How We Grew SaaS Inbound Traffic By 300% In 6 Months

During the second half of 2015 we put together a plan to dramatically increase the amount of inbound sales traffic to our SaaS marketing site.

In April we were averaging roughly 3,000 visits a day, all of this was coming via existing inbound marketing techniques. We knew that if we could increase this number that our daily customer signups should follow the same trajectory.

Our initial goal was to double this number in just 6 months, so by the end of 2015 we should have roughly double the number of users hitting our sales site, and double the number of users signing up to use our product – Gleam.

Our plan was to attempt to do this with entirely organic growth. No paid acquisition sources, just traffic that we could scale without needing to scale ongoing budgets.

But where do you start? What kind of activity do you focus on? How much content should you write?

Most SaaS businesses have many different levers that they can pull to influence growth.

In this post I’m going to share with you our favourite inbound tactics that helped us overachieve our rather optimistic goal by more than 50%.

When we first launched our blog we focused on the fairly narrow topic of Sweepstakes Marketing. Whilst meaningful to some, we ended up alienating much of the marketing world looking for actionable advice (and crossover into commonly used techniques).

We made the decision to rebrand and focus on tactics anyone can use to grow your business.

This instantly opened up to a much wider variety of possible content ideas, and really ignited a fire inside me to build a blog that was both exciting to read and useful (whilst also allowing us to promoting our own product).

We didn’t write a large volume of articles, but set ourselves the task of writing at least 2 really epic ones per month. We also focused on evergreen articles that would be as relevant yesterday as they are tomorrow, we wanted the content to consistently bring value for years to come.

Much of our content revolves around 5 content pillars: Engaging, Inspiring, Emotional, Trusted and Simple

Our most successful articles were:

• 15 Pre-launch Growth Hacking Strategies For Startups (200k views)
• 1 Simple Trick To Grow Your YouTube Subscribers By 400% (150k views)
• Growing A YouTube Business to 100k Followers In 5 Months (140k views)
• 50 Gleam Growth Hacks (110k views – This is an interesting one, more on it later)
• 16 Ways To Grow Your Instagram Followers (100k views)
• 15 Tactics For Getting Early Traction For Your Startup (90k views)

Some tips for writing similar content yourself:

• Use a tool like SEMRush to identify what users are searching for
• Write good long-form articles (at least 1500 words)
• Make your Title catchy, make it stand out. Gone are the days of overly engineered SEO titles

• Make your posts actionable, give users something to do
• Use great imagery

The result of this change drives an extra 40k visits per month to our Blog (and growing by around 10% each month).

One of the hard things about starting a blog is getting your posts seen enough to get shared. Usually this involves a lot of relationship building and outreach.

However we were lucky enough at the time to come across Buffer Suggestions.

Buffer Suggestions allowed you to recommend content that would be automatically put into a Suggestions list for every single Buffer user to share automatically.

This particular tactic helped us get over 10k shares on our Pre-launch guide.

Sadly they retired the service in August, but the key takeaway here is that if your content is good enough – all you need is to find a catalyst to get it in-front of people. There’s a bunch of alternative, similar services in the link above.

I mentioned Evergreen Content previously, I think it’s important to go into this type of content in more detail – if done right it can provide huge ROI.

Evergreen Content is content that will always be fresh, or can easily be updated to stay fresh based on market changes.

Our product focuses on lost of different market segments. Growing your business on social networks, building your email list or just marketing your business.

A quick search on Google Keyword Planner reveals that there’s just over 6k monthly searches for keywords relating to: How to Grow Your Business

Once you know the area you want to tackle you now need to think about the sort of content that will provide huge value for that search. For Evergreen content this can usually come in the form of a list or a long form article.

We chose to write about: 36 Small Business Growth Marketing Tips

When writing your own Evergreen content try to come up with the 10 most important words you’d like to rank for in search engines. Then start building the content around those topics.

Some other Evergreen keywords we focused on included:

growing your email list
growth hacking
facebook marketing
growing instagram followers
prelaunch
growing youtube channel
instagram contest
facebook contest
business growth

Some of things we ensure that our Evergreen articles do:

• We deep link across our blog to other relevant articles

• We try to write about content that won’t go out of date
• We have a revisit schedule to keep old content fresh (if certain tactics become irrelevant for example)
• We try to write Evergreen articles from questions that customers ask, this means we can also use them as an educational resource, or link them from support tickets

This article drives 1,500 visits per month alone to the blog and is growing steadily each month. Our Evergreen content makes up for over 80% of our total content marketing visits.

Now that we were seeing an increase in Blog traffic, we needed a way to continually engage and market to those users.

The absolute best way to do this is to manage your own Email List. We have grown our own list from 2k to 10k subscribers in the last 6 months.

How did we do this you ask?

You need to focus on the value for the subscriber. What are they going to get from you?

It just so happens that we had been working on our own App for building email lists called Capture. It’s a behavioural list building tool that allows you to show opt-in forms based on user behaviours.

