8 Smart SaaS Growth Strategies To Expand Your B2B SaaS Company

How yesterday’s SaaS startups are today’s top SaaS companies?

HubSpot, Shopify, Slack, SalesForce are the biggest examples of successful B2B SaaS companies in the 21st-century business world.

SaaS-based business requires constant improvement and strategic implementation which should resonate with customer behavior. As new technologies and innovation is taking place, it is widening more scope for SaaS business.

According to a market study 2020, companies now spend 50% more on SaaS products than they spent last year before. Data shows that demand for SaaS applications is growing significantly, which is excellent news for entrepreneurs and startups.

But when the market grows, the competition also grows. Modern consumers have better options than ever, and B2B SaaS Companies need to put great effort to stand out in modern competition.

In SaaS, if your growth speed is low it means you are going to lose your venture someday because, till 2021, Software-as-a-service (SaaS) market has reached $145.5 billion making competition tougher and challenging than ever.

In a digital age where consumers want every solution easier and faster, SaaS companies need to upgrade their growth strategy with respect to the market demands to generate high profits consistently on the long term scale.

Today in this article, eSearch Logix will take you through 8 Smart SaaS Growth Strategies that will help you expand your B2B SaaS Company. You will learn from the famous examples of how they succeeded in today’s highly competitive SaaS market.

So, why wait? Let’s get started.

What is Mean by SaaS Growth Strategy?

SaaS growth strategy is basically SaaS marketing which focuses on improving the company growth speed through selling products. It involves marketing efforts to stand out in the fast-driven market of SaaS products so that company can attract new customers and keep them for long period.

There was a time when the marketer’s toolkit used to have trade shows, cold calls, eBlasts, and direct mail. But as innovation started transforming marketing practices in the form of blogs, SEO, SMO, content marketing, email marketing, webinar, and live stream, people block out old marketing tactics and want advanced solutions on their own terms.

That is why B2B SaaS Company needs new strategies to acquire more customers. SaaS growth strategy mainly involves the following key marketing approaches:

1. Inbound marketing
2. Growth hacking
3. Growth marketing

And every segment is playing an important role to maximize the ROI in the B2B sector.

Why Do You Need a Fresh B2B SaaS Growth Strategy To Grow Your Company?

You might be running well in your SaaS business; you have a good growth rate, a large number of clients, and a digital marketing team to acquire more customers. But technology is all about changing its patterns and behavior according to market and customer demands. 

In present times, most of the B2B SaaS companies struggle with:

1. Cross-selling and upselling
2. Getting referred by existing customers
3. Continuously generating more leads
4. Improving the lead quality
5. Winning customer loyalty and retention
6. Converting leads or closing deals

That is why your SaaS business has to adapt innovation in your SaaS growth strategy to:

• Improve brand awareness and visibility all across the digital platforms
• Optimize lead nurture through all stages of the funnel
• Automate all your lead generation tasks
• Create more opportunities to sell and upsell new products to existing customers
• Upgrade onboarding and retention
• Identify target audience through data science
• Plan and implement branding campaigns
• Align sales, marketing, and other teams towards a common goal.

Several B2B SaaS companies from small to medium and large scale have tasted success recently by witnessing their massive jump in the growth curve.

This is because of the digital transformation which helped them enhance the efficiency of their branding, marketing, sales, and after-sales service. Here is the latest data to prove it:

According to Salesforce study 2021-

• There are over 41% B2B SaaS marketers who utilized artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning-based solutions to improve their business operation efficiency.
• 43 percent of B2B SaaS marketers have plans to use analytics for making a well-informed decision.
• More than 32 percent of digital marketers prefer. personalization as the main approach to engaging their clients effectively.

You can see here how B2B SaaS companies depend on digital and innovative solutions to upscale their growth. 

Core Principles of a Successful SaaS Growth Strategy

There is no secret formula to create a SaaS growth strategy that makes your company successful overnight. It requires consistent effort with updated marketing practices.

Your B2B SaaS marketing team needs to continuously educate and convince their customers. Your approach should be driven by logic, the latest technology, efficiency, and financial incentive.

