Every marketer I have ever spoken to has always strived to generate more leads, and there are very few situations where they would get a lead and say “no, thanks.” Lead generation is a critical factor in the development of small B2B companies. It is frequently the most difficult aspect of the job, but once you are able to generate sufficient leads for your enterprise, your work will become much easier.
At some point, you get to know the number of leads you’ll generate per week, month, and even annually. This is referred to as predictable B2B SaaS lead generation. When you have a predictable lead generation pipeline and consistent conversion rates, you can start to accurately predict business growth and the investment needed to achieve it.
How to Create a Predictable Lead Generation Pipeline
To have a successful B2B SaaS lead generation pipeline, you’ve got to use a mix of marketing channels. Feel free to combine SEM (Search Engine Marketing) with SMM (Social Media Marketing), word-of-mouth marketing, and PPC (pay-per-click), among others. You should think of it as hedging your bets to ensure that if one channel falls short, others will compensate for the loss. The most common error marketers make in this area is to excessively rely on one specific tactic they’ve used in the past.
To begin developing a predictable lead generation strategy, you must consider these critical things.
- Which channels work well with your brand.
- The cost per lead on each channel.
- Short-term and long-term investments in your lead generation campaigns.
Discovering Channels that Work for Your Brand
The first step here is to create buyer personas. A buyer persona is an imaginary character that reflects your business’s typical customer. Typically, a B2B firm begins with three buyer personas.
A buyer persona helps you identify the best channels for reaching your target audience. You get to find out the channels they prefer and their specific demographic groups.
Using this data, you can begin to target your desired audience. By combining your buyer persona with your ideal customer profile, you can construct your targeting.
A persona can give you clues about the platforms and publications they consume. For example, if you are developing an ad campaign for a 25-year-old London fashion buyer, you may discover they use Snapchat, Instagram, read certain blogs, or follow certain YouTube channels. You can then build an idea of how to reach them.
There are so many types of marketing channels that it would be impossible to compile a complete list. You can discover the ones that suit you best by working out your buyer persona.
Importance of Measuring Cost per Lead
You can calculate the cost per lead by dividing the amount spent on acquiring leads by the number of leads acquired. For instance, if you ran an ad campaign for $1,000 and got 10 leads, your cost per lead would be $100.
You must determine cost per lead to gauge how effectively each channel is performing for you in terms of pure B2B SaaS lead generation and marketing ROI.
It’s also valuable to track cost per lead because you can tell when you’ve saturated a channel or audience. If the cost per lead on a channel that was $50 crept up to $100, you’ve over-saturated the audience and should make some adjustments.
Making Long-term and Short-term Investments
Don’t leave out the most effective lead generation techniques for your brand for short-term benefits that are more expensive. For instance, content marketing and SEO are effective lead-generation tactics, but they don’t generate results in a few days. In these cases, marketing ROI is calculated over months rather than days or weeks.
You might want to use Google Ads, Facebook, or some other paid advertising channel for quick results, as they generate leads on a daily basis. You should balance this with SEO and content marketing, from which you will see rewards further down the line.
By investing in long-term lead generation tactics, you can reduce your cost per lead in six months by reducing spend on paid campaigns.
How to Increase High-Quality Leads for B2B SaaS Businesses
1. Referral Programs
Your current customers are your best advertisement. Case studies on your website are one of the most popular pages because they prove that your product works. A prospective customer sees them as proof that they, too, had the same problems and that your product solved them.
The closer the case study subject’s profile is to your ideal client profile, the better.
Source: HubSpot
According to HubSpot, salespeople say that the top source of most of their leads is referrals. Referrals are an important source of B2B SaaS lead generation. Referring someone to a hairdresser or to a product you like works the same way as referring a friend to a piece of software.
2. Define Your Product’s Users and Buyers
It is crucial to know who your buyers are and who your users are. In big businesses, the purchaser of a piece of CRM software may be the CTO or Head of Marketing, but the users may be sales reps or secretaries.
