As a B2B SaaS (Software as a Service) company, it can often feel like you’ve hit a ceiling for success due to an ineffective growth plan. The demand for your product may stay constant, but you’re facing regular churn and not leveraging all of your monetization opportunities.
Inevitably, you’ll be unable to scale, and you’ll be unable to win more users, keep current customers, or maximize their lifetime value. With a more nuanced, targeted B2B SAAS growth strategy, you can scale your company with a high-retention, high-profit growth strategy.
What is B2B SAAS marketing?
B2B (Business-to-business) SaaS marketing refers to methods of promoting a software as a service that help the company generate brand awareness, new users, and convert those users into paid customers. The most effective SaaS marketing requires an understanding of your target audience, their expectations, the problems that your product solves, and how your product is the best fit for an individual’s needs and wants.
What is a B2B SAAS growth strategy?
B2B SaaS marketing may center on more traditional marketing techniques like generating leads. Still, a B2B SaaS growth strategy is a comprehensive data-driven approach to acquiring, retaining, and expanding a customer base for software-as-a-service products. B2B SaaS growth marketing emphasizes continuous experimentation, optimization, and scalability strategies to motivate sustainable revenue. A B2B SaaS growth strategy incorporates organic and paid SEO content marketing, Pay-per-click campaigns, email automation, and product-led growth techniques.
By leveraging and aligning customer analytics, automation processes, and insights, an effective B2B SaaS growth marketing strategy can help your business scale, increase conversions, and maintain a competitive edge in the shifting digital world.
Pillar 1 of a Successful B2B SAAS Growth Strategy: Acquisition
In the next section, we’ll discuss how positioning acquisition as one of the pillars of your company’s B2B SAAS growth strategy can help you attract more high-quality leads and convert them into new users or customers.
Grab quality leads through organic traffic to your website
The most effective way to find new leads is through organic traffic on your website, and two of the foundational ways to create long-term, sustainable growth for your company are through SEO and content marketing -especially for SaaS companies with longer sales lifecycles.
By creating keyword-targeted blogs, optimized landing pages, and specialized pricing or features pages, you’ll draw more organic traffic from potential users who may have been unaware of your product. You can try to implement these resources on your own, or hire experts who can author unique blog posts monthly, regularly monitor keyword research, and add frequent content upgrades to your website.
Use product-led growth when relevant
Another approach to acquisition is to implement PLG (product-led growth) strategies. Product-led growth foregrounds the product as the primary driver of customer acquisition, activation, and expansion. As opposed to more traditional sales tactics, SaaS companies differ in enabling users to try before they buy through free trials, freemium options, and self-service onboarding.
PLG strategies center on user experience and engagement, ensuring that the product is easy to use, can solve key pain points, and encourages adoption. These strategies can include the inclusion or refinement of features like in-app tutorials, AI-driven recommendation systems, and integrations that demonstrate the product’s usefulness.
Two industry examples are companies like Slack or Zoom, both of which offer free plans but also offer in-app prompts or referral integrations to efficiently onboard users and increase the value of their product. PLG strategies are most successful when the software hinges on a freemium model or one that offers an easy onboarding process. These strategies can also effectively complement more traditional marketing initiatives.
Take advantage of Account-Based Marketing (ABM) for High-Value Leads
If you want to primarily target high-value leads instead of attracting a broader audience, ABM (account-based marketing) may be the best option. ABM is a targeted strategy that prioritizes bringing in high-value accounts with personalized messaging. Allocating resources to fewer but more qualified accounts will improve the quality of the leads and increase the likelihood of conversion.
With enterprise-level B2B SaaS companies, ABM can also shorten the sales cycle as the focus is already on leads with a higher likelihood of purchasing. By combining ABM with strong SEO content, you can draw the leads you want and keep them with the support that provides them with the necessary resources to convert them into customers.
Pillar 2 of a Successful B2B SAAS Growth Strategy: Retention
This next section’ll discuss how retention figures into any successful B2B SaaS growth strategy. Keeping your customers engaged and happy is where true growth begins, and retention is the most cost-effective way to grow as a company.
