Top 3 Tips to Help You Scale Your SaaS Startup

Starting a business requires a lot of hard work. Creating a product to sell is just the beginning. For a SaaS startup to become a player in its targeted niche, you will need to have an extensive plan laid out in front of you in order to achieve the maximum growth potential. After all, you are not just selling a one-off product. You are selling something, which you need your customers to remain interested in so that they keep returning to your subscription services. 

What does scaling your SaaS business actually mean? It means looking for ways in which to continue to generate profit by new customer gains or venturing into new markets.

According to industry experts, having a good and memorable name for your SaaS startup is one of the basic factors. You can use a random name generator to generate a great name for your SaaS business. Let’s look at 3 tips to help you scale your SaaS startup.

1. Focused Customer Acquisition

Firstly, it’s a good idea to remember that not everyone is going to be interested in the product/s and services that you have to offer. It’s nice to think that anyone who sees what you have created will be impressed by it and want it, but that’s not at all realistic. Some people need email marketing services, others are looking for commercial insurance products. So think the other way around: what you have isn’t going to be wanted by a lot of people. With that in mind, now you can focus your acquisition efforts better.

Online marketing to anyone and everyone is an utter waste of time and finances. To optimize the growth potential of your new SaaS business, identify your target audience, understand the customer decision making process, and focus on them. Ask yourself basic, simple questions:

■ What is the typical age range of your intended/expected customer?

■ What is their gender?

■ Where are they located?

■ What are their pain points?

■ What is there likely budget expected to be?

Google Analytics is free, so use it. Find out who is looking at your website, which pages and elements are gaining the most interest, where are visitors engaging the most, how much time is spent on your website, what is the bounce rate, and so on. If you’re organising a research conference find a abstract management software that fits.

On top of this, it’s essential to check out the competition. Find out who they are targeting, how they are marketing their product, and what keywords they are using. All of these little details will soon add up, and before you know it, you will be armed with an artillery of information to unleash upon a strategy that is optimized for targeting your market.

2. Build a Knowledge Base

As important as a focus on customer acquisition is, it is equally important to concentrate on the customers that you already have. It can be a simple but costly mistake for new businesses to make: pushing for continued growth is of course to be expected, but if it is at the cost of losing customers that you already have, it cancels out the whole point of reaching out to new leads.

As your business moves forward and you find new customers to add to the ones you already have, you may find it hard to keep up with customers’ requests and demands within a decent amount of time. This is where the building of a knowledge base comes in so as to assist you to assist your customers.

A knowledge base will become an integral and vital part of your SaaS startup and your scaling of it.

Here are some key advantages to having one:

■ Customer Support: Frequently asked questions can be answered via blog posts or an FAQ section on your business website. It’s quicker and cheaper than having a dedicated full-time customer service team. With blog posts or an FAQ section, your customers will have a knowledge base to refer to quickly for answers, tips, or even full-on guides;

■ Customer retention: Your customers are highly likely to come back to your website again and again. By keeping your website updated with the latest news, answers to new problems if any have come to light, updates to the software, or ongoing how-to’s teaching users how to get the best from your product/s, you will keep them coming back and more likely to remain invested in your services;

■ You can take the lead: With continued relevant and latest information regarding your services and the field you operate in, you can establish yourself as being a real authority in whatever niche area you happen to be active in. The pro of this is of course that it again will go a long way to benefiting that all-important customer retention and can significantly increase your chances of yielding new customers and growing your business.

As you can see, having a knowledge base for your SaaS startup can be a real win-win for your business. And if you don’t want to handle these activities in-house, for any reason whatsoever, you can hire business process outsourcing (BPO) pros to take care of the stuff as lead generation and customer care and retention.

3. Word of Mouth

Sometimes, the old ways are the best ways, and today it is still as much the case as ever that word of mouth can be hugely advantageous to the growth of a business and/or brand name.

Having your satisfied customers spread the word will work wonders for your reputation – and for luring new customers to your service. More than half of all new businesses that suddenly pop into view within their markets do so due to word-of-mouth referrals alone.

Encourage satisfied users of your service to refer to you, leave recommendations in reviews, and suggest you to others who they think could benefit from using what you have to offers. This is true for all businesses whether you are a jewelry brand or a software company, happy customers leave good reviews. This social proof  helps you build brand trust/loyalty that cannot be bought. Brands like Astteria, for example, have hundreds of five-star reviews that draw in new customers. Even SaaS startups like SERPWizz have great reviews that are incredibly important for the brand.

In the old days, of course, word of mouth meant literally that and nothing more. Today though, social media has opened that mouth a whole lot wider. Not only are social media platforms excellent vehicles for carrying marketing campaigns, but they are also the perfect medium for brands and names to be passed around quickly. As an innovative master’s degree in visual design and communication nicely explains, the world’s geography consist of intercommunicating vessels, where there are major flows of information and content aimed at delivering the branding message.

Wrapping up

As you can see, there is more to growing your business than just having a cool product and unleashing it into the world while hoping for the best. The hard work has to continue. But with just the three tips above for scaling your business, you will not just find new customers, you will keep the ones you already have and build better business relationships as you and your startup head into the future.

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