We decided to see how well our product performed by implementing it on our own blog:

• We created a Growth Tips Newsletter, that we email the best tactics to each month
• We display how many other users are members of our list (for social proof)
• We make the list feel like an important members only club

• Creating in-post notifications with bonus content
• Creating educational pop-ups that show when users have engaged with a specific article
• Incentivizing users to leave a comment with our Disqus tactic

Optimising this workflow allowed us to increase our opt-in rate by 1000%, before we were collecting ~10 emails per day via traditional opt-in forms, now we consistently do over 100 (sometimes 500 when running a contest).

How We Grew Our Email List by 1000%

You can get a complete overview of all the tactics we used to grow our email list in this post.

We are lucky to have the resource to focus heavily on Integrations. We currently integrate with over 50+ services – including social networks and email providers.

But – when you integrate with another business there’s a couple of ways you can approach it.

• You can silently announce the integration without their knowledge
• You can attempt to work with their marketing department to do a joint launch

One of these methods works much better than the other, but also takes a lot more time and effort to execute.

Launching an integration properly can allow you to:

• Get exposure on the partners App Store
• Get featured in Newsletters
• Get the Integration announced on Social Media
• Do joint Webinars or Case Studies

Our current most popular integration has over 5000 joint customers using it.

In fact you can see a HubSpot writeup their experience with our product. This wouldn’t have been possible if we didn’t already have a HubSpot integration.

Integrations can also allow you to break into Adjacent Markets. These are new verticals with new types of customers that use your product in a slightly different way, or a complimentary way (when combined with another service).

A good portion of our growth can be attributed to tapping into some of these markets in the last 6-12 months:

• Event Marketing (We added an Eventbrite integration)
• E-Sports (We added Steam + Twitch integrations)
• Subscription Boxes – We had the this happen organically via a few big Reddit Posts

An important part of growing your business is understanding the type of content that your core demographic is looking for.

For us, many of our customers are looking for guides on how to run a contest. So we built out a whole section with really in-depth guides on what people are looking for.

These guides are read by more than 50k users every month.

We also focused on writing guides that show people how to use our product. You’ll notice above that one of the guides has been read over 100k+ times in the last 6 months.

We link to this guide in:

• Almost every email that we send
• On all social media channels
• In employee email signatures
• In nearly every support email
• Even in our Linked-in profiles

It is vitally important that you have guides that show users the potential of your product.

I don’t know about you, but I usually find most case studies really boring. We purposely wanted to make our case studies engaging, so we decided that we would add 5 Key Growth Takeaways to each.

Quite often these takeaways are completely unrelated to our product, but they really add value to the case study and make it much more actionable and enjoyable to read.

Here’s a quick example of just one of the takeaways in a Case Study:

This has really helped our case studies be….less like case studies.

Where possible we always try to use our own product to an advantage. This means that if ever there’s a partnership opportunity we will try to do some joint marketing or giveaway our own products.

Why do this I hear you ask?

It’s possibly the cheapest form of marketing you’ll ever do, if you can get free exposure to another businesses entire customer-base and also provide huge value to them. Then it’s a huge win win situation.

Gleam makes it super easy to do partnership marketing campaigns, just work with your partner to decide on the prize, how you want users to enter. Then get everyone involves to promote the campaign.

If you’re stuck for ideas we’ve created this huge guide on promoting these types of campaigns.

Our most recent contest drove over 10k social actions in just 24 hours, with an actual monetary outlay of around $500. When you compare this to the ROI on what we spend on Google or Facebook Ads it outperforms them as a channel by 500% (for us).

Probably our biggest driver of growth involves users that are exposed to our campaigns that contain branding. This accounts for over 30% of referrals to our marketing site.

Over a year ago we split tested our footer branding to see what could be better than Powered By Gleam.

Then we spent almost 6 months split testing which combinations of branding would get the most benefit out of this traffic. We knew as we added more customers we would see the incremental gains come in (and be able to forecast easier).

Things we tested included:

• Widget branding
• Links in emails
• When users interacted with our demos
• Notification emails post entry
• Examples in our guides or blog posts

One caveat here is that this entire marketing channel is much easier to optimise when you have a free user-base. But the downside is that you increase your support costs, your running costs and a number of various other factors to consider.

For Gleam though, this method drives an additional 1M+ visitors through our inbound marketing channels every 6 months.

Obviously every business and website is completely different.

My biggest suggestion is to continually test what you think might work, then scale all the things that do work as hard as you can.

Here’s a quick list of ideas to try:

• Get better at collecting emails
• Get better at sending emails to customers/prospects
• Write more engaging content that is actionable
• Build great docs that really teach your customers how to use your product
• Work on your on-boarding to increase conversion rates
• Build dedicated landing pages (i.e. growing a Kickstarter) for key terms that users search to find your products
• Write guest posts for other blogs in your industry
• Convert your popular posts to slideshare presentations
• Run regular webinars to educate potential customers

Now get to it, and have fun growing your own business in 2016. Here’s a more detailed look back at how we grew our business in 2015 💪

• 14 Tips on Marketing a New Business
• How to Use Content Pillars in Your Content Strategy
• 15 Pre-launch Strategies For Your Business
• Master These 15+ Early Stage Growth Strategies
• Where to Find Your First Customers
• How to Grow to Over 100 Customers
• How to Grow Your E-Commerce Sales With Gleam