Top SaaS companies have adopted these practices in their negotiations, business analysis, and long-term planning, have witnessed significant growth. To put in simple, here are the core principles of a SaaS growth strategy that can make your B2B SaaS company successful:

1. Monetization: To turn users into customers through optimizing and testing pricing plans
2. Moving into new markets: To maximize your audience base internationally with local currencies, languages, and native-speaking support and sales
3. Moving upmarket: Grow your Annual Contract Value (ACV) and move upmarket by bundling consumers into team plans and enterprise deals.
4. Moving downmarket: To introduce and scale self-serve sales to increase sign-ups, then upsell via self-serve plans to grow business revenue without the need of a sales rep.
5. Product expansion: To attract new customers and grow ACV with your current customers by proving them with more offers or a robust platform solution.

Do you want to see how following these core principles many companies found a massive improvement in their growth speed? Let us take the example of HubSpot’s growth strategy that made them an iconic SaaS company.

Monetization: HubSpot developed and optimized a SaaS model with additional value metrics such as contacts, emails, buyer personas that allow its B2B clients to improve their monetization strategy.

Moving to a new market: HubSpot launched its first office outside Cambridge, MA to set up field sales and marketing, with more global offices and advanced digital marketing websites.

Moving upmarket: They historically avoided being pulled into the highly competitive enterprise space but focused on moving upmarket.

Moving downmarket: HubSpot was initially only available through talking to sales. But with the launch of the sales and CRM tools in 2014, they offered a freemium based service model to global business organizations as part of their new product-led go-to-market strategy.

Product expansion: HubSpot expanded their business reach from the original marketing automation tool to add sales, CRM, followed by Service Hub and Marketing Hub.

These SaaS growth strategies have not only enabled HubSpot but many other companies to succeed in the SaaS market like-

Urban Sports Club: a SaaS application that is providing a new model of fitness solutions to businesses.

Social Hub: a social media management tool that empowers businesses to grow on social media.

Report: a video-based AI recruiting tool that helps companies in recruiting new employees online.

Picktochart: This is a SaaS-based visual storytelling platform that allows users to create graphics and design faster and easier than any graphics design software.

Holded: a SaaS app that helps SMBs manage all activities related to invoicing, accounting, HR, CRM, and project management through changing messaging strategy.

Brand24: a social listening tool that is enabling businesses to rethink their target audience by various social media features. 

8 Smart SaaS Growth Strategies to Expand Your B2B SaaS Company

1. Create an Effective UI/UX Strategy

One of the best strategies most SaaS companies use is influencing consumer behavior in your favor. And to do this is to create an effective UI/UX strategy with an intuitive and interactive user interface (UI).

Providing good user satisfaction includes giving a seamless and positive experience for your customers users from using your application and SaaS products.

You have to ensure that the UI of not just your website or mobile application but your SaaS product is seamless. Therefore, you should build a well-defined strategy that focuses on these crucial factors.

You can make a survey to get the real feedback of users by asking them about their experience and what they think is working or not such as:

1. What are you hoping to find on this website?
2. Did the SaaS app meet your expectations?
3. Is there anything else within the SaaS product that doesn’t work the way you expected it to?
4. Does this application involve the information you were looking for?
5. What could we do to make this site useful?

2. Discover What Makes You Unique

Usually, the product is the main thing that sets a company different from the competition. The better the product, the better your business will be as compared to the competitors.

To develop an efficient SaaS product, many companies use on-site surveys to collect feedback and gauge what features their customers want. Apart from this, there are other factors that can make your SaaS unique and stand out from the competition like:

• Provide enhanced customer-centric services and support
• Ensure smooth UI/UX across all channels
• Create less frictional flows in the user journey
• Focus on different and diverse audiences and segments

3. Plan a Long-Term SaaS Business Model

You need to produce a high-performing SaaS product that provides improved services to your B2B clients if you want to survive on a long-term scale in the SaaS business. There are many Innovative SaaS Product Ideas That Will Help You Build a Successful Startup.

Many startups from the onset rely on venture capital, while other starts slowly, both keeping the long-term advantages in mind. To ensure your SaaS business model works on a long-term scale, you need to keep improving your conversion rate and bringing in more clients.