While most users currently have little buyer power, engaging them is still important because people frequently switch jobs, and usually move to a higher position. If someone has used one piece of software in one company and found it successful, they are very likely to recommend it to a new employer looking for the same solution.
3. Content Marketing
Creating and distributing quality content is key to successful marketing. It may be too simple, but one of the common issues B2B technology businesses face is not having enough relevant content on their website to rank in Google.
There are two primary methods that B2B companies can use to generate leads through organic search traffic and SEO. The most effective ones rely on Inbound Marketing. People seldom create content because there is little short-term reward for doing so. Those who do not produce enough content will not generate enough low-cost leads for B2B companies.
4. Blogging
You can outsource content if you don’t have the time or resources to produce it in-house. There are plenty of content writers out there who can write relevant content for you.
When someone is trying to hire a content writer or pay someone to write content for a software business, the most common problem is that they don’t understand the sector or technology.
Spending a bit more money can really help here. A content writer will spend time researching your industry and your product before writing. There are also writers who specialize in certain fields.
5. Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
This is a strategy that focuses on targeted accounts rather than a broad audience. Due to the fact that there are so many marketing messages in the world, it is difficult to stand out in any profession. Having a more personal approach has become increasingly difficult, and it is often difficult to obtain the same email address or contact information from numerous companies.
A personalized marketing campaign that targets a specific group of companies or accounts is known as Account-Based Marketing. This strategy is utilized by B2B businesses when the value to the enterprise is significant. ABM does not function as well in the B2C sector because the worth of one client is not very significant.
An example of ABM in a B2C firm would be a luxury brand like Christian Dior tailoring the purchasing experience for its wealthy clients. It would cost them more money to employ someone to perform this task, but the value the consumer receives would be worth it, the same principle applies to B2B organizations.
Accounts-based marketing is defined as marketing through personal accounts as opposed to targeting specific products or services (Hess & Banerjee, 2013).
6. Partnership Marketing
This is a form of marketing in which two or more organizations collaborate to market a product or service. It is possible that you already have some partnerships with firms that sell to the same firms as you do. These usually take the form of referral agreements.
There is often a missed connection between marketing and partnering. It is usually a time-consuming occupation to manage a partner marketing program, and frequently a bigger B2B technology company will have someone specifically employed to be a partnership marketing manager.
However, there are some marketing activities that can be done in collaboration that require very little time. For example, you may send a joint email to each other’s database or produce a piece of content that includes input from both sides and share it with each other’s audience.
Having a good relationship with a B2B tech company can be a great way to build high-quality backlinks from websites with relevant and trusted content. As a company grows, these types of programs develop, resulting in a directory listing and event marketing as part of the paid-for program.
Because you are helping the prospect solve more than one problem with one solution, partnership marketing can be particularly effective for lead generation. This can be a very attractive proposition.
7. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
This is an online advertising technique where businesses pay for each click on their ads.
There has been a bad reputation associated with PPC advertising for B2B SaaS lead generation due to the fact that once you begin generating leads with SEO and organic traffic, PPC seems like a waste of money.
It’s also incorrect to assume that paid advertising will never suddenly provide you with an influx of leads. So, in addition to SEO and Content Marketing, B2B SaaS lead generation should incorporate B2B PPC and focus it tightly.
Many PPC campaigns do not work as well as people wish because they either have not done enough research into the keywords they are bidding on or because they have not optimized their websites and click-through links for conversion.
8. B2B SEO
Everyone agrees that SEO is critical. Everyone wants to be at the top of the search results for their product or service, thinking that they are the most relevant to potential consumers.
With SEO services, you increase traffic to your website in order to generate sales leads. Content marketing is a common approach for generating B2B sales leads because B2B buyers usually do a lot of research before deciding to purchase.
9. SEO Link Building
If you get directions from a policeman and a tourist, you are more likely to take the policeman’s directions rather than those of a tourist. Building links from high-authority websites to your website is called link-building. The more difficult it is to build a link, the higher the authority. For example, the BBC, a well-respected website with 320 million links, has links from many other websites.
