Marketing and growing a startup is one of the most difficult things for business owners today. There is stiff and fierce competition out there, and entrepreneurs have to walk an extra mile to gain traction and growth.

For the IT and SaaS industry, it seems that there is always a new app or product in the market every hour. You have to stand out as the best to attract clients and grow your brand.

As a startup, there are some of the hacks you can employ to grow your business and achieve the desired level of growth in the industry.

Here are the top growth hacking tips for SaaS startups:

1- Invest in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the best strategies you can employ to grow your small business. There are millions of websites competing for online visibility, and that means you should make your website unique to stay at the top of search engines. 

Optimizing your site for organic, local, and international searches is one way of making your brand more visible online.

Here are some SEO tips you can apply to make your business appear big, improve rankings, and drive more clients your way.

●  Make your website mobile-friendly – A significant portion of web traffic comes from mobile devices. As the number of smartphone users keeps growing, when you make your website mobile-friendly, you are more likely to drive traffic your way and increase the conversion rate.

●  Improve user experience – You should focus on creating the web pages for the user and not search engines. Focus more on Google guidelines for creating web pages and improving your website to target user experience. 

●  Improve page loading speed – If your website takes longer to load, it can easily drive away your target audience.

●  Get featured snippets – You get more visibility on search engines when your business appears on featured snippets. Follow this voice SEO guide to increase your chances of appearing in featured snippets.

●  Work on your meta tags – You should focus on optimizing your meta titles, meta tags, and meta descriptions to boost your traffic and impressions.

2- Leverage the Power of Data Science 

Data science is all about finding the hidden patterns in raw data. Once you gather the knowledge to decode big data, it helps you find insights that can help you develop a marketing strategy for your business to grow its customer base.

There are various website analytics tools such as Finteza that you can use to analyze visitor behavior. Finteza offers advanced web analytics to recognize bot traffic, provides a LightHouse report to identify and fix issues related to slow site speed, and helps you automate your funnels by pages, events, and sources.

Data science is one way to hack growth in your business. It helps you with:

●  Market basket analysis – You can find out why the strategy you employ does not get a lot of engagement and gives low returns.

●  Customer segmentation – You can easily grow customers according to their exceptional characteristics such as age, gender, region, and buying behavior. This way, you choose a marketing strategy that works for each market segment and increase your conversion rate.

●  Funnel optimization – Data science helps marketers develop a full-funnel optimization and get all the way down to increased revenue, referral, and customer retention.  

●  Insights and experimentation – Applying data science is one way of looking at the causal relationships in market segments and creating an effective marketing campaign that can grow your ROI.

3- Offer a Freemium Option 

The truth is that when you enter the IT market as a first-timer, you should focus more on giving your customers a reason to buy your brand.

Create a subscription model for your products and allow your customers to try your services for the first time. A freemium option helps your customers to try the product before they can finally decide whether to buy it or not.

4- Pre-launch On Third-Party Platforms 

You can quickly gain an outward perspective of your brand by launching it on third-party platforms like Product Hunt, Medium, and LinkedIn. Submit your new product on these platforms and give real people that chance to discuss and share it with others. Users discuss the latest mobile applications, tech creations, websites, and hardware projects on these platforms.  

They also get to vote on the best or favorite projects. When users comment and vote on your project, you get the feedback you need to improve your product. Also, your product will be receiving the much-needed exposure and online visibility which is necessary for growth. 

Most third-party platforms like LinkedIn and Product Hunt also give you the chance to meet and interact with leading industry experts. You can find a helping hand with your PR, product billing, product engineering, and social media marketing. This is the most effective growth hack strategy for any startup out there.

5. Ask Bloggers To Review Your Product 

Another way you can grow your SaaS startup is to work closely with influencers and bloggers. Email marketing is a great way to reach niche bloggers. You can use any of these email apps to send your emails in bulk. Influencers will mention your product to their followers and drive some sales your way. On the other hand, bloggers can review your products and get people to like them.

If you are launching a new product in a highly competitive market, you can reach out to bloggers to explain all the ins and outs of the product. When your target customers go through your product descriptions published on authority blogs, they learn more about your brand. 

Bloggers can also help you create that social proof, which is fundamental to helping prospects trust your brand. You can pay bloggers to review your products. Also, you can launch affiliate marketing and offer a commission to bloggers for any sales you make through their websites. 

Final Thoughts 

As a startup, there are many strategies you can employ if you want to grow and stay ahead of the competition. One of the most effective ways to grow your customer base is to create brand awareness on social media, work with influencers, offer freebies, and tap into the power of SEO.

Before creating a marketing strategy, you should also use data science and market research to learn more about your target audience.