Proven marketing strategies to grow your bootstrap SaaS startup
As a SaaS startup in the initial days you don’t have money to spend on big marketing campaigns, thus most of the time we often try to keep the expenditure minimum and try to use the free resources and software that are available to us.
This process takes time but is effective in the long run as you build networking from scratch. Thus, to help you speed things up, I will be sharing marketing strategies that have worked for me and many of my clients to get customers.
But before I start I would like to share with you the book I wrote “Cheat Codes for Building SaaS”. This book highlights all the requirements and steps that are needed to build up a successful SaaS foundation and run it.
Content Making ✍️
If you start to write blog posts and do social media posting on LinkedIn then users will come to you. See you don’t have to just write about your product, you need to make content in your niche by educating people and helping them with valuable information.
In between then, you can add about your product, for example, your tool helps users to save time in social media ads. So you will create posts like “Best practices for running Facebook Ads” or something and then in between you can add your tool as well, using this tool saves time and runs the ads faster.
Running newsletters and blogs is a great way to reach a larger audience, though it will take time to start if you are doing from 0 but eventually in 1 year you will be able to reach a good amount of users who love to read your things.
Market Place Listing 🏬
If you have a strong product and it’s almost bug-free, I would recommend you to list your product on marketplaces like Product Hunt, App Sumo, Beta List, G2, and Hacker News.
You can also join their groups on LinkedIn and Facebook, where you can reach people share their ideas, and connect with them. This will also help you in creating a network, and we will know the value of creating a network down in the Integration Partnerships section.
Direct Reach out on LinkedIn and Facebook 💬
If you try to reach people out on LinkedIn at least 5 people I would say in a a week, you don’t have to spam people remember this. You also need to first create a strong profile on LinkedIn and Facebook profile then only start to reach people out.
For this you need a team, you alone won’t be able to reach and convert more users, I would advise you can formulate a team for doing this and make sure only to get good profiles not just start to create profiles or not use any kind of automation tools your profile will get flagged by LinkedIn and Facebook easily, and even though you try to bypass it you won’t get results.
Cold Emails 📩
Running cold email outreach is one of the most effective ways of reaching people especially if you are doing a B2B product.
For B2C I won’t say cold emails are a good choice. If you write emails yourself and reach people who will give you results, you can also try using software like Instantly.ai or Smartlead.
Integration Partnerships 🤝
Integration Partnerships are where you reach out to a different SaaS startup founder and ask them to promote your product via cold emails, newsletters, or posts, and in return, you do the same thing for their product.
Make sure this is strong at both parties' end for promoting like you should bring value for them and same from their end.
Maintaining the Integration Partnership is very important in the long run, as in this you grow with them. Most of the time people do two or three posts and then move on which is wrong keeping a long-term relationship is always good.
Podcasts 🎙️
Podcasts are again a great way to reach out audience, if you are not able to run Podcasts then you can try participating in others. This is another very effective way of gaining views about your experience and why you have built this product.
Return on Ads Spend 💸
We all spend a lot of money on running Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and Instagram Ads, but the real thing is how quickly are you able to generate a return on these ads.
If it’s taking you 6 months or 8 months to get the response then it’s a bad thing for your SaaS startup you are just burning your money.
You must get the results within a month or so by running ads, and if it’s not giving the results, you might need to stop running it for now and try maybe sometime later once your SaaS grows.
If you take care of these strategies and suggestions in mind you would be able to generate good results for your SaaS startup. Let me know how you find these strategies effective for yours, or if anything I’m missing please feel free to comment down below I would love to check them out.
Also, I have a book on marketing if, you want to take a deep dive into marketing and know how to get long-term paying customers for your SaaS, “Marketing Strategies to Grow Your SaaS” which will cover all the necessary steps and strategies in depth to help you take your SaaS from scratch and get some real paying users.
