16 Free Ways to Promote SaaS Overseas (Part 1)

Here are 16 of the best ways to promote your products for free.

16 Free Ways to Promote SaaS Overseas (Part 2)

1. Provide a free solution first

Try before you buy is not a new concept. But it’s even more relevant in the world of SaaS products, because earning trust for a product that doesn’t actually exist is a tough job.

The solution? Offer a free SaaS product for the first few days.

As a fledgling SaaS startup, your first goal is to make your name known in the market. Giving away your product for free is a great way to do this.

Paying or not, if someone shows interest and takes the time to try your product, that’s great news! Here are the reasons:

It proves your product has real value

It gives you free user data and user feedback; free users can provide a lot of information about how to improve your product

It automatically builds your email list and gets your email marketing started

2. Start creating content for Project Authority

Even in 2020, content is still king, there is no doubt about it.

A 2018 study by the Content Marketing Institute showed that 91% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers use content marketing in their business.

Therefore, for SaaS businesses with a tight budget, this is a must-try marketing method.

Content marketing was originally divided into two parts.

1. Content Creation

2. Content Release

The basic logic is to create extremely helpful content that solves your audience’s problems and make sure the right audience sees it.

Let’s say you have a SaaS product that allows freelancers to effectively manage their expenses. Obviously, your content must revolve around solving freelancers’ funding issues.

So you decide to create content: “The Ultimate Guide on How Freelancers Can Manage Their Expenses.”

How do you know readers want to read about this topic?

Just use Google! It will tell you whether your readers are willing to read this content.

OK! So you created the content. The next step is to promote it.

The following is a simple promotion process.

Share on all social media, both personal and professional

Share this content with your friends and family

Submit to the forum sub-forums

Post on Facebook Group

Contact everyone you mentioned in your article and ask them to share it

Reach out to people who link to similar articles

Answer questions on Quora

Promote to your email list (if you have one)

Please refer to the promotion checklist below:

3. Write a summary of expert experience

Summary posts are an effective way to grab your market’s attention.

Experience summary posts are created by collecting opinions from industry experts and organizing them well under one article. You may have read a lot of summary posts.

This is very easy to do.

Find industry experts in your field

Connect with them on Linkedin/Twitter or get their email

Give them a specific question to answer

Don’t expect everyone to reply, but most people will. And they all have some interesting perspectives to share

Add their answers to your blog

Publish it

Let this person know that the blog is live and tell them to share it

This is what is called an expert experience summary post.

The basic function here is to stimulate people's self-awareness. If you mention them in your article, there is a high chance that they will share your article with their circle.

The more your content is shared, the more views it gets, the more followers it gets, and the more opportunities it has to acquire paying customers.

4. Write SEO content

Focusing on SEO and creating SEO content is another low-cost SaaS marketing strategy that you must try. Your goal here is to create content that ranks high on search engines. Now, the topic shouldn’t be just any topic, but it should be based on keywords that people search for.

Suppose you are selling HR CRM, then you should talk about HR best practices, HR issues, tools, tips and tricks, etc.

You could write a comprehensive guide to HR tips and tricks and rank them.

Anyone searching for these things is definitely a potential customer for you. If your content ranks high on Baidu, it is an automatic traffic-generating machine.

You may ask, aren’t SEO content marketing and content marketing the same?

The answer is no, although SEO content belongs to content marketing.

Content marketing is when you come up with unique content ideas, guides, summary posts. Create content and promote it through various channels to attract people's attention.

SEO content marketing is when you don’t come up with unique content ideas, but you do keyword research to see what people are searching for on the internet and you try to find their intent.

Then, you create a great content based on your research.

Now, you can also promote SEO content through content marketing. But here, your goal must be to get links to your website in order to improve rankings.

5. Marketing Video

We're not talking about those lively explainer videos here.

What this means is grab a camera, make a video of yourself explaining what you’re doing, and then put it on the internet.

You see, people are connected . If you appear in a marketing video, it does two things:

Create a brand for you and your products

People will see that you are a real person and start to trust you and your product

Build trust, which is crucial to your marketing efforts.

6. Harness the power of forums

Quora is a huge question and answer platform. Users can post questions on various topics and get answers from experts around the world. This makes Zhihu one of the best platforms for marketing products.

Suppose you want to promote your solution. You go to Quora and search for questions and related communities. Then you start answering questions.

These are some questions you can answer on Quora:

· Your software related issues. For example, “What is the best HR CRM software?”

Topics in your field, such as "How to be an effective HR?"

Brand-related questions: How your product is better than your competitors

Now, Quora is very strict about promoting products. In this case, you can add a disclaimer at the end of your answer stating what you do and saying that your article may be biased because you work with this brand.

Please note, however, that this is a very time-consuming and labor-intensive process.

You can try it for a while and see if it works for your business.

Reddit is also a community with great potential. It is an online community where people with similar interests can join boards to discuss topics of their interest.

If used in the right way, it can do wonders for your SaaS business.

However, self-promotion on Reddit is a big no-no. You must read all board guidelines and get permission from a moderator before posting, otherwise you may be banned from the board.

It really helps because the community there is very active and engaged.

If the content you share is valuable, people will definitely engage with your content, thus increasing your chances of gaining attention and acquiring paying customers.

7. Build your personal brand on Linkedin

In terms of reach, no platform can beat Linkedin at the moment. As a SaaS startup, you can’t miss the opportunity to build your brand on Linkedin. For one person, this is easy and convenient.

Create a Linkedin profile for yourself and your company

Start posting relevant content from your personal account. Don’t post general content on your company page. Instead, use it to display announcements of updates.

All the magic happens on your personal homepage. Make sure you are consistent in your content creation and promote your company page from time to time

Dhruvam Thakur from The Smart Taxi has done an excellent job in personal branding and company promotion.

8. Write a guest post

Guest posting in reputable publications is a great way to attract attention. It also earns you backlinks, which helps improve the authority of your blog.

However, it is not easy to publish a guest post on a high-profile website. You have to use a lot of connections in this industry to get a good chance to get a guest post published.

Personal or online meetings, conferences and Linkedin connections can help you find the right people to guest post with.

Author: Cucumber Morning News

Source: Qinggua Media