SaaS Growth Strategies You Need to Try in 2023 and Beyond

The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) marketplace has been around for decades, but the rise of Industry 4.0 and events like the recent pandemic has truly propelled its growth. To be more specific, the SaaS market size is expected to scale from US $130.7B in 2021 to a staggering US $716.5B in 2028. 

This means that the demand for SaaS solutions will grow significantly in the coming years. To meet this demand, existing businesses will continue to evolve their product, while new entrants over time will make the competition even fiercer.

So, the question you need to ask in this survival of the fittest is: how do you evolve your SaaS to stay relevant and of course, alive?

The answer is simple; by applying effective and contemporary SaaS growth strategies. We’ve compiled a few for you right here. 

In this article, you will learn:

• The best growth strategies including live events, influencer, marketing, and more.
• The challenges that SaaS companies face 
• How you can use HockeyStack to track your company’s growth.

SaaS Growth Strategies for 2023

Here are seven of our recommended SaaS growth strategies that will help you scale your product in 2023 and beyond. 

#1 Live Events

One of the most popular growth hacks for SaaS companies has been networking, and what better way to do that than to host live business-to-business (B2B) events where your share your experience with peers from the same industry, interact with potential customers, learn about contemporary SaaS solutions to partner with, modify your digital strategy? 

You can also seize the opportunity by becoming a sponsor at one of these events to highlight the solutions you bring to the market. Live event networking statistics back our recommendation as well, with 68% of B2B marketers stating that they generate the most leads through live events.

A great example is the Adobe Summit 2022 where there were over 200 informative sessions about the future of Adobe. They not only help you expand your skills and build connections, but also provide inspirations for your venture. It’s a great way to empower entrepreneurs while also promotions what the organization has to offer.

Similarly, you can conduct these events online through webinars (pro tip: utilize your pool of emails and run a dedicated email campaign to invite as many people to your webinars as possible); or you can opt for in-person events, which can be slightly more challenging to execute. 

Not sure where to start? How about you attend some of the biggest SaaS conferences before hosting your own? Here are some popular SaaS trade shows you can look forward to:

• SaaStr
• SaaStock
• Growth Hacker’s Conference
• MWC Barcelona

Once you’re out in the market, start with an intimate live event online where you discuss your digital strategy with others and take direct feedback from prospects. 

#2 Influencer Marketing 

Social media is a coherent part of SaaS companies’ digital marketing strategies today as it transcends boundaries to reach a broader audience. We recommend taking this up a notch and adding influencer marketing to the mix as this type of marketing is 11 times more effective than betting your budgets on banner ads. 

Your main concern while onboarding influencers should not be costs or followers (although they are also very important). Instead, it should be on the type of audience an influencer has. You need to hire the ones who are experts in your field and who will actually be able to convince their audience to consider your product. 

Let’s take you through a short example to explain this: You’re a SaaS product manager looking forward to finding the best growth strategies for your brand. You want guidance from SaaS marketing experts rather than, say, a generic digital marketing manager with an irrelevant audience, which is why you ended up here, case in point. 

The concept remains the same while hiring influencers for marketing; hire technical experts relevant to your product so you can expand your reach to authentic audiences rather than taking a storyteller onboard whose audience is anything but relevant to your business. 

Canva used a similar strategy by using Guy Kawasaki to market their product after he used Canva to design his social media graphics. This helped them reach a larger audience, doubling it in a short time. His endorsement sure did help!

#3 Video Marketing

It’s hard to say that any type of digital content has been able to supersede video marketing on the digital front. Videos across online platforms boast an unparalleled 92% global reach; the numbers alone are enough to say why this should be an integral part of your SaaS marketing strategy. 

Visual content is much easier to grasp and your audience actually prefers watching videos than seeing other content types. Video marketing gives you a lot of room for creativity from the way you present your product to the way you incorporate CTAs in there. 

Spotify proved the strategy in a mere 90 second video where they used unique graphic to show Spotify’s streaming functions in everyday life. With bold visuals, they show cased their product to grow it’s subscriptions allowing their subscribers to grow significantly. 

