400% revenue jump with $0 marketing budget - 9 super actionable tactics
How We Did It & Probably You Too
If you run a early or middle stage SaaS business, one of the biggest issues is increasing your revenue on a tight budget. You probably don’t have the resources or time of Salesforce to afford giant customer acquisition costs or wait 18 months to recoup these costs.
This post goes over 9 super actionable tactics that we’ve used for Ultimate mold crew (provides affordable mold removal in toronto using hi-tech devices) to increase our revenue (fast!)
- Cold Emailing
- Offer a Service With Your Product
- Monitor Slack Channels for Mentions
- Lifetime Deal
- Get blogging
- Guest Posting
- Repurpose Your Blog Posts
1. Cold Emailing
Cold emailing or outbound sales is a tactic that will probably bring very little traffic to your site, but it’s very likely to increase your revenue right out off the bat.
It will also cost you close to $0.
The premise is simple:
- You find relevant potential customers to contact.
- You offer them to solve a problem they’re currently facing.
- You get them on a call.
- You make your product demo.
- You close the deal.
Most people get this wrong in step one of the process — targeting irrelevant leads at the wrong time.
Let me give you an example of a successful outbound campaign for the first version of UMC. We prospected our target audience which were looking for mold remediation in toronto. Used various social listening & other AI tools to find where our target audience is and relevant industry bloggers. We reached out to them offering to solve this problem for them as well as bloggers for outreach.
2. Offer a Service With Your Product
By far this is the least scalable tactic on the list. But also probably the one that can bring some cash in the bank fast.
Think of ways to package your product/tool with personalized one-to-one service.
This could be:
Paid lessons by the hour — you can teach your customers to be successful with your product by providing private lessons.
Premium support — similar to the previous one but one as taxing on your time.
“Done for you” premium service as an extension of your product.
For example, at UMC we offered a “cleanup discount with 20%” and an ebook to our customers containing home care tips during covid 19. This is how we managed to close our first customers
3. Monitor Slack Channels for Mentions
1. Join as many relevant Slack groups as possible.
2. For each Slack group click on the group’s name -> Preferences like that:
3. Then click on Notification Settings.
4. At the bottom of the notification settings, you will see “Highlight Words’:
Let’s say you’re running an email marketing service.
You’re going to type in “email marketing”, “email sequences”, “drip campaigns”, etc. Every time someone mentions one of these words or phrases in the Slack group you will receive a notification.
These are usually people asking questions or interested in your topic. In other words — piping hot leads. All you have to do is DM them. Engage with them, ask them questions, sell them your product.
4. Launch your product on a lifetime deal platform
Like: AppSumo, StackSocia, MightyDeals, PitchGround.
This tactic will bring both a lot of revenue and a lot of traffic to your startup. Lifetime Deals don’t charge anything upfront. However, they get a hefty cut out of the deals sold — between 50 and 75%.
These communities have hundreds of thousands of targeted customers. They will bring hordes of startup junkies to your site and help you generate tens of thousands of dollars if not more in revenue. Considering your specific situation, this is probably your best go to revenue tactic.
The drawbacks? Since these are lifetime deals, the customer lifetime value of these people would be as big as your lifetime deal — i.e., small.
Consider the potential impact of being associated with a “discount” service like this.
Pro tip: think of ways to up-sell your lifetime deal customers.
5) Blogging
No, not the sort of blogging that teens do to express their love lives…
I’m talking about following a proper content marketing strategy that is geared towards building up your presence.
E.g the type of blogs that Commonwealth Bank posts, or Amazon, or any of the other corporate giants.
And best of all, it’s completely free.
If you have a website, you can make blog posts. And you can get more traffic as a result.
But in order to make this a viable strategy to consistently drive traffic to your website — you need to post frequently, and consistently.
Here are 6 steps to successfully drive traffic to your website using blog posts:
- Create a dedicated blog section of your website, with a link to it on your homepage
- Do some market research, and find what readers want to read about
- Pick a topic that people constantly want answers for, and make a post. Include valuable tips, tricks, and anything that can help your reader
- Continue doing this with every idea you can find. Solving any problem you can, and demonstrate your expertise
- Keep it simple at first, a post a month, or every second month. If you find some time, write some extra and keep it as a backup (incase you don’t have time to write one month). Now slowly ramp up this number, and aim to post weekly, bi-weekly, or even daily.
- Don’t just write the same way each time. Try some different styles, and see how your audience responds. Find writing that you like, and use that as inspiration to improve your own.
Did you know…
Websites with blogs are indexed 434% more than those without?
With blog posts you’ll be creating a relationship with your customers, showing that you understand them, and building more trust.
And also, it’ll boost your SEO ranks (I’ll touch more on this later).
6.) Guest Posting
Leverage the following of others to grow your own.
Is there a blogger in your industry that you follow? If you don’t follow anyone in your industry, it’s time to start. You need to know everything that’s going on in your industry.
E.g. If you run a branding & advertising agency, look at some marketing or related niche blogs or publications
Now you need to write some solid content that would help their business. Some sites will have guidelines for guest posts, make sure you follow them.
Now you need to pitch them. Send them an email or any other way you can get in contact with them. Tell them you have something you’d want them to post, and in return have a link to your website or have your name at the bottom.
What if they say no?
Hold onto your post, and take it to the next place. If you can’t find anyone to post it, just plop it onto your own blog instead.
Action Steps:
- Find industries that are related to yours
- Do some Google searches to find blogs in those industries
- Write a post that you think would benefit the website owners
- Pitch them your post
- Put links to your website, and an author section at the bottom
- Do as much as you can, your name will spread, and your traffic will increase
7.) Repurpose Your Blog Posts
You already have some content on your website. Let’s be efficient here, there’s other platforms that haven’t seen it yet.
Edit your content to fit the dynamics of that platform, and post it.
You could use LinkedIn, Medium, Quora, and anywhere your audience gathers.
Make sure you adjust your words to match the audience. And match their intent (e.g if they’re on Facebook, they’re there to have fun. Add some images and make your content enjoyable).
If you’re worried about Google penalising you for duplicate content, just wait a few weeks between posting and content repurposing.
Action Steps:
- Decide on a new channel that can benefit from your content
- Find relevant content you’ve made before, update it and make it fit the new platform you decide to post it on
- Publish it and include a backlink to your original post
- Repeat this process, but make sure you post new content too
There you go! ways to increase the revenue of your SaaS startup quickly!
In the next post I’m going to share with you our marketing automation strategy framework.
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