I've found that many fast-growing saas companies do NOT use ads for their growth.
Digitalocean is one of them, do you think that it's all thanks to word-of-mounth?
DigitalOcean makes pretty extensive use of ads for retargetting & etc. Try going to their site then browsing Youtube or Twitter, for example. I've seen enough of the "You've been coding like a beast..." video to last me several lifetimes.
Content marketing into emailed drip campaigns and/or retargetting is a pretty powerful formula in many SaaS businesses. Scalable content creation can be a pretty powerful force multiplier at lots of businesses, including SaaS businesses.
A service which is remarkable enough to mention to friends, or which intrinsically gets mentioned to other people in the course of typical use (e.g. Basecamp), is a nice asset to have, too, but many SaaS companies grow without those advantages.
It all comes down to what your application does, your target market and where your customers hangout. Here is a technique that can fit almost any product, you can even use this for validation before building your product.
1) Identify several use cases and features for your application (preferably more than 10). Examples for a project management SaaS app:
- Project Management
- Time Tracking
- Increase Productivity
- Team Collaboration Tools
2) Build a keywords list, you want to get 3 to 5 keywords for every use case.
3) Create landing pages targeting every use case and feature. Use the keywords you previously identified in the page title. You should have good and useful content on these pages and it should focus on converting visitors into customers.
4) Build inbound links for your homepage and every landing page. Analyze backlinks of your competitors and related products using http://www.ranksignals.com (disclosure: I built RankSignals). This should get you an idea of how to get links and how many links you need.
5) Reach out to as many blogs as possible and pitch your product. Don't just focus on most popular tech blogs, every single link helps; even a local mom blog.
With in few days or weeks (depending upon your competition and execution), you could start ranking on search engines for most of the keywords you are targeting, and it will start driving a growing stream of organic SEO traffic to your product. Industry influencers and bloggers will also start noticing your product and write about it. This will drive even more traffic and links.
This will build an organic marketing flywheel which will bring new customers and continue to grow every single month. You can scale this by creating more landing pages and useful content like guides and tutorials. DigitalOcean does this very well, their community content portal (https://www.digitalocean.com/community/) drives majority of their organic traffic.
Nice analysis/strategy description. I just want to add that one of the primary reasons why saas companies increase in size, is because they provide convenience. It seems that the SEO strategy increases convenience by having a relevant guide/tutorial for each use case. Which makes it easier for the short-in-time managers making the decisions whether or not to use this or that saas company's services.
Content marketing into emailed drip campaigns and/or retargetting is a pretty powerful formula in many SaaS businesses. Scalable content creation can be a pretty powerful force multiplier at lots of businesses, including SaaS businesses.
A service which is remarkable enough to mention to friends, or which intrinsically gets mentioned to other people in the course of typical use (e.g. Basecamp), is a nice asset to have, too, but many SaaS companies grow without those advantages.