In much the same way, an excellent way to leverage video marketing for your SaaS brand is to post videos on your YouTube and then share its link across mediums to expand reach. For instance, you can share a link to your SaaS product’s overview in a sign-up email, or embed it into your blogs to make the most out of it. In fact, studies reveal that 72% of users prefer learning about a new product through a video; more reason for you to include videos in your email campaigns. 

There is endless data about video marketing and how it increases the influx of traffic and boosts ROIs for business. Start incorporating videos everywhere from social media accounts, to landing pages, email campaigns, and beyond and watch your SaaS solution going viral; you can thank us later. 

#4 Incorporate User Feedback to Improve the Product

Launched a product and want to know how end-users see your solution? User feedback helps you understand where roadblocks exist and what you need to do to resolve them. 

There are a number of ways you can collect this feedback:

• By strategically placing survey forms on your website 
• By adding in-app surveys to the product 
• By compiling data from live chats to identify patterns, determine issues, and distinguish them from the less-occurring problems

Here’s an example of what your survey results can look like:

You’ll be surprised to see the type of actionable insights you’ll get from product surveys. A common practice SaaS companies embrace is reaching out to potential users and providing them with a free trial solely for the purpose of obtaining feedback on the product. 

This pre-launch move will allow you to revisit your product, and roll out versions that incorporate user feedback.

Slack is an excellent example here. The SaaS tool incorporated user feedback into the product, which has now made it stable enough to drive its own growth. This is also the reason why you won’t see many marketing efforts by the brand as a significant chunk of its revenue is now being brought in by the product itself.  

#5 Enhance the Customer Experience 

It’s safe to state that customer experience is at the heart of every growth strategy. In the SaaS space, these experiences are defined by several factors from the effectiveness of your onboarding to the intuitiveness and overall design of your UI. 

You can ensure your audience has a good experience by focusing on your customer journey from the get-go. Your core focus should be to highlight the value your product brings to the table and then deliver on it. 

You can start working on your customer experiences by conducting an in-depth analysis and figuring out what kind of roadblocks exist at each touchpoint. You can do this by seeing where the most leads are dropping off in the funnel and identify those touchpoints. Once you do, you can make improvements there.

The next step is understanding how your customers feel about your product right now, and what challenges they’re facing at the moment. Fixing their pain-points will not only help you to retain existing customers, but customers will also be willing to pay more for better customer experiences, which can trigger growth in the longer run.

#6 Email Marketing 

No matter how profitable your influencer or social media marketing becomes, leaving the good ol’ emails behind is still not an option, especially if you’re trying to build a robust SaaS growth strategy. You can personalize your emails, they’re easy to monitor, and can contribute well to your monthly and annual revenues. 

If done right, email marketing for SaaS –based products can offer a mind-boggling 3600% in ROIs, but how do you differentiate a good email campaign from a mediocre one? You follow tried and tested KPIs, simple. Here are a few you can begin with:

How many emails get opened: if your audiences don’t open your emails in the first place, all your effort will go in vain. An excellent way to ensure this doesn’t happen is by revisiting your subject lines, since that’s your CTA to convince a user to open your mails. Try A/B testing different copies on a smaller audience to see how they work, before your roll out emails to a broader pool. 

Monitor conversion rates: So your recipients opened their email, now what? The whole point is to get them to respond to your CTA inside the mail. Identify reasons why your audience did or did not click on the CTA to guarantee winning email campaigns down the line as they can really propel your SaaS tool’s growth.  

One of the best examples of email campaigns within the SaaS arena comes from Canva – the design tool. They roll out emails to congratulate users on reaching basic milestones such as completing a certain number of designs. Users are encouraged to share this milestone on their socials through a clear CTA placed at the end of the email, which in-turn, increases the tool’s visibility and presence online.  

#7 Podcasts

Podcasts; you’ve heard of them, you enjoy them, and they hold a secret for your company’s success. Using SaaS as a marketing strategy means that you’ll be significantly increasing your reach. It’s not unheard of; let’s put two and two together, shall we?

26% of Americans are known to be avid podcast listeners. Now that you know the demographic you’re catering to; once you lay out a podcast strategy, understand the content you want for your listeners, and launch an engaging podcast, you’ll ensure that every listener of your demographic is aware of what you do. That is, of course, if you’ve managed to create content, optimized it on your website, marketed it on social media, and also remained consistent with postings.

