6 Best Hacks to Drive Growth
Using Marketing Tools

Identify Your Target Audience and Buyer Personas

To grow your business, you need to know who your target customers are and what motivates them. Identifying your target audience and developing buyer personas is key.

A target audience is a specific group of people you want to market your product or service. Start by looking at your current customer base and see if there are any common characteristics like age, location, or interests.

Also, think about who would benefit most from what you offer. The more specific you can get, the better.

Buyer personas are fictional representations of your target audience that help you understand them better.

Give each persona a name and details like:

Demographics: Age, gender, income, location, etc.
Goals: What are their needs and desires? What problems are they trying to solve?
Behaviors: How do they like to gather information? Are they active on social media? What influences their purchasing decisions?
Challenges: What obstacles stand in their way? How can you help overcome them?

Developing personas makes your target audience feel more human so you can tailor your marketing to their specific wants and needs.

For example, if your target audience is busy working parents, a buyer persona could be:

Jenny is a 35-year-old marketing manager with two kids. Her goals are saving time and simplifying her life. She does research on social media and blogs before buying anything for her family. Her challenges are balancing work and home responsibilities, so products or services that can save her time and effort would be appealing.

With personas like Jenny in mind, you'll be able to create content and messaging that resonates with your target customers. And that will help boost your growth in no time.

Leverage Automation Tools

One of the best ways to scale your marketing efforts is by leveraging automation tools.

Automation tools can be a real time-saver for marketing teams these days. Creating visual content like images, graphics, and videos is a huge part of modern marketing, and software tools let you do a lot of that work faster.

Here are three tools that will help you with automation

1. Slazzer

Slazzer uses AI to detect backgrounds and seamlessly remove them automatically in seconds without any manual intervention. Forget about fiddling with lasso or magic wand tools to carefully select and delete backgrounds pixel by pixel.

It saves you hours of work to remove background from product photos, portrait images, and any other pictures you want to use in your marketing materials. Once the backgrounds have been deleted, you can effortlessly place your transparent images onto new backgrounds, add text or branding, layer multiple images together, and more.

2. Brevo

Brevo enables marketers to automate email campaigns, SMS campaigns, social media scheduling, and customer segmentation.

Its user-friendly interface and extensive features allow marketers to nurture leads, engage customers authentically, and provide targeted content that establishes loyalty. Segmentation and comprehensive reports help marketers optimize strategies, track performance, and drive meaningful growth.

3. Zendesk

Zendesk is a game-changing platform that revolutionizes marketing automation while still maintaining a human touch.

It empowers marketers to streamline efforts, create personalized experiences, and automate customer support. This saves time, demonstrates commitment to customer service, and enables marketers to automate marketing campaigns seamlessly. Zendesk offers automated SMS campaigns, social media scheduling, customer segmentation for targeted content, and comprehensive reporting.

This allows marketers to optimize strategies, gain insights and achieve better results in an evolving digital landscape.

Create Engaging Content to Share

Creating engaging content is key to driving growth with your marketing SaaS tools. When your content resonates with your audience, they will share it, linking back to your site.

This boosts your search ranking and exposure.

Focus on solutions to common problems. Write blog posts or record videos that teach your audience how to solve frustrating issues they face in their jobs or lives. For example, create a step-by-step tutorial on how to optimize a social media profile to gain more followers. Viewers will appreciate the helpful guidance and share it with others in their network.
Tell stories to connect. Weave in stories, examples, and anecdotes from your own experiences or those of your customers. Stories help to humanize your content and make an emotional connection with your audience so they relate to what you're sharing. For instance, share the story of how one of your earliest customers found success with your product. Describe their challenges, how your tool helped solve them, and the results they achieved.
Use visuals to engage. Include images, graphics, slide decks, or short video clips in your content. Visuals capture attention, communicate ideas quickly, and make concepts more memorable. Even just including photos of your team, workspace or product can help to visually engage your audience. Infographics that convey data or statistics in an easy-to-digest format also tend to be highly sharable.
Promote social sharing. Make your content easy to share on social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Include share buttons for major platforms at the top and bottom of blog posts and videos. Also, encourage sharing by framing sections or key points in a way that motivates the reader to spread the message. For example, “Share this with a friend who’s struggling to gain more social media followers.”
Creating content that educates, tells stories, uses visuals, and encourages social sharing is key to driving growth with your marketing SaaS tools.

When you provide value to your audience through engaging content, they will share it far and wide, raising brand awareness and boosting your search rankings.

Focus on solutions, connect through stories, engage with visuals, and make sharing simple.

