Mike HeapMike is an experienced Product Manager who focuses on all the “non-development” areas of My AskAI, from finance and customer success to product design, copywriting, testing and more.
Table of Contents
- 1. Create a Highly Converting Hero Section for Your Landing Pages
- 2. Craft a Unique Positioning for Your Product
- 3. Make Your Customer Support Scalable
- 4. Create Engaging Social Media Post Hooks
- 5. Create Your Own Social Media Design “System”
- 6. Do Your SEO Research
- 7. Perfect Your Email Onboarding Sequence
- 8. Make Clickable YouTube Video Thumbnails
- 9. Collect Testimonials for Your Product Automatically
- 10. Automate Your Analytics To Make Better Decisions
- 11. Interview 5 Users Before Launching a New Feature or Product
- 12. Invest Time in Setting Up A Referral Program
- Make The Most of Your Time To Grow Your Business
It’s easy to get overwhelmed when running your own SaaS business, bogged down with the “busy-work” that you feel needs to be done when it probably doesn’t move the needle as much as you would like it to.
Then there are the tasks that you do once and, like as not, don’t revisit, but have a huge impact on your business and so are worth the time invested to ensure you do them well.
I’ve put together a list of just those tasks, the 80/20 activities that you should spend more time on to get the most out of your SaaS and, your time (they have been working for us!).
Let’s get started:
1. Create a Highly Converting Hero Section for Your Landing Pages
The “hero” section of your business’ website is the immediately visible section of your website or landing page that users see as soon as they land on it, it is sometimes referred to as “Above the fold”.
It is at this point where the vast majority of visitors to your page will decide whether they are going to delve further or bounce, so it needs to make an impact.
Therefore, when it comes to your landing page, you want to spend 80% of your time creating and iterating on this section. More specifically, you should be focussing heavily on the:
- H1 or Main header/title text
- H2 or Secondary header/sub-title text
- CTA - your main call to action or button copy
- Hero image, video, or demo - whatever the visual element
- Social proof - user testimonials, reviews, or company logos
For some top tips on each of these, check out Harry Dry’s Marketing Examples and click on “Landing page”.
The elements in this section you should be testing regularly as they will likely have the biggest impact on your landing page’s conversion rate, you can use a tool like VWO or Optimizely to do this.
2. Craft a Unique Positioning for Your Product
Your product positioning is how you communicate to potential customers what your product stands for and what it doesn’t.
If your positioning is unclear it can lead to confusion in your customers’ minds but can also make your life significantly more difficult.
You need to be able to show how your product’s positioning differs from that of your competitors, otherwise, you are going to have a much harder time converting visitors to customers.
Within your business having clarity on your positioning will then make a lot of other things easier including:
- Your product copy, design, and branding - if you can imagine a customer it makes writing a lot easier
- Your marketing and distribution channels - if you know who you are for and against then you can start figuring out where to find them
- Prioritizing features to build - it will make it a lot easier to say no.
If you need help with your positioning, try a course like this one to get up to speed quickly.
3. Make Your Customer Support Scalable
Whatever the product, customer support is often a huge drain on SaaS resources, but it absolutely cannot be ignored and is usually the thing that separates a good SaaS from a great one.
It is worth spending time upfront to choose the right tools and get the right customer support setup so you aren’t constantly fighting fires.
Firstly, you need a good foundation - you need to create solid documentation.
Even for a complex product, if you get your head down this can be done in a few days (likely even faster with this) and instantly gives you somewhere to link to or direct users to within your product, to prevent having to repeat the same explanations and instructions.
However, users will always pursue the path of least resistance when it comes to support and that is why you will quickly find your live chat inbox overflowing.
As you already have your documentation or knowledgebase set up, you can now use My AskAI as an AI Customer Support Assistant, trained on that documentation, to begin answering the generic support queries that make up the bulk of requests, leaving you to focus on the customers that matter.
4. Create Engaging Social Media Post Hooks
So, you’ve gotten into the habit of writing and scheduling social media posts on X or LinkedIn and are writing some useful content and deep, long-form pieces, but they end up getting no views or engagement.
Chances are it isn’t your content, but because your “hook” wasn’t enticing enough.
A hook is the thing that grabs someone’s attention, stops them from scrolling, and encourages them to read on, it is the snippet they see before they expand a post.
A hook is to a post, what a hero section is to a landing page.
Once you have written a post, try writing 5 different “hooks” and see which you would want to click on, or ask a friend or partner which they are opening if they see it in their feed.
If you need some tips on writing hooks, here are a few tips.
5. Create Your Own Social Media Design “System”
While we are on the subject of social media posting, the 2nd part of the “hook” is the image that accompanies the post.
Most social media algorithms now favor posts that contain images (and probably video even more so) but images can take a while to create.
Just sharing a simple screenshot isn’t going to be enough a lot of the time.
To save yourself time in the long run create a few basic social media templates in Canva or Figma (or get a designer off Upwork or Fiverr to do this), with a few graphic assets (think shadows, arrows, comment/text boxes), that you can use for different types of content.
Or you could use a tool like aiCarousels to streamline creation of carousels on LinkedIn.
Then, the next time you post and need to add your image, you can just drop in your screenshot for high-quality output.
