Businesses in B2B SaaS use email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), or social media marketing (SMM) as their primary growth strategy platforms.
All three leverage social business intelligence to understand audience behavior, improve result-oriented decision-making, and encourage sustainable business development.
However, splitting your marketing budget between email, SEO, and SMM won’t be the most cost-effective growth strategy. So, which one is the best? Let’s find out! Today, we’ll discuss:
- How to improve growth strategies with cold email
- Best growth strategies that leverage email, SEO, and SMM
- Best practices applicable for each growth strategy
Leveraging Email Marketing In Your Growth Strategy
Email marketing is the most flexible growth vehicle and can work with every growth strategy. Here are five ways to leverage cold email marketing in your growth strategy of choice.
Cold Email And Go-To-Market Strategy
The best go-to-market strategy provides immediate feedback, exactly what you get when running cold email campaigns. Each campaign offers real-time data that you can use to iterate your best-performing emails, run A/B testing, and analyze buyer intent.
Using cold email in your go-to-market strategy means building segmented email lists based on demographics, interests, and behavior. Then, you can use lead intelligence tools like Instantly B2B Finder’s news filter to enrich your email list with up-to-date, relevant information.
PLG And Email Nurturing
PLG means letting prospects see the value of your products and services themselves. Instead of selling, you can act as an adviser, sharing tips and best practices on how to use your products to meet their needs best.
This type of PLG approach is best done through automated email nurturing. Utilize email triggers to collect feedback. Ensure that each email sent provides value to specific prospect segments.
Market Expansion Through Cold Email
You can leverage email outreach campaigns to target new market segments or regions. As mentioned, we can translate our emails into the local language, making it resonate better with our new target audience.
To improve authority in the new market, collaborate with local influencers or key opinion leaders that align with your products or services. The best way to reach out to these people is through email marketing.
Marketing Product Expansion With Email Marketing
Product expansion boosts your existing customers' average order value through cross-selling or upselling. Sending emails with personalized upselling or cross-selling is an excellent way to generate revenue from customers who already trust your brand and products.
You can also include existing customers in an email nurturing campaign demonstrating the value of your new product line. Don’t focus too much on the features; discuss the benefits and how your products can solve unmet needs.
Facilitate Acquisition Through Email Marketing
Sending a killer business proposal email is essential whether you’re acquiring a company or trying to get acquired. Email is the most streamlined business communication channel for sending stakeholders updates regarding the acquisition and negotiation process.
It helps facilitate everything from customer onboarding to integration and post-acquisition nurturing. Email marketing can also be used to cross-promote products. However, ensure that you segment the customer base first before running campaigns.
Email Vs. SEO Vs. SMM
Email marketing, SEO, and SMM are excellent marketing vehicles that can generate sales for your business. Here’s what to expect from each:
Cold Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing trumps SEO and SMM when it comes to ROI. Radacti did a comprehensive study on email marketing, suggesting a potential ROI of up to 4400%. Members of our Cold Email Masterclass group on Facebook are living proof of this statistic.
Email marketing allows you to reach your ideal customers directly. To make campaigns more effective, segment and qualify your contact lists. Qualifying contact lists help you personalize and add more value to each email sent.
With tools like Instantly, you get sales email automation, unlimited email warmups, and access to over 160 million pre-verified leads through the B2B Lead Finder. Once you’ve mastered the fundamentals and started seeing results, all that’s left is to scale up campaigns.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
A key component of growth is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO involves optimizing your website and content to appear higher in search engine page results (SERP), making it easier for potential customers to find you when searching for solutions related to your business.
One way to incorporate SEO into your lead-generation efforts is by creating informative content through a company blog or resource center. By regularly publishing relevant content, you not only provide valuable information to potential customers but also increase your website's visibility in search engines.
Another aspect of SEO is backlink building. This involves getting other reputable websites to link to your website, which drives more traffic and further improves your search engine rankings.
By implementing effective SEO strategies, you can bridge the gap between your business and your target audience. This means that you will not only attract more qualified leads but also establish yourself as a credible and trustworthy source within your industry.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Social media is excellent for inbound content marketing and paid targeted campaigns. You can reach users who fit your ideal customer profile when you run PPC campaigns.
You can also partner with influencers who can promote your products. Collaborate with influencers with authority within your niche. Influencers with more followers are better for brand awareness, and those with fewer followers are better for engagement.
Types of Growth Strategies
Go-To-Market Strategy
SaaS companies launching a new product, service, or feature need a go-to-market strategy. This strategy is a series of actionable steps that cover market research and distribution.
Creating a holistic go-to-market strategy helps you target prospects that benefit most from your products or services, understand prospect sales cycles, and establish your brand in your niche.
The best way to develop your go-to-market strategy is by using a growth vehicle that provides the most feedback for your business—email marketing does just that.
With the proper tools, email sequences can be automated, measured, and scaled faster than any other growth platform.
Each campaign provides real-time insights, allowing you to adjust your strategy immediately. We’ll discuss this further later.
