The B2B SaaS industry has seen an incredible surge in growth over the past several years, with a yearly average of approximately 30%. This robust growth for SaaS has been backed by the huge rise of the use of technology to address key business objectives.
Gartner research published that the revenue of the SaaS industry should hit $143.7 billion USD by the end of 2022. This is expected to be supported by the increase in the use of cloud services. The trend is expected to continue for a long period as businesses encounter complex operational and technical issues that they need to solve using software solutions.
The B2B SaaS industry is considered an infant industry, implying that the growth potential remains attractive. Hence, entering into the SaaS industry is considered a good investment in times like this as the Return on Investment is expected to be solid. According to Crunchbase, SaaS organizations are now operating in over 100 countries.
To remain competitive in the market, SaaS companies must create and maintain high-quality products and services. They should also focus on customer experience by refining their user interface and ensuring that customers have access to top-notch support. Additionally, SaaS firms should strive to create visibility across multiple platforms to reach a wider customer base. In doing so, they can gain greater brand loyalty and increased market share.
Meanwhile, the growth in the SaaS industry is largely fragmented as competition in the market becomes stiffer. Big industry players have been the major beneficiary of the market growth while the smaller players compete fiercely for survival. Hence, you have to take deliberate and strategic efforts to be part of the growing B2B SaaS companies.
In order to capitalize on the growth opportunities within this industry, it is important to identify the right target market and develop tailored strategies that are fit for purpose. It is also vital to be agile when responding to shifting customer demands as well as staying abreast of emerging technology trends. Finally, companies must invest in appropriate resources and a robust infrastructure so they can tap into this highly competitive market.
In this article, we will highlight how to go about growing your B2B SaaS company amid intense competition in the industry.
It is important to understand and implement some growth strategies to expand your SaaS business. In this regard, we have highlighted four key business growth strategies for your B2B SaaS company:
When launching a growth plan, your focus should be on understanding your market. This helps you to develop the right strategy. As a SaaS business, it is important to develop a market for the SaaS products you offer. To achieve this, you should develop a buyer persona or ideal customer profile; with this strategy you identify who are the potential buyers of your products, who are in dire need of the services you offer, what their buyer journey will look like, and how you can make your products appealing to them.
Once you have identified the ideal customer for your SaaS business, you should focus on creating content that meets their needs and interests. This could range from newsletters and blog posts, to infographics and videos. Additionally, maintain a consistent presence across multiple digital platforms such as social media and online directories to keep in touch with customers and reach out to new ones. Finally, invest in advanced analytics so that you can measure the impact of your campaigns and tweak them accordingly.
This helps you reach the right audience and achieve customer retention. For instance, if you have developed an accounting software that helps with transaction records, your ideal and potential customers are consumer goods companies and other businesses that deal with the sales process. Understanding this will help you in crafting the right marketing campaign to advertise your products. It is recommended that small SaaS businesses should focus on market development strategy.
Another effective growth strategy for B2B SaaS companies is increasing market penetration. This strategy largely involves the expansion of a company’s customer base. In line with market development, this entails finding defining your target market and crafting ways to reach them. This can be through advertising and marketing activities that can help you put your product in the face of the public.
As against market development where you develop new products and find a niche for your company in the industry, market penetration is about exploring a market or customer segment that is not familiar with your products. To be more strategic about it, you can target a larger customer segment, a new geographical location, or a subdivision of the industry itself.
To successfully penetrate a new market, you should focus on creating cost-efficient strategies that both bring in new customers and build relationships with existing customers. This could include targeted advertisement campaigns, special offers, or discounts. Take advantage of the latest technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to launch personalized marketing campaigns and tap into untapped customer segments. Make sure that the experience you are offering is consistent across all channels so that your customers feel valued.
Developing a unique product that addresses a major business problem is another secret to the consistent growth in the SaaS industry. Product design and development is quite challenging for business as it involves critical steps, resources, and capabilities. As a SaaS company, you have to understudy your target market, identify a problem you can help them solve, and develop a software solution to address the problem.
