E140: Growth Strategies Beyond Paid Ads

Paid ads are great for validating your B2B SaaS value proposition, but the exercise may be expensive if the PPC (pay per click) budget to compete in your industry is expensive.  Let’s talk an alternative growth strategy that also works really well and will cost you a lot less.

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Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here and today, one I want to talk to you about are growth strategies for your B2B SaaS that goes beyond paid advertising. Now, I talk a lot about Google search ads, and I like it for various reasons. Number one, it’s quick and easy to determine its cost effectiveness and enables you to relatively easily figure out whether or not your value proposition has strength.

Now, having said that, it may not always be cost effective given. The particular industry or product that you’re building. This is why I’m such an advocate for doing that research up front before you build, before you decide where you want to build. As I mentioned in a previous episode, I’m now building a new B2B SaaS or working on one that is very competitive.

The industry that it’s in, people are just throwing money at. Ads in order to kind of get traffic in that way. As such, if I went to try to compete with them, they would easily crush me or more realistically kind of just drown me out. So I’m not gonna go head to head there. But what may make more sense are a few other options, and this is where it really is important for you to dive deep into who your customer is, who the buyer is.

Understanding those personas, really understanding their industry, the problems that they experience, how they go about solving them. Because it starts to help you understand how they think, where they go, what they do. And depending on the questions that you may ask them, you can learn even more about that as well.

You can figure out other ways to connect with them as an audience, because at the end of the day, what you’re trying to do is get your product in front of them to see whether or not they have value for it. So other options here, if paid advertising isn’t where you want to begin. It could include any number of options.

The other two primary ones that I leverage is call email. Still that can work if you do it really well. And SEL search engine optimization. I typically think of SEO as basically the organic version of the paid ads. So in the beginning, your domain doesn’t have authority, so you’re investing in paid advertisement to try to get.

The right eyeballs on your landing page to see how well it’s converting. Now, if the budget there makes sense, Aspen, assuming you wanna spend relatively conservatively, then that as an option will work. However, if it doesn’t, something like an investment in SEO will ultimately provide you with essentially free organic traffic if you’re able to climb those search rankings.

But getting there isn’t free and it can take a while. So it’s a kind of a different approach. If you’ve ever heard the kind of hunting versus farming analogy, I would apply kind of the hunting analogy or the hunting version to the ads option and the farming one to seo. But doing them both, uh, can be really powerful.

Doing either out of the gate can work, it’s just they’re not necessarily gonna have the same level of effectiveness. One’s got a longer tail, and that would be the SEO option. And this is where cold email comes in, because I think this is another good, relatively quick. But, uh, can be a cost effective way to determine whether or not the product that you’re working on has, is ultimately gonna be cost effective.

You can leverage a number of different platforms to work up. A sequence of messaging that can be more personalized than most people send. That is a really critical factor in the success of leveraging this as a tactic, because most people are sending largely generic messages, but the more customized yours are, the more specifically are to the needs of your target market, the better you’re gonna be able to do in terms of performance, and then ultimately measuring the strength of your value proposition, and you’ll likely be able to do that.

Much more cost effectively. That’s more than likely what I’m gonna do In this case, I’m gonna leverage one or both of those other strategies for now so that I can get the information that I need without having to burn through a crazy budget in order to try to make ads work. Because the PPC for the industry that I’m targeting now, it’s just astronomical.

It’s like really expensive. So anyway, I wanted to share with you other growth strategies beyond paid advertising because there’s plenty.