Having a link from the BBC to your site would be of great advantage, but extremely difficult to get—in fact, websites like this rarely link to external sites.
10. Using Content Marketing to Boost SEO
Creating content is the easiest part of SEO. With this post, I’ve tailored it to the keyword “b2b SaaS lead generation.” Google will then consider the content piece alone as well as many other factors to rank the piece. It’s hard to rank for competitive keywords with content unless you have a very authoritative website with a lot of backlinks. Ranking for high-volume, competitive terms is difficult without one.
Tips to Build a Lead Generation Website
The websites that generate the most leads are the ones that are easiest to use. They have the least amount of friction when customers make a purchase.
There is always a desire for the path of least resistance when it comes to achieving anything. You must make it easy for people to purchase from you, or submit their information. This is not simply about function; it’s also about information.
Do your customers have all the information they need?
Can your web visitors access all the information they need from you? Companies often answer “Yes, but they need to contact us if they want a demo so we can customize it to their needs.” Look for ways to get that kind of information off the phone and onto your website.
Questions to Answer on Your Website
- The services/product you are selling.
- The problem you’re helping your customer solve.
- The solution you provide to your customer.
- The price customers have to pay.
- How customers can access your product.
Not all B2B websites address these issues, and depending on what you provide, you may not want to address all of them because they aren’t a part of your positioning or value proposition. Here is an example:
Company Y is selling Enterprise Marketing System
- The services/product they are selling: Enterprise Marketing System
- The problem they’re helping customers solve: Companies want easy-to-use marketing tools all in one place and accessible to multiple people in their enterprise.
- The solution you provide to your customer: An easy-to-use SaaS product that combines various marketing tools into one platform.
- The price customers have to pay: The size of their company will determine the price.
- How customers can access your product: Getting in touch with a salesperson.
There are two points of friction. I can’t get a price unless I get in touch, and I must talk to someone to find out how I can obtain the application.
In regards to whether or not this is an issue, your competitors’ products’ ease of use determines whether or not this is an issue for you. If you’re selling a similar product and someone offers an online trial where you can sign up for free, you’re probably in trouble. But if your competitors are doing the same thing, it may not be a big problem.
The Best Lead-Generating Websites
It’s hard to gauge how effective a website is at generating leads unless you are intimately familiar with the firm.
There is no guarantee that a website’s design and appearance will result in a lot of leads. In some cases, a website that looks terrible might still generate a significant amount of business. While the quantity of leads generated by a website is unknown, we can estimate the amount of traffic it receives by investigating SEO.
An established website with quality, SEO-optimized content may generate more leads in the long run even if it looks a bit outdated than a new website with hardly any content.
Digital Marketing for B2B Firms
In a B2B firm, a digital marketing or growth marketing manager is responsible for generating leads. You may not have time to perform everything or know everything you need to, and that is where a B2B Digital Marketing Agency can be valuable.
As a Lead Generation Marketing Agency, we come across a lot of B2B tech businesses that are all facing the same problems. At Get Going in Business, we help marketers who don’t have the time or expertise generate more marketing-qualified leads.
Lead Generation Reports
After generating all those great leads, you must provide proof of return on investment to the rest of the company.
Your CRM system and marketing software should be properly set up to track if you want reporting to be simple. Reporting becomes difficult when set-up work has not been adequately completed beforehand.
What you should be monitoring:
- The total lead generation expenditure.
- The amount spent on each marketing channel.
- The overall cost per lead.
- The cost per lead on each channel.
- Total leads acquired.
- Total leads per channel.
- The number of MQLs.
- The number of SQLs.
- The number of Opportunities.
- What percentage of leads are MQLs?
- What percentage of SQLs convert to Opportunities?
Wrapping Up
Whether you work in a SaaS company or not, leads are leads. You will never get anywhere without them. The best method for generating leads for your business is knowing your customers, targeting them, making it easy for them to purchase and empowering your customers to be your brand ambassadors.
Get Going In Business has been helping SaaS B2B companies turbocharge their lead generation for the last decade.
Learn more, book a call with us today!