6. Do Your SEO Research
SEO is one of the most valuable pieces of marketing you can do for your business
When it works, it can bring potential customers to your site almost by magic, using search engines to connect you with them without having to pay them.
However, the one big downside with SEO is that it takes time, not only time to work, but potentially time to not work.
If you don’t invest the time upfront doing the research to identify things like keywords you want to rank for, then all the blog posts, side products, and lead magnets you make may go to waste.
So it is highly worth spending time to make sure yours match your product, show good intent, and are achievable.
7. Perfect Your Email Onboarding Sequence
Your email onboarding sequence is a vital piece of your activation and conversion funnel (if you are operating a freemium model).
It is your opportunity to educate a captive user about your product. They have already shown intent by signing up, now is your time to reveal more functionalities, continue to handle objections, and coax them into paying.
While you may tweak email subjects and body copy from time to time, you probably won’t significantly change this flow, so it is worth investing the time upfront considering things like:
- Frequency and timing of emails - make sure you don’t overwhelm a user, but also that you strike while the product is at the front of their mind
- Subject lines - these are the equivalent of your social media “hooks” for emails, if you don’t write a captivating one, your email won’t be opened.
- Subjects you want to cover in your sequence, likely including:
- Getting started (to see initial value)
- Key features and benefits
- Upgrade features and FOMO
- A check-in, and maybe;
- Referral and testimonial requests
8. Make Clickable YouTube Video Thumbnails
Mr Beast, the biggest YouTube creator in the world, has spoken at length on the power of thumbnails and the impact they will have on the success or failure of a video.
Given the time invested in recording and editing a video, spending time on the thumbnail is a no-brainer.
Similar to social media post hooks and the hero section of your site, if you aren’t making someone want to click in and look at your video, then it doesn’t matter how good the video behind it is.
From Mr Beasts’ videos, there are several quick tips that could help:
- Only use 2-3 words maximum, if at all, the words shouldn’t repeat the title, they should add to it and create intrigue.
- Use simple imagery, and make it eye-catching - remember, this will be scanned along with hundreds of other thumbnails.
- Use bold colors against a bright background and high contrast (opposite ends of color wheels work well).
- Try and use a face in the video to make it more relatable.
- Make your thumbnails consistent across videos so people can identify them easily.
- Use the shortest possible title you can, so it won’t get cut off and is understood at a glance.
9. Collect Testimonials for Your Product Automatically
Testimonials and social proof are one sure-fire way to improve conversion on your site for relatively little effort.
The key is to set up a good process for collecting it automatically so you aren’t wasting time asking each time.
Use a tool like Senja to add a feedback collection widget onto your site, and in your emails, then add a request for a testimonial as part of:
- Your product flow (i.e. in-app)
- Onboarding flow or post-paid upgrade (whenever you think the user will be feeling most positive about their experience!), or;
- Set up an automatic link to the collection form when you close a customer support ticket to send a request for feedback (ideally looking like you are requesting it personally).
You can then set up a testimonial “wall” on your landing page that automatically updates with each new testimonial received.
10. Automate Your Analytics To Make Better Decisions
You might spend days, weeks, or even months working on a new feature, and put it out to the world, only to realize you have no idea what impact it has.
Setting up a good product analytics tool, like Amplitude, June, or Posthog, along with the requisite event tracking when you launch a new feature will save you hours in the long run trying to come up with proxy data for stats “showing” new feature adoption.
It’ll also put an end to many qualitative feature debates with cold hard data.
Adding this in at a later date will not be pretty, I promise you, and may even help you identify features that are not being used and can be removed.
11. Interview 5 Users Before Launching a New Feature or Product
However much testing you can do yourself or within your team, nothing compares to putting something in the hands of real people, outside your company, who have no incentives or biases.
Ideally, they’ll be existing customers, but they don’t have to be necessarily, as long as they can understand what your product is supposed to do.
Asking them to test out your new feature or product will get you 80% of the insights you’ll likely get from a huge, coordinated testing approach, but in a few hours instead of days or weeks.
You’ll find the bugs, and usability issues, and get reactions immediately, instead of from live users, post-launch.
12. Invest Time in Setting Up A Referral Program
You may have heard about referral programs where all you do is sign up and then the rest takes care of itself.
While this may be true occasionally, but, the vast majority of the time, it is not the case.
In an ideal world, you would be regularly engaging with your affiliates, as if they were another user group, however, in the absence of that, just supplying them with the right tools will go a long way and save you a lot of wasted effort.
Here’s what you do:
- Create a one-page affiliate landing page including things like:
- A calculator so they can work out how much they will make
- Details on your ICP
- Details on conversion rates and LTVs of your users
- Social proof
- Ideas for ways your product could be marketed
- Examples of what the best affiliates do
- Create assets your affiliates can use to promote your product: videos, ad graphics, tutorials, branding, logos, fonts, and color palettes.
- Set up an automated onboarding email that shares all of the above information with them when they sign up.
- Send one email per month pointing back to your assets and sharing any new features you have launched recently so they are up to date.
For referral platforms you could try: Reditus or Rewardful.
Make The Most of Your Time To Grow Your Business
Hopefully, you learned a few things we learned the hard way about where time is best invested and how you can make the most of it.
I’d love to know if you have any more 80/20 tips and tricks!
