5 tactics to grow Mac Martine's 6-figure ARR SaaS
My first growth audit with inputs from the founder
This is probably the most excited I’ve been doing these audits as for the first time so far, I actually reached out to one of the co-founders (Mac Martine) first and got his inputs BEFORE writing the audit for their product useaware.co
I’m also a fan of Mac’s The SaaS Bootstrapper newsletter which I recommend you check out.
Aware is a LinkedIn engagement & analytics tool that makes engaging and social selling on LinkedIn easier.
Before we start
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Now on to the audit!
The Brief
Where previously I just go through a site and decide what I think are opportunities for growth.
This time Mac could give me insights on their growth challenges and what I’ve learned is that:
affiliates & referrals drive growth and needs doubling down on
need to improve user onboarding to successfully convert users
Quick Intro to Social Selling
After trying out Aware myself, I got introduced to the concept of social selling.
I’m not happy with the definitions that rank on Google so I’ll give my own understanding of it.
Social selling is basically interacting with people on LinkedIn (or other social networks) to build relationships and “pull” potential customers to you through thought leadership, answering questions, etc.
Aware basically helps you do social selling and this context will be helpful for reading this audit.
Strategy (new!)
Dominate Social Selling conversation through the Social Selling Academy
Hubspot basically grew their business by coining, promoting and dog-fooding the concept of Inbound Marketing.
Social Selling is something that hasn’t really been owned by anyone yet save for LinkedIn with its Social Selling Index.
But while difficult to rank for according to ahrefs, the companies currently ranking for ”social selling” keywords barely have anything to do with it.
Turns out they’re already sort of doing this with co-founder Alex Boyd’s Social Selling Course.
However I think there’s a way to drive this conversation further a la Hubspot Inbound Marketing style.
💡Experiment 1: Acquisition
A free social selling course hosted IN Aware’s site a la Hubspot Academy
Googling “What is inbound marketing” which has 3.6K monthly searches will show Hubspot as one of the top results.
You land on an article directly answering the question but the hero banner drives you to one of their lead magnets which is their inbound marketing course.
You get users emails, dominate the conversation AND get a lot of real estate to sell Aware’s product via nurturing campaigns and IN the course material.
Aware can copy this approach by creating articles that rank for social selling keywords and upselling them to the free social selling course.
💡Experiment 2: Acquisition
Repurpose course into webinars, pdfs and promote in other channels like Product Hunt or LinkedIn webinars
LeadDelta does a good job of this with their free resources.
Anything they produce they also promote on Product Hunt for more exposure, and more backlinks.
Similarly, looking for Social Selling webinars on LinkedIn I found this one organisation attracting 38K attendees for their upcoming webinar. Webinars are a great way to establish trust and it’s a captured audience you can upsell to your product.
💡Experiment 3: Activation & Retention
Create a loyal community on Discord
After attending the course or the webinar, students can be funnelled into a Discord server. Having a two-way communication with students on a closed community on Discord could establish Aware as THE authority on social selling.
Here we can take a look at Small Bets as reference where influential community members can co-organise webinars WHICH can be made exclusive to Aware customers as a special privilege. (We’re running a business here, not a charity)
💡Experiment 4: Activation
Replace onboarding tour with quick set up onboarding
As someone not familiar with social selling I was given a proper education on the concept with the tour.
It taught me to create a list of influencers I should comment on, showed me my top engagers so I can return the favour, and identified engagers who are likely going to be receptive to a sales pitch.
However, this was all a prompt based tour where all you have do is click NEXT, I didn’t actually use any of the features like creating a list so when the onboarding was done I was a bit confused with what I was seeing and what I’m supposed to do.
I would recommend to create a separate quick set up experience similar to how Google Ads does it. Once you’ve created your first campaign, you won’t ever see this interface again and it’s designed to get people familiar with the features and set up.
💡Experiment 5: Referral
Segment users based on affiliate partner potential
Any user onboarded on Aware sends a lot of LinkedIn data over like Views, Engagement Rate, etc.
This means that Aware has all the means create segments based on what it determines to be a likely candidate for a successful affiliate partner or likely to be tire kickers, etc.
Have email drips sent out to users who fit the referrer ICP that look something like this
Fits criteria but didn’t sign up for affiliate program → Invite with special offers if they don’t sign up after a few sends
Signed up for affiliate program but no sales → Further incentivise the first referral, provide tips on how to sell the program
Tiering system for → More referrals = higher share of the revenue to further incentivise top performers
Churned referrer → Identify users who haven’t had a new referral in some time and offer more incentives
And that’s a wrap for this week’s audit! Let me know what you thought!