It is crucial to monitor the progress of product development and track how it aligns with customer needs. Consider prototyping and testing your product before launch in order to identify any potential flaws or defects. Take time to ensure you are regularly collecting feedback from customers in order to refine the product design and improve its features. Iterate on the product quickly so that it can be released faster and more effectively meet customer needs.
At times, you may have to be creative in coming up with a new product. Say, for instance, there is a new business problem that none of your existing SaaS products can help in solving, you can modify any of the existing products to address the business problem. You can also discover entirely new software solutions that can be a better fit. The underlying strategic action is to understand the market and discover ways in which you can solve an existing business problem or help in avoiding business challenges.
In a case where you have limited opportunities or capability to penetrate a market with your product, you may have to consider having several software solutions for varieties of clients. This growth strategy involves offering new software solutions to new and existing clients.
You can develop several products and services for your new and existing customers by understanding their business needs and the problems they are trying to solve. Product diversification requires heavy investment in research and development to build sufficient capabilities.
Diversifying your product offering is beneficial for both new and established businesses. By diversifying, you can increase revenue streams as well as reduce the overall risk of relying on a single product or market segment. Conducting a thorough market analysis will help you identify potential opportunities for expansion and create products that cater to varying customer needs. Building up a strong and experienced team to manage the product development process is essential for successful product diversification.
Having studied the four fundamental growth strategies of a B2B SaaS company, it is important we mention four necessary steps and actions you can take to unlock your company’s growth potential:
Sales motions are the combinations of general sales practices and key actions taken to increase the sales of your SaaS product. It sets a good direction for your sales executive on how best to go about their sales activities. It helps you identify qualified leads that can help you grow your sales conversion rate.
Practical steps to starting a sales motion could be to integrate customer profile platforms that enable you to evaluate your customers. In that way, you can determine how best to approach them and the type of products to introduce to them.
Having a good registration can be effective in supporting your sustainable growth. Creating a two-page checkout can be helpful here. Rather asking clients to provide their personal and card details on a single page may be a turn-off.
You should consider splitting it, requesting their details on a page and their card details on the other. You can integrate third-party services such as Google to make signing up easier. Also, minimize the use of mandatory fields when asking customers to sign up on your page.
A powerful action to grow your business is content creation as it helps to grow SaaS businesses rapidly. Content marketing entails creating several video content, blog write ups, among others. In that way, you can increase your digital visibility and create more awareness about your product offerings.
For instance, if you have software solutions that are relevant in the engineering industry, create credible content about relevant issues in the engineering industry and how your software solution can help you solve the problem.
You can also give helpful tips on how to resolve operational issues, industry trends, thereby boosting your ability to increase your customer base, ultimately, sales.
Customers are happy to engage you in business when they get real-time information and support services from you. In that regard, you can integrate online chat rooms where your salespersons get to interact with customers and provide them with a full description of your product offerings and the services you render.
Prospective clients can also book sales, request a product demo, or sign up for free consultation calls. This helps you to increase your sales conversion rate, thereby resulting in business growth.
As a SaaS company, you should understand and explore the five growth hacks you need to become a successful business. These hacks work for business expansion both in the short-term and long term. To hack your business growth, there are some necessary actions you have to take to make the growth hack effective and meaningful. Not taking these steps can adversely affect your business or bloat your operating costs. These strategic actions are:
After reviewing these strategic actions, you can now explore the growth hacks highlighted below:
Network invitations are not only effective for social media applications, they are also credible tools that work in promoting businesses. In a case where your SaaS product can be used by several individuals, you can create a shared platform or network invitation which allows many users to connect and share B2B networks.
You can also create simple templates that your active users can utilize in reaching their networks via social media or emails. Through this, your clients see you beyond just a random business, they perceive you as an essential part of their business operation. As such, it becomes easy for them to engage you in business and buy more of your products.