Use Social Media to Spread the Word

Social media platforms are a gold mine for spreading the word about your business and driving new customer growth. With over 3 billion people using social media worldwide, you have a huge opportunity to expand your reach. Here are a few clever ways to leverage social media and boost growth:

Promote your content. Share blog posts, videos, photos, and other media on all your social channels. This exposes new potential customers to your brand and also helps increase traffic to your website. Measure the clicks and engagement to see what kinds of content your audience responds to best.
Engage with your followers. Don’t just broadcast messages - interact with people who follow you. Like and comment on their posts, answer questions, and start genuine conversations. People will appreciate your responsiveness and become more loyal fans of your brand.
Run social media contests and giveaways. Offer a free product, service, or other prize to increase buzz and get more eyes on your social profiles. Require people to like, share, tag, or comment on a post to enter. This spreads awareness about your contest and also exposes you to new potential followers.
Join relevant Facebook Groups and LinkedIn Groups. Look for groups centered around your industry, product, or service. Once you join, contribute to discussions, share useful content, and build connections. Subtly promote your brand by mentioning what you do in your profile and posts. People in the group may visit your profile or website to learn more.
Use hashtags to improve discoverability. Include popular hashtags related to your brand, products, services, and industry in your social media posts, especially on Instagram and Twitter. This makes your content more findable in searches and can lead new people to your profile. See what hashtags your competitors use for inspiration.

Social media is a powerful tool for growth when used strategically. Focus on building an engaged audience, spreading helpful and interesting content, facilitating genuine interactions, and optimizing your visibility.

With consistency over time, your followers and business will grow.

Some tools to help:

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a must-have tool for managing all your social media profiles in one place. As a marketer, Hootsuite makes will make your life so much easier by allowing you to schedule posts in advance across networks like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Using the Hootsuite dashboard, you can draft social media posts, schedule the best times to share them, and analyze how they perform once published. It also allows you to monitor mentions and engage with followers.

The built-in analytics provide insights into which posts resonate most with your audience so you can optimize your social strategy.

Any marketer serious about social media should have Hootsuite in their toolkit.

2. Buffer

Buffer is a social media management tool that helps marketers like us automate and schedule social media posts. Using Buffer, you can connect multiple social accounts like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and queue up posts to share at the best times for maximum engagement.

For example, say you have a product launch coming up and want to build buzz on social media. You can draft a series of posts promoting the launch, and Buffer will automatically share them for you at optimal times leading up to the big day. This frees you up to focus on other launch tasks!

Buffer also provides analytics to help you see how your posts are performing. You can check impressions, engagements, clicks, and more to determine what content resonates most with your followers.

These insights can then be used to refine your social strategy and make the most of your Buffer marketing automation.

Run Contests and Giveaways

Contests and giveaways are a great way to drive engagement and growth with your audience.

Who doesn’t love the opportunity to win something for free? When you run a contest, you’ll get tons of social shares which expands your reach, builds hype, and attracts new followers.

The key is to keep your contests simple and focused. Think about your business goals and what you’re trying to achieve. Are you trying to increase email signups, get more social media followers, or drive traffic to your website? Choose a prize that aligns with your goals, like a free product sample, gift card, or subscription.

Keep your entry mechanics basic by asking people to like, comment, or share a post. You can also request email signups or ask people to tag a friend. The easier it is to enter, the more people will participate.

Promote your contest on all your social media channels, in email newsletters, and on your website. Post regular reminders leading up to the entry deadline to keep people engaged. You’ll want to share details like how to enter, the prize, the deadline date, and when the winner will be announced.

Once your contest is over, announce the winner on social media and tag them in your post. Thank everyone who entered to show your appreciation. Contests often result in a short-term follower boost, so be ready to engage your new audience members with great content after the contest ends.

Over time, monitor how your contests are impacting your key metrics like social media followers, email list growth, and website traffic. See what types of prizes and entry methods resonate most with your audience so you can optimize for even better results next time.

Contests and giveaways are a simple but powerful way to expand your reach and drive growth. With a little planning, you'll be leveraging this strategy in no time!

Some tools to help for running Giveaways:

1. Gleam

Gleam lets you easily create engaging campaigns to grow your email list and drive more traffic. Their drag-and-drop campaign builder makes it simple to set up contests, giveaways, lead generation forms, and more without any coding.

For example, I can quickly build an email signup contest to grow my list or an engaging social media giveaway to increase shares and followers. Gleam provides ready-made templates to get started fast or I can customize everything to match my brand.

With Gleam handling the logistics, all I have to do is promote the campaign and watch the entries and shares roll in. Their real-time analytics show me what’s working so I can optimize on the fly.

Best of all, Gleam integrates with all the tools you are using like MailChimp, HubSpot, Zapier, and more.

2. RafflePress

RafflePress is a must-have tool for boosting traffic and growing your email list. This WordPress plugin makes it easy to set up contests and giveaways to engage your audience.

