11 Effective SaaS Lead Generation Tactics From Industry Leaders
Predictability is key to achieving real SaaS business growth. Predicting your revenue accurately allows you to make better decisions regarding expenditures, new hires, and product development. It’s critical to know whether you’re on track to hit your revenue goals and whether you’ll have enough cash on-hand to pay your bills at the end of the month. You can forecast your revenue if you know how many new leads your business receives each month and how many of those leads convert into paying customers. You’ll inevitably grow your revenue if you can improve and increase your lead generation. Unfortunately, generating leads for SaaS can be one of the biggest challenges a business can face. In this post, I’ll share 11 ways to improve your SaaS lead generation and generate real results. Have a Defined Goal How do you define a ‘lead’? Is the lead someone who might purchase? Is it someone who signed up for your email list or liked or shared one of your LinkedIn posts? You must define what makes a lead and what does not, since SaaS marketers work with a variety of leads. You may even be targeting a variety of leads in different campaigns, so you will require a system that can automate lead qualification. It can be extremely powerful and simple to automate. It’s especially crucial in SaaS marketing for startups to get this right, or else you risk causing a lot of confusion and making inaccurate growth projections. There are three types of SaaS leads: These three categories represent three different levels of customer intent. Let’s have a look at each of them. Information Qualified Leads (IQL) Cold leads, also known as IQLs, are prospect leads at the beginning of the buyer journey, aka the awareness stage. They are typically people who have encountered your top-of-funnel content (blogs, e-books) and have given up an email address in exchange for more valuable information (such as signing up for your blog or reading an e-book). Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) MQLs are in the consideration phase of the customer journey, and are referred to as “warm leads.” They are closer to purchasing than IQLs, but not as hot as SQLs. Prospects have continued to express interest in your product, have probably watched a few webinars, downloaded some whitepapers, and view your company as an option for solving the problems they are facing. Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) Most of us want the SQL kind of leads but, unfortunately, we have to start with IQLs and nurture the leads until they become SQLs or “hot leads.” A SQL is in the decision phase of the buying cycle and is ready to make a decision. Salespeople typically get involved here, offering a bottom-of-the-funnel type offer (such as a free demo or trial) and striving to close the deal. Content Creation for Lead Generation Creating content is a great way to generate leads. Today, content marketing is the future of marketing. With a plethora of content tactics at their disposal, SaaS marketers are well on their way to victory if they start with just these three: blogging, gated content, and webinars. SaaS Blogging In the 90s, blogs were all the rage, and soon after they became “uncool” very quickly. They have now come full circle. There are over 70 million blog posts published every month on WordPress websites alone. Creating mediocre SaaS blog posts and publishing them on a semi-regular basis isn’t enough to achieve real success. You must ensure that your blog aligns with your SaaS marketing objectives. If your objective is to generate leads, you must be dedicated to doing so. Remember, consistency is critical. You will not turn a reader into an opportunity unless you provide such remarkable value that they are desperate for more. Keep these questions in mind when creating blog content: No matter how great your post idea is, if it doesn’t answer at least one of the above questions, your blog isn’t ready to publish (or your topic idea doesn’t need to be written). Always include a clear customer persona and give the reader real, actionable value. Gated Content It’s all about give and take. You’re doing trade with your audience. A good example is giving away a valuable e-book in exchange for a prospect’s information (typically an email address). How can you expect prospective customers to give up their email address when there are so many valuable in-depth blog posts and videos available for free online? The key is providing value that no other company can offer. You will have a better chance of winning if you have already shown your exceptional proficiency, which is why you will often find this approach employed on SaaS blog pages. Here is an example of how it can be done from Shopify: Shopify places gated content above the fold on their blog page, as shown here. They offer you content that you’d normally pay to get. It’s impossible to turn down an offer like that. Free business lessons? You can very easily build a large email list of leads by offering exceptional value in exchange for just an email address. Webinars Hosting a webinar is the best way to show your expertise and authority on a subject. Choose a subject you or your company is an expert in, then decide on the format. Here are a few choices to consider: Once you’ve decided what the webinar is going to cover and how it will run, it’s time to get some sign-ups! Targeted social media ads are one of the best ways to accomplish this. You should create a dedicated landing page and add CTAs to relevant pages on your website. There are many webinar platforms for SaaS applications. Some of the most popular include WebinarJam, Demio, Zoom, LiveStorm, EverWebinar, ZohoMeeting, WebinarNinja and GoToWebinar. You must secure a platform to host the webinar, as well as handle sign-ups and SMS or email reminders. Recorded webinars can be a tremendous asset for content marketing after the event