One of the smart ways to become a bigger company is by providing a useful and powerful tool for your customers to utilize. As a SaaS company, your clients are businesses, and happy customers are driven by profitability.
Hence, they will be attracted to services that help them reduce costs. By creating free tools that positively impact their business operations and help them reduce costs, your customers will be more familiar with your brand, in that way, boosting the chances that they will buy your products.
Explore possible ways that you can help businesses improve their processes by creating free useful tools for them. Ultimately, you will more likely attract more customers and retain the existing ones.
Naturally, people tend to connect with people that they trust or can share information with. See your clients as part of your networks and share relevant information with them.
By implementing an inbound marketing strategy and engaging with them, any potential customer will be more comfortable with you. Sharing good content online and among your user base also promotes your brand awareness, in that way, making your products and services more appealing to your clients.
Beyond publishing the content yourself, you can take it a step further by making it easy for your clients to use and share it online. The basic features of your content strategy should include instant share buttons, relevant hyperlinks to your website, and previous posts, among others. These activities will help in reinforcing your brand presence, thereby increasing your brand awareness, and contributing to your business growth.
If you have a B2B SaaS application, you should consider integrating it with other relevant applications. This will allow you to leverage the dataset on both software applications.
It also promotes brand awareness and increases the number of users of the two applications. Being the owner of the API makes the job a lot easier for you as you can take control of the data on the applications. As such, your applications and customer data can be safe and secured to a large extent.
Another growth hack you should explore is email marketing. This is because all businesses have official email addresses, making them potential recipients of every information you share via mails. As a SaaS business, you should leverage this opportunity by taking deliberate marketing efforts to grow your mail recipients list.
It was revealed that 87% of fast-growing SaaS companies adopt the use of email marketing. The reason is that if it’s highly cost-effective and does not require too much time, you can reach a larger audience quickly. Although, it can be challenging when trying to grow your mailing list. Nonetheless, the impact on the growth of your business cannot be overemphasized.
After putting in all the hard work to develop and implement growth strategies, combining your growth plan with a structured and well-defined marketing strategy will ultimately trigger solid business performance. According to Forbes, about half of businesses fail before completing their first five years of business operations. This is largely due to an ineffectual marketing strategy or program. Hence, we have highlighted key marketing tips that can contribute to the growth of your business:
The first step to having an effective marketing strategy is by developing a good plan. This involves defining who your target audience is, what business challenges are they facing, how can your product help them solve the problem, what are the essential features of your products and how can you make them attractive to your audience.
You can also understudy your competitors to know what they are doing differently, how their product is fairing in the market, what the market thinks about their products and brands, among others. These among other important questions will guide you to having an effective marketing plan.
If you intend to grow your business, owning a good and interactive website is non-negotiable. You have to reinforce your online presence to deepen your market penetration. Several website-building tools and supports can guide you through, hence, you may not have to spend heavily on coming up with a website.
It is important that you create a website that is dynamic and easy to modify as you may have to make changes on the website along the line. Also, your website should load quickly, be interactive, easy to navigate, and should have relevant support services. This helps to improve your customer engagement, thereby fostering your brand presence.
This is an essential aspect of any growth marketing plan as it helps you reach a larger audience. Build a list of your mail recipients and share valuable content with them. You can grow your list by creating incentives for clients who provide their mail addresses.
You can also give out credible information on your website and tell clients to provide their emails before they can access it. Also, social media activities are essential here. Utilize several social media platforms to share content and provide timely information about your brand and products.
Create social media channels and online forums and communities for your business to contribute to discussions online. This strategy fosters your brand awareness, positioning you as an expert in the industry.
Since 2002, Insivia has been helping SaaS companies grow and acquire and retain users. We’ve helped new and established SaaS platforms redefine how they talk about their solution. It’s time to scale your SaaS business. Let’s talk today.