With RafflePress, you can automate word-of-mouth marketing and get more shares on social media. The viral sharing features help your giveaways spread like wildfire. You'll gain more followers and website visitors in no time.

Best of all, RafflePress integrates seamlessly with GetResponse. Every new contest entrant is added to your email list automatically. Just set it and forget it - RafflePress does the work for you.

If you want an effortless way to attract leads and build your mailing list, RafflePress is the answer. This handy plugin takes the headache out of marketing automation so you can focus on what matters - your business!

Start a Referral Program

A referral program is one of the most effective ways to drive growth for your SaaS business. When done right, referrals are like word-of-mouth marketing on steroids.

Offer incentives for referrals

Give your happy customers an incentive to spread the word about your product. Offer them something of value, like a discount on their next renewal or billing cycle, extra storage space, or premium features.
For the new customers they refer, provide a signup bonus as well, such as a free trial period or discount for their first purchase. These types of rewards motivate your customers to actively promote your business to their networks.

Make it easy to refer

Don’t make your customers jump through hoops to refer your product. Build a simple referral feature right into your app that allows them to enter an email address and send an automated referral message.
You can also provide pre-written social media posts, email templates, and referral badges or codes they can share to simplify the process. The easier you make it, the more referrals you’ll gain.

Follow up and say thanks

Once a new customer signs up through a referral, reach out to thank the existing customer who made the introduction.

Let them know their referral earned them the reward you offered. This positive reinforcement will make them more inclined to refer again in the future. It also gives you another opportunity to ask them for a review or testimonial to help build social proof.

Track and optimize

Closely monitor how your referral program is performing to see what’s working and make improvements.

Look at metrics like how many referrals you’re getting, the conversion rate of referrals versus other lead sources, and which types of incentives and rewards drive the highest activity. Make changes to your program based on the data to optimize its effectiveness and keep those referrals coming!

Referral marketing is a highly effective growth strategy, but only if you take the time to set up a well-designed program, motivate your customers to participate, show them gratitude, and continuously optimize based on metrics.

The best tools for setting up referral programs are:

1. Referral Factory

Referral Factory is the secret weapon in my marketing arsenal. As a marketer, referral programs are key to acquiring new customers, and Referral Factory makes setting one up a breeze. Their software offers everything I need to create a successful program, including:

Built-in rewards and incentives to motivate referrals
Native integrations with the tools I already use
Custom referral links and shareable social media posts to spread the word
Real-time tracking and reporting to see how my program is performing

For any marketer looking to implement a referral program, Referral Factory should be at the top of your list. It’s the easiest way to turn your happy customers into brand ambassadors and boost your bottom line.

2 . ReferralCandy

ReferralCandy is an easy-to-use referral marketing tool that helps you turn your happy customers into brand ambassadors. Their responsive customer service team makes the onboarding process quick and painless so you can start getting referrals within 10 minutes.

ReferralCandy powers referral programs for ecommerce stores of all sizes. Whether you have a small shop or a large enterprise, ReferralCandy can help you unlock exponential growth through customer referrals. They offer a robust set of features that make it simple to set up and manage a referral program, saving you time and money.

Leverage Review and Survey Tools

One of the easiest ways to get more reviews and customer feedback is by using review and survey tools. These SaaS tools make it simple to create professional-looking surveys, send them to your customers, and analyze the results.

Leveraging these tools is a no-brainer for driving growth. Here are a few ways they can help:

Get more reviews on sites like Google, Facebook, and Yelp. Review tools allow you to easily send review requests to customers after a purchase or interaction. This can significantly increase the number of reviews you get, which builds social proof and trust in your brand.
Improve your product or service. Send post-interaction surveys to get feedback on your customers’ experience. Ask open-ended questions about what they liked and didn’t like, and what could be improved. Then use that feedback to make meaningful changes. Your customers will appreciate that you listened, and your product will get better over time.
Identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities. In your surveys, ask customers what other products or services they’re interested in. Look for common themes in the responses that point to natural upsells or cross-sells you can promote. This is an easy way to increase customer lifetime value.
Reduce churn. Survey tools also allow you to send “check-in” surveys to gauge customer satisfaction and spot any issues. If you identify customers that seem at high risk of churning, reach out to them directly to resolve any problems. Early detection of churn risks is key to retention.
Improve your marketing messaging. Send surveys with questions about your marketing content and ads to find out what’s resonating with your audience and what’s not. Ask which words, images, or messages caught their attention. Then use that feedback to optimize your marketing for better results.

Review and survey tools provide an easy way to get high-quality insights from your customers. Leverage them in your business, listen to the feedback, and take action on what you learn.

