Why Smart SaaS Brands Use Growth Marketing

Many startups use growth hacking to quickly increase brand awareness and grow their user base. But tactics will only get you so far. As your company and business model matures, you'll need to take a more scientific approach to see a significant impact on overall growth. Over the past decade, growth marketers have replaced traditional marketers. Let's go over exactly what growth marketing is, what a growth marketing team looks like, why software companies should focus on growth strategies, and how First Page uses growth strategies at different stages of the customer journey.

To quickly scale your SaaS business while protecting profits, you need to focus on growing monthly recurring revenue and increasing customer retention. Over the last decade, content marketing was considered the cost-effective alternative to paid media to attract and nurture customers. But recently, customer acquisition costs (CAC) for content marketing have skyrocketed, closing in on the CAC of paid media.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) Content vs. Paid 

Patrick Campbell, CEO of ProfitWell, says, “We’re finally seeing content marketing coming to its own and mature just like the paid world did five years ago.” 

Even though content quality is going up, content effectiveness is going down. In 2018, the average number of shares per post fell by 90 percent compared to two years prior. Why? Saturation. Virtually everyone and their mom has a blog. The search competition is fierce. It’s hard to get a spot on Google's first page and even harder to keep your ranking unless you have a strategy that involves optimizing and refreshing your content for user relevance and search intent.

That’s where growth marketing comes in. It increases your chances to attract, convert, and nurture customers. By the end of this article, you’ll be convinced that content coupled with growth marketing strategies is the most profitable way to get more traffic, leads, and, most importantly, exponential recurring revenue. You’ll also get a better understanding of how First Page uses growth marketing as a catalyst for your content and SEO so you see better and faster results.

What Exactly Is Growth Marketing? 

A growth marketing strategy is used when companies want to deliver fast and scalable growth. It accelerates business growth by focusing on building awareness quickly and reducing customer acquisition costs (CAC) to increase topline revenue while protecting profits. Protecting profitability is important because when companies grow too quickly, ramping up marketing burns through cash faster than seeing the return on investment from customer lifetime value (CLV). There has to be a balance for sustainable growth. A smart growth marketing strategy acquires customers in a cost-effective way by optimizing your marketing efforts with data.

Growth marketing is agile and iterative. It starts with the assumption that there is no right answer, only a theory you test to see if it works. After you analyze the results, you scale the successful strategies. Successful growth marketing campaigns often require a team of designers, developers, product marketers, and content marketers to create supporting assets like landing pages. Whatever channel or tactic you choose, the goal is to find new ways to generate leads, optimize conversion rates, and nurture customers. 

Before digging into how growth marketing makes your SaaS product more profitable, it helps to understand why growth marketing is so important for SaaS companies.

Why Tech and SaaS Brands Should Focus on Growth Marketing 

“Growth marketing is when you focus all of your business efforts on growing an audience (or community) as fast as possible in an environment of extreme uncertainty, on a limited budget.” 

– Derric Haynie, Chief Ecommerce Technologist of Ecommerce Tech

The challenge you face as a venture-backed SaaS company is showing value in a short amount of time. The pressure to grow your sales quickly with a small budget makes growth marketing the perfect method to increase revenue. Understanding the metrics that drive the strategy to grow your audience is key. 

While implementing growth marketing, you gather insights that save you money, like a customer’s content affinity or behavior. Here’s how. If you want to optimize your marketing spend and focus your efforts on the most effective strategies, you need data. The way you get that data is by testing different channels and tactics at every stage of the buyer’s journey to see what performs best then scale the winners. 

It’s not the tone-deaf spray and pray outbound marketing approach. It optimizes content for conversions using intel from sophisticated machine learning from a CRM (customer relationship management) platform like HubSpot and a CDP (customer data platform) like Lytics. This creates more relevant and personal messaging based on leads’ content interactions gaining the trust of decision-makers and end-users in a shorter amount of time. 

Say goodbye to painfully long sales cycles, scheduling multiple meetings with different stakeholders, and unopened emails, and hello to pipeline acceleration, engaged customers, and increased customer lifetime value. First Page improves your content marketing ROI by reducing your content marketing customer acquisition cost (CAC).  

How First Page’s Growth Marketing Approach Accelerates Revenue 

First Page is an agency that focuses on data-driven growth marketing for tech and SaaS companies. With a solid content and SEO strategy in tandem, brands can see huge organic growth.

For example, this online business formation company grew revenue by 300 percent in just one year with First Page’s SEO and content strategy. 

Here’s how First Page’s SEO and content strategy can fuel your organic traffic: 

1. Audit your website and content to review their performance and also identify opportunities for improvement.

2. Build a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy and plan, including:

   1. A content strategy with target personas, content pillars, calendar, and

   2. An SEO strategy with onsite changes and link building

3. Refresh landing pages and create keyword pillar pages for your site

4. Build (white hat) links for pages you need to rank on the first page to drive qualified traffic

5. Publish consistent, high-quality blog posts that are optimized for SEO

6. Distribute content consistently on social media to maintain a presence and build awareness

After building an engine for driving traffic, First Page focuses on nurturing and converting lookers into buyers with high-quality content. Lead loss often occurs at the beginning and end of the buyer’s journey. Identifying the causes for dropoff in the sales pipeline is a good opportunity to create content that addresses buyer’s objections and unique pain points. This process of using relevant and personalized content to ease friction in your sales pipeline is not new. It follows HubSpot’s proven framework.

How First Page’s lead generation strategy optimizes conversion rates and increases content ROI:

• Analyze where your leads are coming from and how they’re converting

• Optimize content for better conversion rates, more downloads, and higher email open rates

• Customize messaging and timing of nurture campaigns

• Create a lead scoring model that aligns sales and marketing goals

• Build landing pages and workflows that trigger content to nurture leads

Successful lead generation requires understanding the buyer's journey and intent paths. This helps you create content that attracts high-quality traffic and converts leads.

Attract, Convert, and Retain Customers

Transforming your website and blog into a machine for growth is a complex process that requires planning, strategy, analysis, and execution. Learn how our experts will help you maximize your marketing budget and see a faster content ROI.