Let’s say there are people who don’t listen to podcasts but are interested in SaaS related content. Luckily, that’s what you’re talking about. With a little research and word-of-mouth, you’ll gain a few new listeners as well. 

Now, you’ve created the podcast and you’ve managed to advertise it, that’s great. But how is that helping your company?

Well, there are a few things that you can do:

1. Talk about your services in the podcast.
2. Explain who you are and why you are eligible to educate the masses. It doesn’t take too much time to learn about your company from there. Voila! You have more reach. 
3. The more relevant guests you invite on your podcast, the more legitimate your company will look. 
4. When you advertise your podcast, more people will look you and your company up as well.

What Are Some Challenges of Growing SaaS Companies?

Businesses operating in the SaaS space need to quickly adapt to the contemporary trends to stay relevant and continue on a growth trajectory. But that’s the problem; keeping up with the ever-evolving SaaS space is easier said than done. 

Here are some of the main challenges that Software-as-a-Service companies are facing today:

#1 Penetrating the market

The SaaS market has become extremely competitive over the past few years. Whether you’re building an analytics product that captures data from multiple resources or a time tracking solution for remote teams, there is already a lot of competition waiting for you in the market. 

This makes it difficult to launch your product and acquire a decent market share for survival. You cannot rely on just the basic feature-set anymore. Your company should be able to differentiate itself amidst the competition through product’s functionality, the user experience you offer, and customer onboarding etc. 

#2 Disparity in systems and data

Access to relevant customer data is crucial for every SaaS business to grow as it allows entities to tap into insights about customer experiences and journeys. But with disparate systems across organizations, it becomes difficult to collect this data from different sources and pull it up in a unified dashboard. So, you may have access to data from the sales and marketing teams while numbers from the finance team may be missing. 

Furthermore, if different teams are using different systems to collect and retain data in a silo, it will only increase this information disparity. This can hinder collaboration to resolve customer pain-points and makes it difficult for SaaS teams to take timely business decisions which adversely affect product sustainability moving forward.

#3 Inadequate infrastructure for Scalability 

Every SaaS business to ever exist came to the market with hopes of making it big. Some of them even perform really well in the beginning, but aren’t able to sustain their swift growth because they don’t have a scalable infrastructure that grows alongside revenues.

A scalable IT infrastructure would allow you to handle the growing demands for extracting, storing, analyzing and reporting on data. This will ensure that you’re able to provide a consistently good customer experience even when your product scales rapidly. 

While there are quite a lot of challenges that SaaS businesses face, the good news is that you can overcome a considerable number of them by turning to growth hack professionals. 

Track Your SaaS Growth with HockeyStack

As a decision-maker, you need to make real-time strategic business decisions based on the available data, which becomes difficult as developers take time to turn disparate data into meaningful information before presenting it to you.

So, why not take the matter in your own hands?  

With HockeyStack you:

• Don’t have to deal with codes so dealing with data becomes a breeze 
• Have access to information in real-time, which removes lags and allows you to take swift decisions 
• Can customize dashboards to present the information you need, the way you need it
• Can extract information from multiple sources (Stripe, HubSpot, etc.) within seconds with one-click integrations

Let’s dive further with a few examples. 

Say, for instance, you need to analyze your monthly recurring revenue over the past few months to make projections and set business direction for the future. You have also that at the tip of your fingers.

HockeyStack’s presentation of your data from various sources paints a clear picture of how your SaaS product is performing against KPIs. Furthermore, the detailed graphs on our intuitive dashboard makes comprehension easier for you.

You can also track other metrics related to organic and inorganic traffic on your website, the percentage increase in traffic, your active visitors, and more to get a complete understanding of how well your growth strategies are performing. 

Check out our Live Demo to dive deeper into HockeyStack and how it can help your SaaS growth. 

Or get onboard with us and start steering your product to success today. 

FAQs

How do you drive SaaS growth?

The SaaS market is highly competitive, which is why your product’s growth depends on various factors like creating more personalized content, improving the product based on user feedback, among many others. 

What is the most important factor for SaaS growth?

While there are several factors that are critical for SaaS growth, your product-market fit tops all of them. It means that your SaaS tool:

• Must be backed by a significant market demand 
• Relieves all customer pain-points 
• Matches the price your customers are willing to pay