to foster trust. 50% of potential customers say they trust customer reviews as much as they trust friend and family recommendations (which commonly tops the charts for the most trusted information source).
Here’s how you can implement referral marketing to generate SaaS growth:
- Social sharing: Encourage customers to share your content on their social media channels. Use NachoNacho’s marketplace to find SaaS social media solutions for creating and tracking social campaigns as well as monitoring brand mentions.
- User-generated content (UGC): Potential customers respond positively to UGC, often seeking it out during their research stage. So, encourage customers to create and share UGC, such as product reviews, blog and social media posts, videos, and testimonials.
- Referral incentives: Motivate existing customers to spread the word about your brand by offering exclusive discounts, premium features, free webinar passes, and other tempting incentives.
- Consider types of referrals: Dual-sided referrals, for example, offer incentives to both the referrer and the referred lead. Tiered incentives increase the reward value based on referral volumes. Gamified incentives, such as competitions and raffle tickets, also work well for driving quick growth.
5. Leverage link building
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a core SaaS growth strategy that drives consistent organic traffic and leads to your website. But to unlock rapid growth, you need to formulate hyper-strategic SEO techniques, like link-building.
When trustworthy, authoritative websites link to your website, Google will consider your website to be trustworthy and authoritative, too. So, it will rank you higher on SERPs, driving more organic traffic your way.
But how do you get these backlinks? Here are some of the best strategies:
- Create high-quality, linkable assets: Infographics, charts, original research, and in-depth guides are some of the best types of content for naturally generating backlinks.
- Leverage guest posting: Write a guest post for another reputable site in exchange for a couple of do-follow backlinks.
- Use the broken link method: Find broken links on websites whose customers might benefit from your content. Reach out to them proposing that they replace the dead link with a working link to your website.
- Find unlinked brand mentions: If a website has mentioned your brand or product but hasn’t linked out to it, why not contact them to suggest that they do so? You can see who mentions your brand using tools like Google Alerts or BuzzSumo.
- Use the expertise of an agency: SaaS link building agencies are experts at finding and securing high-quality backlinks for you, so it might be worth looking into if you want fast, reliable growth.
6. Create high-quality, long-form content
Time for another SEO-driven SaaS growth hack.
Search engines favor long-form content (content that’s 1,000+ words). Not only does it suggest that you’re providing comprehensive value to your readers, but it’s also long enough to include short and long-tail keywords more naturally. So, you’ve got a better chance at ranking high on SERPs.
Deliver value to your readers through in-depth exploration of subjects. Use market and keyword research to identify trending topics, evergreen content, and low-hanging fruit keyword opportunities.
As an added note, remember to regularly refresh and update content to maximize its long-term quality.
7. Create a freemium version of your product
If you’re looking to rapidly scale your user population, then offering a free version of your SaaS product might be the way to go.
Freemium products have instant virality and appeal. They shine a beam on your business in overcrowded markets and incentivize your target audience to try your product. This gives you access to the email addresses of high-quality ideal customers, allowing you to target them with marketing messages that, hopefully, will entice conversion.
Additionally, offering an interactive product demo allows potential users to experience the full capabilities of our software in a guided, hands-on environment, significantly enhancing user understanding and boosting conversion rates.
This is a strategy that has worked well for lots of SaaS companies: HubSpot, Dropbox, and Notion, to name a few. That said, there are some risks involved so be sure to weigh up the pros and cons!
SaaS growth metrics to track success
Tracking and analyzing the performance of your SaaS growth hacking strategies empowers data-driven decision-making. Backed by informed insights, you can measure growth, make targeted improvements, capitalize on winning strategies, and bin the ones that aren’t working.
These are some of the most important growth hacking metrics to track:
- Customer acquisition cost: Measures how much it costs, on average, for you to acquire customers.
- Monthly recurring revenue: This tells you how much revenue you’re predicted to earn every month.
- Average revenue per user: Calculates how much revenue you generate from each customer on average within a specific time period.
- Lead-to-customer conversion rate: Tracks how many leads go on to convert.
- Customer lifetime value: Predicts how much revenue you can expect from a single customer over their entire relationship with your company.
- Active users: Measures how many customers are actively engaging with your product.
- Return on investment (ROI): ROI tells you how much profit you’ve gained from campaigns to determine their success.
To track these metrics, adopt marketing analytics software, such as Kissmetrics and Confluent Cloud.
Calqulate Metrics is another useful software designed specifically for SaaS companies to track financial analytics and growth metrics.
Key takeaways of SaaS growth hacking
SaaS growth hacks unlock the door for exponential scalability. Strategies like referral marketing, influencer marketing, and freemium pricing models are capable of quickly generating lots of high-quality leads through trust and virality. Other methods, like link-building and content marketing, are exceptional and cost-effective drivers of organic traffic.
But behind every SaaS growth hack, you need the right tools. Take a look at NachoNacho’s SaaS marketplace to find huge discounts on everything from ecommerce platforms and CRMs to analytics solutions, accounting software, lead generation tools, and more.
Written by Nick Brown
Nick Brown is the founder & CEO of accelerate agency, the SaaS SEO agency. Nick has launched several successful online businesses, writes for Forbes, published a book and has grown accelerate from a UK-based agency to a company that now operates across US, APAC and EMEA. Here is his LinkedIn.