How to Drive Viral Growth For Your SaaS Company

Consistently acquiring new users for your SaaS business is critical to increasing your monthly recurring revenue (MRR). Increasing your customer base also increases your chances of conducting valuable research to reduce churn.

Virality is where the product essentially promotes itself and is one of the most exciting phenomena in the digital age. There is no guarantee that you will be able to create custom viral products, but there are many ways to design, develop and position products to provide opportunities and create a foundation for viral growth. 

In terms of marketing budget, acquisition costs are decreasing and conversions to monetize are increasing. So how do you create conditions for the viral growth of online content, products, and services?

Best Viral Growth Strategies for SaaS Companies

Essentially, viral marketing encourages consumers to share their messages with other consumers. This message may be brand and product-related information. Viral marketing isn’t a form of marketing like email marketing or social media marketing. It involves customizing your current marketing strategy so your message can spread quickly.

If you do it right and your campaign makes word of mouth, your brand is more likely to get false coverage and improve important KPIs. A powerful system allows you to turn impressions into leads, email lists, social media, and web traffic.

Audience understanding

Only interested consumers share, so make sure you can properly activate and engage consumers before designing your viral strategy.  To get to this point, consumers need to make sure that the product has a huge advantage. Advertisers and invitees need to be clear about the benefits of the product. Complex price propositions will ruin the change.

Create engaging content for specific platforms

Viewing or viewing content is one sure way to increase the viral growth. In B2C, it was common to share entertainment such as games, funny videos, photos, and jokes. Think about how YouTube and the big social media and sharing platforms came out.

For a B2B marketplace, distribute something of value like content or business tools. Think SlideShare. Or consider real-time communication. You could also leverage email to get a word about that giveaway planned for next week. If you have a tempting offer, people will be more than pleased to click the forward button. This can increase the virality of your SaaS brand. 

Integration with other ecosystems used by the audience

The strongest trigger is the one that looks completely light, so you need to find a way to easily access user contacts. It’s not a good idea to ask someone to leave the app and send an email manually. Hence, other ecosystems are full of lead, making it the best driver for viral growth. Integrate with your email system, API (especially social media), or phone apps to take the next step.

Make it easy to share

Yesware and Rapportive are good examples of products that spread very well to target groups. It’s worth it, so users can get in touch with each other without any additional sharing features. Because it’s integrated with Gmail, it all comes from voice and language. You need to write an email like “John, look at Rapportive. That’s great” in 2 seconds. That means I am supernatural. If you’ve already written a letter, the extra swap feature doesn’t help.

Hackpad doesn’t even have a share button. Sharing happens naturally when you want to show a document to others. With Facebook and Google integration, you don’t need to know potential email addresses. When you start typing, a drop-down list of links will appear, select the link you want and the document will be shared.

Utilizing presence in existing networks

You cannot force users to share their actions through social media or email. They have to do it alone. However, it can provide timely sharing in user feeds. With Scoop, you can automatically publish your content to 8 different platforms, and that’s what you have to cover more. The latest kid on the block, Clubhouse, is also a great platform to tap into if you’re already there. Did you know that you can even become an influencer on Clubhouse?

This strategy works because most of us don’t mind sharing the word from people hanging out in the communities we follow. But this doesn’t work for more personal cases. Passive sharing may go unnoticed, but users can manually share tracks, albums, artists, and more. Overall, this is a great combination of passive and active sharing.

Find more opportunities

Many products benefit from a so-called “power-based” strategy. Some experts say “this is 2003”, but “Powered by” is still popular. How does it work? We post small links to our products on our customers’ websites so they can advertise when they use them.

There’s always something users can share in view-only mode, and it’s a great opportunity to show off the tools they’ve been using. Quoterolls is a quote management system. 90% of active users send offers to business partners by sending links to mycompany.quoteroller.com, so your brand is instantly known.

The strategy covers 5 to 7% of paid consumers per month, and Quoteroller’s Sasha Kovalev said, “The results are clear without much effort.” That’s my point. Well-designed viral channels give consumers little input every month.

Also Read: How to sell Saas Business

Use of fun elements

In most cases, you don’t have to spend money to please the product users. Trello uses a different strategy than Trello Gold. They offer special backgrounds, stickers, customizable emoticons, and… fun features like avatar crowns. So, in addition to more memory (250MB instead of 10MB per card), you can feel special!

Let consumers recommend your product

If sharing your content and activity isn’t enough, you can experiment with our referral program. In this case, the quality of the stock is much more important than the quantity. Spam invitations no longer work, so be careful when introducing referral features.

You should get a message telling you to cut down on invitations from consumers and focus on the right friends for your product. Giving benefits to both parties is a better way to get users involved in the invite process more than clicking “Invite All Friends”.

Uber, for example, gives $10 to every friend you recommend (you can refer up to 30 friends this way), and, according to the available data, a free ride in one of Uber’s most important drivers.

Use Referral marketing

Referral marketing, also known as word of mouth marketing, is still one of the strongest forms of marketing. Many older companies still rely heavily on word of mouth marketing through customer addresses. Modern SaaS companies can also use their online referral programs to simulate this type of marketing. Referral programs are systems that allow brands to reward customers for acquiring new customers.

The referral program is designed to grow your business exponentially. A successful referral reward program will continue to attract new customers. The more new customers a company acquires, the larger its customer base and business. Referral programs can also help drive viral growth. The more people participating in the program, the more likely you are to receive new referrals.

Partner with Influencers

Just as you can find influencers in other industries, you can take to LinkedIn and other b2b social platforms to identify SaaS influencer to partner with. Once done, reach out to him/her with a collaboration proposal that involves endorsing your SaaS products with their followers. It might be difficult to get in touch with those high-profile influencers, but don’t consider this as a disadvantage. In fact, focus on building relationships with micro-influencers who have a greater affinity with their audience.

In terms of influencer content, you could have the expert review your product, or invite someone else from the industry to co-discuss the salient features of your offerings. After the influencer shares the content with their followers, make sure to share the post on your own social media profiles and other channels. Cross-promotion is one of the most underutilized tactics for making a SaaS product viral among audiences. 

Conclusion

Virality is indeed a great way to get new users for free and reduce customer acquisition costs. Free users are a great place to start, so it’s worth taking advantage of viral opportunities. However, it is important to understand the basics, so let’s first rely on the most popular misconceptions.

But virality isn’t the only function. This is the design principle. This is not the result of luck. Designed. Don’t force users to use the random access button. You need to understand your audience and design user flows that lead to sharing.

SaaS companies can indeed benefit from a well-designed viral strategy that increases free customer acquisition. Mix the above ideas and see what works best for you. Leave a description of your problem in the comments and we will be happy to suggest promising combinations of share and reference features for our products.

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