Product-led Growth (PLG)
Over 53% of customers prefer buying from SaaS companies without interacting with any sales personnel. Instead, you let your product sell itself to end-users, not just decision-makers.
SEO would be the best growth vehicle for leveraging PLG. That’s because end-users want to be educated first through quality content before making a purchasing decision.
The more you can convey your product’s value, the better the chances end-users will promote your products to key decision-makers in their company.
According to a SaaS IPO analysis, companies focusing on PLG, especially those with freemium models, are twice as likely to grow revenue by 100% year-over-year.
Market Expansion or Market Development
Market expansion aims to grow your total addressable market (TAM). You can expand the market by shipping to new regions, translating content for non-English speakers, or creating a different marketing angle for the same products.
One of the best examples of market expansion comes from YouTuber Mr. Beast, who created a new channel with all his videos dubbed in Spanish. His Spanish audience could just watch the original videos; dubbing them in Spanish makes them more accessible.
Accessibility is key in any market expansion campaign. For example, US SaaS companies can create ads in Norwegian to expand their TAM to potential Norwegian prospects.
Product Expansion
Product expansion focuses on adding new products or services to reach a new market segment. For example, Instantly created the B2B Lead Finder, which streamlines prospecting by providing access to a database of over 160 million pre-verified leads.
If you want to grow your business through product expansion, ensure it complements existing products, aligns with your marketing efforts, and targets a new demographic within or adjacent to your niche.
How to Improve Results Of Your Growth Strategy
After finding the best growth strategy for your business, ensure success by implementing the following best practices:
Create Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Every growth strategy needs a defined ICP. It helps pinpoint leads who benefit most from your products or services. With tools like Instantly B2B Finder, you can find leads that match your ICP with the help of advanced filters.
If you don’t have access to tools for streamlining ICP creation, use qualification and segmentation frameworks like BANT, MEDDIC, or CHAMP. Building your ICP streamlines lead generation, prospecting, and outreach personalization.
Analyze Market Position
Market position covers your potential customers, buying habits, products, and competitors. Analyzing where your product fits within the market reduces risk, helps find trends, provides benchmarks, and optimizes marketing efforts. To do a market position analysis:
- Identify which growth strategy fits your business best
- Research market trends, then use the data as benchmarks for projected growth
- Conduct competitor analysis
- Find how your product differentiates itself
- Create acquisition campaigns that align with market trend data and ICPs
Invest In Product-Led Content
If you’re aiming for a product-led growth strategy, you need to illustrate the value of your products through the content you publish. Consider how-to articles, guides for solving product pain points, or content on how your product is a better alternative than its competitors.
Investing in product-led content also helps you generate more inbound leads through your blogs, guides, webinars, podcasts, or infographics. It builds brand awareness, can be used to nurture leads, and drives product adoption.
Streamline Pricing Model
B2B SaaS companies have several pricing models to choose from. Here’s a list of the most popular models and the best growth strategy to pair them with.
Freemium Pricing Model
Freemium pricing is the bread and butter of many SaaS companies. It allows users to try the product without ever communicating with sales, and this pricing model aligns well with product-led growth strategies.
Per-User
Per-user pricing incentivizes B2B SaaS companies to maximize product value. The model charges businesses based on the number of users, making it excellent for any go-to-market strategy. Salesforce is a great example; it can be scaled as your needs grow.
Feature-Based
Feature-based pricing models work great with product or market expansion growth. Different tiers offer more features, encouraging users to upgrade as needed. ZoomInfo, for example, has flexible pricing, depending on whether you need sales, marketing, or talent acquisition features.
Flat-rate Pricing
Companies entering new markets can use flat-rate pricing models to simplify their offers, making them excellent for market expansion. You don’t have any tiers or a wide selection of features. Instead, you focus on one quality product for a “one-size-fits-all” approach.
Tiered Pricing
Tiered pricing offers prospects flexibility with their budget. It allows companies to cater to different customer segments. For example, Instantly offers Growth, Hyper Growth, and Lightspeed, which cover the needs of small businesses all the way to the enterprise level.
Track Data and Improve Strategies
There isn’t a universal growth strategy that you can just plug and play. Ensuring success means iterating on high-performing strategies and scaling down on poor-performing ones. We use data and analytics to identify which is which.
Key Takeaways
Implementing a growth strategy ensures that your business has a roadmap of actionable steps toward success. Regardless of your strategy, email marketing, SEO, and SMM have always been considered the best growth vehicles for B2B SaaS. Here’s why:
- Email marketing helps you directly communicate with prospects that fit your ICP
- SEO and SMM content marketing help you find quality inbound leads
- Focusing on SEO helps build authority in your space
- SMM provides a way to engage and build a community around your products
- Utilizing SEO, SMM, and email offers a synergistic omnichannel approach to marketing
Every business needs email, SEO, and SMM for sustainable growth. However, email marketing is the only growth vehicle allowing you to directly target your target audience at scale.
For everything email marketing, look no further than Instantly.ai! Start scaling today!