Some Survey Tools:

1. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a popular marketing automation tool that makes email marketing a breeze. As a small business owner, you can rely on Mailchimp to design eye-catching email newsletters, send automated welcome emails to new subscribers, and track the results of your marketing campaigns.

Mailchimp’s drag-and-drop email designer lets you quickly create mobile-friendly emails without any coding required. You can add images, social sharing buttons, and clickable buttons to my emails to increase engagement. Mailchimp also offers hundreds of free templates to choose from.

2. GetResponse

GetResponse is an easy-to-use marketing automation tool that helps make my job a breeze. Once someone signs up or takes action, GetResponse automatically follows up with tailored messages based on their behavior.

For example, when a new subscriber joins my email list, GetResponse instantly sends them a welcome email. If they don’t open that first message, GetResponse will send a re-engagement email a few days later to give them another chance. These automatic follow-ups save me hours and ensure no leads slip through the cracks.

GetResponse also makes building emails a snap with their message editor. You can quickly drag and drop images, buttons, and text blocks to create beautiful responsive emails. They have tons of mobile-friendly templates to choose from.

Use Heatmaps and Analytics to Optimize

Using marketing analytics and heat mapping tools, you can gain valuable insights into how people interact with your website and content. This data can help you make optimizations to drive more traffic, leads, and sales.

For example, heatmaps show you how far down the page visitors scroll and where they click. You may find that many visitors don’t scroll past the first few sections or that your call-to-action buttons don’t get much attention. Use this info to make changes like moving important content higher up, simplifying navigation, or testing new CTA placements.

Web analytics provides metrics like page views, bounce rates, and conversion rates. Monitor these numbers over time to see how your content and campaigns are performing.

For example, if a blog post gets lots of traffic but has a high bounce rate, you may need to rework the headline, intro, or content to better match reader expectations. Or if a social media campaign drives traffic but no conversions, try tweaking your messaging or CTA.

A/B testing tools let you create different versions of pages to see which one performs better. You can test things like:

Headline variations: “5 Ways to Boost Productivity” vs. “Boost Your Productivity with These 5 Hacks”
CTA button colors: Red vs. Green
Page layouts: 2 columns vs. 3 column

Use the data from the winning variation to optimize your page. Even small changes can lead to big improvements in key metrics like click-through rates and conversion rates.

Reviewing analytics and running experiments with your marketing tools regularly will help you gain valuable insights into your audience.

FAQs: Common Questions about Driving Growth with Marketing Tools

When using marketing SaaS tools to drive growth, you’ll likely come across some common questions. Here are a few of the frequent ones we hear:

How do I know which tools are right for my business?

There are many options out there, so it can be overwhelming. Focus on your key goals and needs, then evaluate tools based on factors like:

Features: Do they have the specific capabilities you’re looking for? Things like email marketing, social media management, analytics, etc.
Integrations: Will the tool work with your existing tech stack? Look for ones that integrate with platforms you already use.
Ease of use: Opt for tools with an intuitive interface. They should simplify your life, not make it more complicated.
Pricing: Make sure the tool fits your budget. Some offer free trials or different pricing tiers based on features.
Reviews: Check what other users say about the tool. Look for mostly positive reviews mentioning things like valuable features, good support, and ease of use.

How do I get my team on board with new tools?

Introducing new SaaS tools can be met with some resistance, especially if people are used to certain ways of working. Some tips for gaining buy-in:

Involve your team in the selection process. Let them test out options and provide input. They’ll be more invested in the final choice.
Focus on the benefits. Explain how the new tools will make their lives easier or help them be more productive. Address any concerns head-on.
Provide thorough training. Give your team opportunities to learn the tools through demos, documentation, or in-person coaching. Make yourself available to answer any questions.
Start with a trial period. Use a free trial to test the tools as a team for a few weeks. Then, evaluate how it’s going and make a decision together about moving forward with a paid subscription.
Lead by example. Adopt and embrace the tools yourself first. Your enthusiasm and hands-on experience will help motivate your team to do the same.
Offer incentives. Consider providing small rewards or recognition for team members who dive in and become advocates for the new tools. Their positivity can influence others.

With the right approach, you can get your entire team on board and excited about the growth opportunities new marketing SaaS tools provide. Stay open to feedback and make adjustments as needed to ensure the tools are working for everyone.

Conclusion

So there you have it, six hacks to drive growth using some of the latest and greatest marketing SaaS tools on the market today. Many of these tools offer free trials or low-cost options to get started, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

What are you waiting for? Happy marketing!

About the Author

My name is Alina and I have been a blogger and freelancer writer since 2018. I write about skills and the importance of skills development for youngsters. Developing our skills is important in all aspects of our lives.

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6 Best Hacks to Drive Growth Using Marketing Tools