3 Tips for Expanding Your SaaS Business
Nearly every applicable sector in IT has either shifted already or is in the process of shifting to a Software as a Service (SaaS)business model. Expansion through sustainable growth for smaller SaaS companies is still a relatively new prospect though. Taking notes from market-leading IT service providers, the following points can help you expand your own SaaS service without the usual learning curves.
Image Courtesy: AvSystem
Decide on New Features Based on Market Evaluation Data
There are several aspects to manage while planning any business expansion, but product and customer growth management are among the most critical. However, even before product expansion can come into play, one must decide on the routes to take. Ensure that all data needed to answer imperative questions such as the following are present while planning your expansion strategy:
- What is the current and predicted market value of theSaaS sector that you are working in?
- What is the current and estimated market evaluation for potential new segments within the SaaS industry that you are expanding to?
- Is your company’s market value sufficiently on a par with the industry norm for small SaaS providers?
- If your company’s market value falls below market standards within the applicable segment, is sustainable expansion even possible right now?
- What steps can you take to boost your SaaS company’s value?
- What are the most valuable SaaS features expected by clients that you are vying for with the expansion?
- Should you add new features to the present software, or launch a new, dedicated service that can cater to the new target group(s)?
Read this post on SaaS valuation and why it’s a popular business model. You should be able to gather the necessary market data and resources from there.
Create Customer Expansion Strategies: Marketing and Promotion
Once the planned new features have been incorporated by either launching a new software service or by simply adding more features to an existing software, you have successfully expanded your services in line with market demand metrics. However, that’s just one aspect of expanding a SaaS business, because we still have not discussed anything about customer expansion strategies. This part can be broken down into two primary goals, which are:
- Spreading awareness about the fact that your company is now offering new features via their SaaS model.
- Explaining exactly how the new features work and in what ways they can help your target clients.
If your new services are meant for the B2B sector, email marketing can be highly fruitful. Send curated emails with embedded download/experience links to special, trial offers. Next, let’s look at the benefits of letting your software market itself.
Provide Free Access to New Features for a Limited Time
There is no better way for a SaaS provider to create confidence about its new products among present and potential clients than to let them experience it for themselves. By adopting a limited time, free trial strategy, you are removing the paywall itself, which displays the provider’s confidence in their product. Free trials will inevitably and significantly boost exposure for the new features/software, allowing developers to gain customer feedback and make improvements accordingly.
By the time your new software or the newly incorporated features are ready to be launched as paid business services, you will have an expanded and invested client/customer base and an improved and feature-rich SaaS product that has been perfected with the help of their end users themselves.
Depending on the particular SaaS sector that the company is working in, this process can have different names such as beta testing, demo, trial period, etc. but they all share the same idea. From Microsoft and Google to Amazon Web Services, even the biggest SaaS providers in the world follow similar strategies while promoting new launches.
