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This Simple Tactic Got Us to $135,000 ARR in 135 Days
  • Publish: May 19, 2021
  • Author: Ognjen Bošković
  • Reading Time:

We grew our SaaS business from 0 to $135k ARR in 135 days.

This didn’t include:

  • Paid ads
  • Sponsorships
  • Cold outreach
  • Product Hunt launch
  • AppSumo launch

These are all in the regular growth playbook, so what have we done if we skipped these?

It’s simple. Organic social. LinkedIn and Facebook to be precise.

And no, we didn’t spam people in the style of MLM schemes.

In this article, I’ll cover everything we did to organically grow our business and our brand.

Organic Social Marketing Strategy

This strategy is extremely simple at its core.

  • Connect with your audience
  • Engage with them
  • Provide value
  • Demonstrate expertise
  • Solve problems in public

Here’s exactly what we did to make this work.

Defining a Buying Persona

This is how we started.

After that, you should be really, really specific.

Don’t try to target everyone. You don’t want to compete with everyone and waste your time on someone that might use your product.

Be specific or you’ll end up wasting a lot of time.

Keep updating your buyer persona documentation because, over time, you’ll learn a lot based on feedback and be able to perfect your targeting.

We made some mistakes too. For example, we targeted SEO consultants that don’t work on producing a lot of SEO content. They ended up using our keyword grouping tool, ClusterAi, for a month or two, because they would map out a year’s worth of content with it and had nothing else to group.

This increased our churn rate and lowered our customer lifetime value. Focusing more on the SEO agencies that constantly produce a lot of content solved these issues, but we could have grown much faster if we defined our buyer persona better right at the beginning.

Learn Where Your Audience Hangs Out

Now that you know who your audience is, you’ll need to find the places where they spend their time.

Here are some of the communities you should look for:

  • Facebook groups
  • Slack groups
  • Reddit
  • Quora
  • YouTube channels
  • Niche influencers’ social media profiles

My advice here is NOT to try and focus on all of them. If you do that, you and your team will end up managing a huge social media surface, and unless you have plenty of resources, it will backfire.

We went with just two: Facebook groups and LinkedIn personal profiles.

Facebook groups are the last bastion of organic reach on Facebook. This is the case for three reasons:

  • Facebook notifies members when someone posts in the group
  • When admins know what they’re doing, FB groups become great communities
  • Spam is usually not tolerated

When it comes to LinkedIn, with the right content + engagement strategy, your organic reach can be huge.

There’s no other place where you can still get this massive organic reach… unless you’re on TikTok I guess!

Avoiding the Social Media Limitations with Your Profile Funnel

If you were able to just post a link to your sales page/product page anywhere you want and still get a lot of traffic, I wouldn’t be writing this article.

But, social media platforms have their own rules, and so do the communities I’ve listed above.

In most cases, it usually comes down to – no external links.

Social media platforms make money by keeping their users on the platform. So, they’ll penalize you if you try to take them somewhere else.

Similarly, any community worth of mention is going to penalize spammers that post their links and promote their stuff. That usually means getting kicked out!

Made some mistakes with that too… Getting kicked out of 70k members community sucks, believe me.

So, now we understand the problem. Let’s see what the solution is.

If you were able to just post a link anywhere and get traffic, here’s what your funnel would look like:

Post a link > User clicks on it > End ups on your website > Signs up/buys

Well, you don’t need me to tell you this is unrealistic.

Instead, here’s how we adjusted that funnel and made it work:

Comment on a post > Demonstrate expertise > User is impressed > User is curious (who is this guy?) > Clicks on your profile > Ends up on your profile > Clicks the link on your profile/searches Google for you > Signs up/buys

I know, I know. Seems pretty complicated. But here’s the thing…

Once you set up your profile funnel, you’re done. The only thing left to do after that is post/comment with valuable insights, demonstrating your expertise.

So let’s get into the profile funnel setup.

Setting Up Your Profile Funnel

I’ll cover two social media platforms I use, Facebook and Linkedin. I plan to go hard on others, but there’s a ton you can do with just these two.

Facebook Profile Funnel

Here’s what you’ll need on your personal profile:

  • 812 x 312 pixels cover photo
  • Attention-grabbing design
  • Copy that inspired action
  • Call-to-action + link in the bio section

Something like this:

Here’s what that looks like on my profile:

That’s it. Now when someone is curious (or impressed) with the content that you post all over the place, they’ll:

  • Go to your profile
  • Click on your link

I cannot stress enough how this kind of traffic is way more qualified than any other kind of traffic you’re getting elsewhere.

(Google Ads, Facebook Ads, even organic search)

These are people that already ‘know’ you, have consumed your content, and hang out in the place you know your audience hangs out.

LinkedIn Profile Funnel

Again, you’ll need:

  • 1,584 x 396 pixels cover photo
  • Attention-grabbing design
  • Copy that inspired action
  • Call-to-action + link in the bio section

Similar to Facebook, but with one additional limitation. You can’t have proper links on your LinkedIn profile.

Luckily, you can fix that easily:

Just add a link straight into your banner.

Additionally, you need a strong headline. Here’s mine:

I highly suggest you tie it to the outcomes that your services/products can lead to.

In our case, we wanted to make it our marketing strategy to talk about the results we got using our tool.

As you can see, I’m not the best designer. In fact, I’m no designer at all. Just use Canva and make sure these graphics pop out and effectively deliver your message.

That’s way more important than a fancy design.

Another two sections you can use to make the most of the LinkedIn real estate are ‘Experience’ and ‘About’.

Check mine:

Once again, deliver your message and incentivize the viewer to manually type your links in the browser.

Set this up once, and then all you have to do is create and publish great content on your social media profiles and inside the communities where your audience hangs out.

Just by doing that, we grew ClusterAi from 0 to $135,000 ARR in 135 days.

This case study is a piece of my marketing strategy which is covered fully in my newsletter, SaaS Marketing Grown Ups.

Head there and sign up for the most actionable growth playbook on the web.

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