Your guide to quick wins in SaaS marketing

🔥 10 ready-to-deploy tactics to gain positive ROI momentum in 2024

👋 Hi, it’s Kyle Poyar and welcome to Growth Unhinged, my weekly newsletter exploring the hidden playbooks behind the fastest-growing startups. 

I love big, meaty strategies as much as the next person. But sometimes we all need a quick win to put points on the board. Thankfully, Tom Orbach is here to help.

Tom writes MarketingIdeas.com, a fantastic newsletter with one powerful marketing idea per week (he has a great recent piece about how to transform ‘boring’ content into viral hits). Tom is the Head of Growth Marketing at Wiz – which notably grew from $0 to $100M ARR in 18 months – and is a Forbes 30 Under 30 alum.

Keep reading for Tom’s guest post and then check out Marketing Ideas for more.

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Quick wins are my secret weapon for building momentum. 

They are practical, low-effort tactics that deliver tangible results in a surprisingly short time frame. In my eight years in growth marketing, I’ve helped build $10B+ unicorns, and I’d estimate that quick wins comprise 30% of my success. For marketing leaders, mixing quick wins into the 2024 roadmap is my go-to advice for 2024.

And the best part? Anyone can execute them at any time. No need for epic budgets or endless brainstorms, just smart hacks, proven strategies and a dash of execution magic. 

I get asked about my own quick wins all the time, so I’m going to let you in on the top ten quick wins I use most often. The majority of these quick wins take somewhere between 10 minutes to 2 hours to set up — and the ROI of the time spent is definitely positive.

Why quick wins matter

Quick wins are not just about instant gratification (although who can resist that?). They build trust with your leaders and stakeholders, validate your strategies and earn you the right to take bigger risks. They're about showing, not just telling, the value your team brings.

The anatomy of a good quick win:

1. 🎯 High Success Rate: Likely to succeed with minimal risk.

2. 💰 Low Effort & Budget: Requires little resource investment.

3. 🍿 Demonstrable Results: Produces clear, measurable outcomes.

4. 🏃🏻‍♂️ Short Time to Value: Benefits are realized quickly.

Ready to dive in? Here are the best quick wins for marketing leaders to try:

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Win #1: “Apply” over “Register”

What to do: Instead of simply letting people sign up for your event, challenge or webinar, invite them to apply. Make your audience fill out an application form and feel like they need to earn their spot. And my secret? It’s totally fine if you end up accepting every application — no one will know, and everyone will be happy.

Why it matters: It creates a sense of exclusivity. Humans place greater value on the things they cannot achieve. Applying feels more intentional than registering, attracting genuinely interested audiences and fostering a sense of belonging. It also allows you to gather valuable data about your most engaged prospects. True, an application form adds a bit of friction (that people might churn), but the quality of attendees (as well as their engagement levels) is worth it. This tiny change of framing can boost your event/webinar ROI.

Example: There are so many webinars and in-person networking events leveraging this tactic, but my favorite example is what JupiterOne did with “DataHeist”: a cybersecurity riddle you solve to participate in their annual conference. This gamified application process generated significant buzz and attracted highly qualified leads (once you solve the riddle, you get here).

How to measure impact: Track application rates compared to previous registration rates. Analyze the quality of leads generated through the application process.

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Win #2: Authentic praise for thought leaders 

What to do: Ask in-house employees with similar roles as your target audience to recommend industry thought leaders. Publish a listicle featuring and praising them on your blog.

Why it matters: This quick win positions your brand as an authority without extensive effort invested in content creation (your colleagues do the work). In addition, most “Top X Experts” lists are lacking genuineness — they’re clearly made for buzz generation and promoting the brand writing about them. But with our quick win, the recommendations are coming from the actual people that follow them, which is 10x more authentic.

Example: We did it at Wiz, and the results were phenomenal.

How to measure impact: Track blog post views and social media shares for your listicle. Monitor brand mentions and conversations surrounding the featured thought leaders. Analyze leads generated from the content and its impact on SEO performance.

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Win #3: Strategic logo bomb

What to do: Show your customers’ logos in the top of the fold, not buried below. Why? Because social proof works best when people first meet you — the more info they have, the less effective the logos. Most SaaS companies I’ve worked with get this wrong. Next, always mix unknown and known companies (this trick really boosts authenticity). 

Finally, add logos to your pricing page. Under each pricing plan, write “Helping teams like...” and then the specific logos of companies that use it. It’s a smart move because it 1) instantly clarifies which plan suits the visitor (“Yeah we’re a bit like SpotHero”), 2) sparks hope that they can achieve the same level of success thanks to your product, and 3) boosts brand credibility with humble name-drops. Boom.

Why it matters: Improves credibility, sparks interest, and clarifies which plan suits potential customers.

Example: Deel and Navan place logos strategically; Zoom and Atlassian do not. The example above is from Prismic’s pricing page.

How to measure impact: Monitor changes in conversion rates to the main CTA on the website and pricing page. Run “brand lift”-like surveys to measure the impact of these logo tweaks on brand perception.

For further insights on this improving your homepage, consider reading Growth Unhinged's article on SaaS homepage building.

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Win #4: Review-generation competition