6 Best Tips for Content Marketing Lead Generation
Sadly, for content marketing lead generation 30% of new businesses fail in their first two years, 50% in the first five years, and 66% in the first ten. Why do so many businesses fail? There are plenty of potential pitfalls: Poor content marketing can have a huge impact on your business. Many business owners and marketers fail because they approach marketing incorrectly. They do not frequently optimize their marketing campaigns to increase conversions, gather leads, and drive sales. There is no doubt that marketing is one of the most effective methods to boost lead generation for business development. In fact, content marketing produces 3 times as many leads as other traditional marketing techniques, according to a DemandMetric report. So how do you create excellent content that generates leads for your company? This guide explores six effective ways to generate leads using content marketing. 1. Create a Buyer Persona Did you know that you can generate a thousand leads and still not make a single sale? Your content must be tailored to suit your target audience if you want it to be effective. If you create content that isn’t compatible with your audience, you risk wasting time and money on leads that won’t convert. Before starting with content marketing, you must first identify your target audience and develop a persona for them. What Is a Buyer Persona? A buyer persona is a research-based profile that describes the sort of person that would purchase a particular product or brand. A buyer persona provides information on the prospective buyer—their characteristics, preferences, and types of touchpoints that lead people to buy your product (or your competitor’s). If you know who your prospective customers are and what questions they need to be answered, you will be able to create informative, valuable content that addresses their pain points and answers their questions. The process of turning visitors into leads begins with producing content that provides immense value. You must know the customer’s needs in order to deliver value. The following are some of the specifics that must be included in your buyer persona: Knowing who your target audience is can help you create content that meets their demands and boosts conversions. There are a number of tools available to help you build your buyer persona if you are unfamiliar with the process. The Facebook Audience Insights tool is located inside the Facebook Ad Manager. Using this tool, you can discover a lot of information about your audience and use it to build a persona. You can also add interests that you want to research to get more information about your customers. There are over 200 billion global internet searches each month, and Quantcast delivers real-time data on over 100 million of those. Using artificial intelligence, Quantcast helps you better understand your target audience. They help you accurately track and measure your audience using artificial intelligence. Survey Gizmo is a terrific tool for conducting surveys on your audience so that you can construct your own buyer persona based on real audience responses. If you already have an email list, you can use Survey Gizmo to examine data on your current customers. 2. Use the Content-Type Best Suited for Your Audience There are hundreds of content types available, and in order for your content marketing efforts to have a profitable ROI, you will need to create content that suits your audience. Creating content for your marketing strategy is the key to generating either traffic or leads. You need both to turn a profit— before you can generate any leads, you must bring visitors to your site. Some examples of content you can use to generate traffic are: Blog posts can be a valuable resource for generating traffic to your website. They provide value for your readers and increase the number of indexable pages in your domain. They are also excellent at directing people to your landing or sales page. Videos are another terrific way of driving traffic to your site. Make engaging, audience-focused videos to boost the number of times they are shared. Also, focus your efforts on YouTube. YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine. Creating videos that are appropriate for the platform can boost traffic to your website. There are currently 2.95 billion social media users in the world. You should take advantage of this and publish posts on social media to drive visitors to your website. This means optimizing your social profiles, interacting with other users, and using targeted social media advertisements. Production of