4. Focus on Value Instead of Competitive Cost

One of the most common mistakes B2B SaaS companies make is to think of the competitive cost as their main advantage. Well, it may be effective in eCommerce or other business sectors, but SaaS is different. Here, the customer’s main goal is to find a product that works better rather than how low cost or discount there is.

No matter how low or affordable your SaaS product is, it will never become a blockbuster in the market until you provide great value to your customers. If your SaaS application performs excellent and gives updated functionality, your customers will be ready to pay even higher prices for your services.

So offering a competitive product price is not a stable strategy, as someone else might come with even lower prices.

5. Optimize Your Website for High-Intent Keywords

If you want to grow your B2B SaaS company, the first step is to grow your customer base. Your brand should be on the top of Google’s search result pages when any potential user searches for products and services like yours. The smart way to do this is to optimize your content for high-intent keywords.

For example, a B2B company may search on Google by typing this keyword “best CRM software for small businesses”. In this case, the searcher shows intent to buy a specific type of CRM. In this example, Zoho and HubSpot’s CRM appears as one of the top pages that searchers see when looking for the best CRM for small businesses.

Hence, it is essential for B2B SaaS companies to create a list of their high-intent keywords and optimize content so that they appear on the top of search results.

6. Drive More Organic Traffic through a Blog

Have you ever analyzed HubSpot carefully? Why do they have a large number of B2B and B2C clients for their SaaS products such as HubSpot CRM as well as other software? It is because of their blog. HubSpot has a dedicated blog that gives comprehensive insights and updated information to their customers.

HubSpot blog educates its potential customers on various industry-related topics and trends. Top B2B SaaS agency considers blog as the most effective tool to educate and convince potential customers to buy the product.

Let us take our own example. eSearch Logix is a leading HubSpot’s Partner Agency.

We do have a dedicated blog like HubSpot called tech.searchlogix.com for educating and providing highly valuable and updated information about our new SaaS products and the latest industry trends.

Through this blog, we are able to build trust with the audience by giving them the information they need to know, and eventually, it helps us gain a good number of organic traffic to our pillar pages.

7. Offer a Freemium Model without any Hassle

Any business when they plan to buy a SaaS product wants to assure that they are investing in the right application that gives them better ROI.

While many SaaS companies offer free trial services like 14 days free trial period, 30 days free trial period, here you should try to add one particular monetization model that quickly gains attention.

And the best way to do this is to offer a Freemium model which allows users to try your product or service for free with limited and basic features. This monetization model will enable your customers to get more familiar with your product and offers.

Having a freemium model enhances customer acquisition and improves a SaaS company\’s growth. Since the freemium product is a scaled-down version of the premium version, satisfied users will have more confidence in choosing a paid plan.

8. Create Original Content That Stands Out

Content plays the most influential role in the SaaS business. Particularly in B2B, business owners are highly experienced and they hold a mature understanding of what product will work for them or not.

Buyers do believe in buying directly from on-call sales reps unless they are fully convinced they are investing in the right product. They make a deep research and analyze the product’s features before many any buying decisions.

Business owners want to understand how your software can help them achieve their business goals. So the whole idea is valuable content. That is why SaaS companies should focus on creating original content in the form of blogs, eBooks, videos, surveys and findings, researches, case studies, and white papers that give valuable information to customers.

| Read: How to Create Content for Buyer’s Journey to Boost Your Conversion Funnel

Best digital marketing companies in India consider content as the biggest key factor to grab more deals than any other technique. If your content can help the reader easily understand how your product or service can help your client’s business grow efficiently, then your entire effort is successful.

Conclusion

B2B SaaS Companies need to adopt smart ways of retaining and acquiring customers. Long-term SaaS growth can only be achieved when customers get convinced and feel confident about your product.

Your SaaS growth strategy should focus on updating your application with market trends, modern features, and providing values to customers. And these 8 smart SaaS growth strategies will help you expand your B2B SaaS Company effectively.

If you want to supercharge your SaaS growth speed, eSearch Logix is a leading SaaS development company who can empower your SaaS Company to grow tremendously. Our expertise in innovation and software engineering makes us stand out from our competitors.

Just Book a Free Consultation and Discuss Your Project Now