Make onboarding easy
The biggest liability for customer churn with SaaS companies is in the first 7-14 days after signup. Your product needs to demonstrate its value quickly, or users will look to other options.
It’s crucial to offer a user-friendly onboarding process. Your growth strategy should be designed to simplify the flow of onboarding, offering guided tours at any possible pain points, and providing in-app messaging or chat support to help new users get set up.
The best onboarding processes will not only be an intuitive experience but will also trigger a “aha” moment quickly – ideally before a paywall or key trial expiration point.
Invest in customer success
Another retention strategy is to market your product so that users feel like the product is structured for their own success. If the user independently sees the value of your product, there will be less opportunity for customer churn.
Strategies that inform customer success can include features like regular check-ins with customer success managers to evaluate the user’s experience, usage data monitoring, and adding mechanisms to offer assistance before users even realize they need it.
Through content upgrades and technical SEO improvements from Ranq’s qualified staff, you will be putting resources towards educating potential users and enabling their success through your content and messaging. These improvements could be as simple as making your content more visible to users, but even a moment of being unable to find the right page could push a user away.
Use feedback loops to improve your product
The retention of customers isn’t only about solving their problems but about continuously listening to their feedback and responding based on those insights and concerns. Through visible product evaluation surveys like the CSAT (customer satisfaction score) and NPS (net promoter score), along with product analytics and regular community engagement, your company can build trust and loyalty with your user base. And in turn, you’ll be able to close the feedback loop.
Pillar 3 of a successful B2B SAAS growth strategy: Expansion
This next section will discuss how a successful B2B SaaS growth strategy can focus on expansion. We’ll highlight the most effective ways that SaaS companies can increase customer lifetime value (CLV) through upsells, cross-sells, pricing adjustments, and usage-based models.
Use tiered pricing
When marketing a product that offers multiple kinds of upgrades and integrations, it’s important to offer tiered pricing options. This way, users will be able to slowly upgrade their software capabilities when needed rather than feeling forced into paying for features that seem either intimidating or superfluous to their aims.
As a pricing structure example, you can offer starter plans that include core features, mid-tier plans that bring in more collaboration tools, and premium tiers that incorporate various analytics and integrations that make the user feel supported by your company. Make sure to also price as part of product-led growth so when users see more value, they will want to move to the next price tier.
Cross-sell with complementary features or services
Just like upselling, you essentially leave money on the table if you’re not offering cross-sell options with your SaaS. Cross-selling in the SaaS context means offering additional, complementary products or services to an existing customer base. For your service, this could be things like adding an easily accessible reporting dashboard to a customer relationship management platform or an upgraded service layer.
When deciding possible cross-sell options, speak to your customer success and sales team to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Track usage patterns for your service and base these options on customer feedback.
Offer annual plans in addition to monthly plans
One of the easiest ways to grow your SaaS company is to ensure that you’re offering an additional annual subscription option along with your monthly plan. Even if only a small percentage of your customers choose this option, you’ll see more immediate revenue from your product and a longer period before you experience churn. Consider offering discounts, bonus features, or early-access perks to incentivize these subscriptions.
Grow your B2B SAAS business with Ranq!
You can scale your business or enterprise effectively with a winning B2B SaaS growth strategy that aligns acquisition, retention, and expansion marketing initiatives. The key is to implement plans that work towards each of these three main aspects of your strategies.
For acquisition, position your SaaS with product-led growth and target high-value customers. For retention, design your product in a way that’s not only intuitive but also lends itself to independent usage and offers a robust support system in the event that your users need it. For expansion, consider how you can most consistently upsell and cross-sell your product through additional features, tiered pricing, or additional offers of annual subscriptions as an alternative to monthly subscriptions.
These are all great conceptual starting points, but if you really want to obtain the highest-quality and most relevant leads and motivate organic traffic growth, look to the experts at Ranq.
Through comprehensive SEO optimization services and keyword-targeted content creation, Ranq can help you develop a sustainable, high-profit, high-retention B2B SaaS growth strategy.
