Top 5 Free Strategies to Promote Your SaaS - Nick Greene-apollodigital

Out of ideas on how to reach more customers?

With new marketing strategies popping up every day, you have to keep up with the competition and get some traction on your site.

In this article, we will cover the best marketing strategies for your SaaS which you can start implementing right now.

Strategy #1 - Get Featured on Media

Content that’s featured on respectable media not only looks great on your website but also brings you site traffic, new customers, and revenue.

Here’s a simple step-by-step guide on how to get featured on popular media:

Step 1: Create a list of all your competitors.

Step 2: Google all their names and find out all media websites they have been featured in.  To make your life easier, you can narrow down the search by looking up the “News” tab.

Step 3: Once you’ve made a list of all competitors, list out all the articles they’ve been featured in. Specifically, you want to note:

• Name of the media, e.g.. Business Insider
• Name of the article, e.g. Socialyte founder explains her process for choosing the right person for the job
• Name of the journalist, e.g. Don Draper
• What the article is about, e.g. Your competitor has a special way of hiring people.
• Journalist contact details. Sometimes the writer will list his/her contact details on the site. If he hasn’t though, there are a bunch of email extraction tools you can use, like Hunter.io or ClearBit Connect.

Step 4: Create a press-kit.

A press-kit is a file that contains all the information a journalist needs to know about your SaaS, like what your company does, its founders, some background information, previous press releases, and your contact information.

You can create a Google Drive folder with all the information and send the journalist a link. Alternatively, you can put everything in a ZIP file.

Here’s what you should include in your press-kit:

• Info on your company. How long have you been around? Are you VC-funded or bootstrapped?
• Info on your founding team. Who’s on the team? What other entrepreneurial experience does the team have?
• Product screenshots. What does the product look like? The journalist, in most cases, will want to use ready screenshots for their feature (and not have to make them themselves).
• Company Logo.
• Contact Information.

Step 5: Send personalized emails to all the journalists that wrote about your competitors.

The key here is personalized.

You don’t want to just randomly email them and beg for a feature.

For example, if the journalist wrote about employment in the influencer marketing SaaS industry, they might be interested in how your company recruits and finds the best people.

Because all of the articles are about something different, you need to create separate, personalized emails for each journalist. Make the email short, to the point, and relevant to the article they wrote. It might seem like a long shot, but trust us, it works. You’ll hear back from at least some of them.

Strategy #2 - Create Quality Content

With authority content, you tick off two goals with one bullet:

• You want to reach an audience that is looking for solutions to a problem you can solve.
• You want to establish your SaaS as an expert in the industry it operates in.

The path to creating authority content has two main phases:

1. Content creation
2. Content promotion

We’ll discuss both steps in detail below.

Phase 1: Content Creation

Let’s say your SaaS is an influencer marketing agency that connects different brands with influencers. Your goal is to reach both brands and influencers and then ultimately offer them your services.

So, what’s the type of authority content you should be creating?

In your case, you could create a comprehensive guide to influencer marketing.

First, through a Google search, check what others have written about the topic.

Note down what each of these guys do right and what they do wrong.

The key here is to improve on what everyone’s done, and create the best, most comprehensive no fluff content out there.

Phase 2: Content Promotion

Now, you have a great piece of content. However, it is worthless if people don’t know it exists. You want to make sure people read it and talk about it.

Here is how to get the buzz going around your article:

• Share the link on social media.
• Reach out to relevant connections and ask them to share your content.
• Share your content in relevant subreddits. Appropriate subs are /r/marketing, /r/startups, /r/ content_marketing. Be careful to not outright dump your content though. Reddit users don’t like self-promotion. That might even result in a ban. Post the link as a comment whenever someone asks a relevant question that your content answers.
• Run ads on Facebook, Twitter, and Quora.
• Submit your article on Quuu Promote.
• Reach out to people who wrote articles on a similar topic or linked a similar article.

Strategy #3 - Promote Your Product with Partner Companies

This strategy is straightforward: you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.

If there is a company out there whose product is complementary to yours, you might want to hit them up for a cross-promotion. For it to be a win-win situation, though, make sure you are at the same level in popularity and amount of users. And it goes without saying that competitors are off-limits.

Here are three great ways to do cross-promotion:

1. Product Feature Posts. You create an article featuring your partner’s product, and they feature your product in their article.
2. Run Facebook Ads. Both you and your competitor can run ads targeting each other’s audiences.
3. E-mail Users. Don’t want to go through the trouble of creating custom audiences? E-mail your users instead. Inform your audience about how the competitor’s product is complementary to yours (& why it’s the best).

Strategy #4 - Create Viral Infographics

Infographics are everywhere for a reason:

People absolutely love them. They contain a large amount of information that is compiled and visually appealing.

And the best part? Media companies love infographics. If you get one featured on different media, you can get a ton of traffic, brand awareness, and backlinks.

For example, Noodle, an online platform aimed at teaching new skills to professionals, created an infographic to show how the need for data scientists is growing. The infographic then incentivized people to visit their website to learn more about how to get these in-demand skills.

News outlets picked it up (probably by following Strategy #1) and the rest is history.

Strategy #5 - Create SEO Content

Want your content to rank on Google?

Here’s how:

Step 1: Decide on the keyword.

SEO content is complicated.

The articles you write for your blog should be dictated by keyword research (as opposed to what you think is good content).

You have to search what people are looking for online and then create content based around that. You can do this by using free keyword research tools like Google Planner or Wordtracker.

Let’s say you still operate an influencer marketing business. By running ‘influencer marketing’ in Wordtracker, you can get a good idea about what people are searching for.

Decide on a relevant keyword that (1) describes a problem your SaaS is solving, and (2) people are searching for. In this case, ‘influencer marketing platform’ is searched by 1,752 people per month. You might want to write quality content on that.

Step 2: Gather information about your keyword.

Look up your keyword and take a look at what has already been written about it by the top rankers.

So, you want to go through the top 5 ranked articles for ‘influencer marketing guide” and look for the information they all have in common.

Make note of whatever is relevant. It will also give you an idea of what your article is supposed to look like.

Step 3: Create an outline

Borrow the most relevant information from the top sites and create an outline for how your article will look like.

If your keyword is “influencer marketing platforms”, your outline should look something like this:

• Describe what influencer marketing platforms are
• Explain why influencer marketing platforms are important for growing brands
• Create a ranked list of influencer marketing platforms
• Name and functionality of the platform
• A screenshot of the platform’s webpage
• How the platform works
• Why the platform is beneficial for its customers
• Conclusion

Step 4: Write the article & optimize for SEO

By using the outline and all the borrowed information from competitors, you can now FINALLY write a killer article. You can do this yourself or by outsourcing it to a content writer.

After your article is said and done, you can optimize it for SEO by following the guidelines of YoastSEO or RankMath.

Conclusion

Getting new users is good.

Getting new users with spending any money on marketing is even better!

We hope you found this guide useful and found some new ideas on how to market your SaaS business!

Also Read:

• Different Stages of SaaS User
• Track Customer Acquisition in SaaS?
• Validate your SaaS idea before building an MVP?
• Set Pricing for Your SaaS Product?