podcasts has been on the rise in recent years, as indicated by a 2019 report on podcast statistics. As of now, there have been more than 700,000 podcasts created, with 29 million podcast episodes produced. You can communicate with your customers more intimately using podcasts, hopefully resulting in a bump in traffic to your site. The Demand Gen Report stated that infographics can increase your web traffic by 12% and receive 650% more engagement than normal guest posts. Visual marketing is very much in vogue, so you should seize the opportunity by increasing your visual marketing efforts. Once you’ve begun seeing traffic from your content efforts, the next step is to create content that can be used for lead generation. A new blog that hasn’t started generating any traffic yet can still generate leads through great content, but what happens then? 3. Use Content Syndication People seeing your content is one way to leverage content syndication. What is Content Syndication? When you post your content on a high-traffic third-party site, you immediately have the potential to generate a lot of leads. Syndicating your content means uploading it to sites that are larger than you to generate more traffic and increase engagement. Netline is a B2B lead generation network that allows you to syndicate your content so that you can build traffic and generate leads faster. The best thing about this platform is that it is performance-based, meaning you only pay for the leads that are generated. Make sure to use
7 Most Effective SaaS Lead Generation Strategies
Most marketing departments consider outbound sales strategies as their bread and butter. However, in today’s SaaS lead generation market, where prospects are increasingly savvy, these strategies may no longer work as well. Prospects are no longer willing to be barraged with one spammy message after another. Who likes spam? For this reason, SaaS lead generation must adapt to more sophisticated prospecting and engagement methods in order to be effective. Both online and offline marketing techniques are effective ways to gain new leads and potential subscribers for B2B SaaS companies. In this article, we’ll explore 7 different lead-generation tactics to help you gain more clients for your company. But first, let’s have a look at what lead generation in SaaS is all about. What is the definition of lead generation in SaaS? SaaS firms provide software that customers can access online rather than installing on their own computers, so users can access the program from anywhere and at any time. Some SaaS business examples are Google Apps (docs), Salesforce (CRM), Dropbox (cloud storage), Slack (communication), GitHub (code hosting), and MailChimp (email marketing). It’s wrong to say that lead generation is limited to websites since even social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter generate leads. However, the majority of leads nowadays are produced via online marketing efforts. Picking up the right leads can be one of the most challenging parts of the sales cycle. Lead nurturing is a process of nurturing an active lead to a better stage of the sales cycle. This process includes sending emails, calls, offers, and other messages to a lead. A lead could be someone who has started filling out a form on your website and stopped halfway through or someone who has downloaded a free trial of your software but never sent you their credit card information. Even though money doesn’t grow on trees, customers must be directed to consider your company as a potential service provider. However, as we all understand, leads must be pursued and persuaded to convert to clients. What makes a SaaS lead generation strategy important? SaaS lead generation strategies utilize both organic and inorganic approaches. On one hand, organic techniques seek to get your website discovered naturally in search engines. Inorganic techniques seek to actively connect with your potential customers via social media, email marketing, paid advertising, and other digital channels. The purpose of SaaS lead generation is to attract a qualified audience and convince them to purchase your product. Here are 7 tactics to supercharge your SaaS lead generation today. 7 Strategies to Skyrocket Lead Generation for SaaS Businesses 1. Find the platforms your customers use for lead generation. When creating a marketing strategy for your SaaS product, you should be sure to find your target audience and make sure you stand out. It’s not always straightforward—for instance, Instagram isn’t just for beauty consultants and clothes stores—it’s also for SaaS photo editing companies. If you know who your target customers are and what they want, you’ll be able to determine which platforms they’ll be on. All you need to do then is reach them! 2. Share not only engaging but also informative content. Your SaaS marketing strategy must be well-informed and consistent in order to make the most of your content. Do your homework, publish frequently, and optimize! Before you begin writing about your industry, you must research your buyer personas and see what has been said on the subject before. Get on board with new trends and new developments. Prioritize posting on a regular schedule. Once a month is not enough; your followers must have something new to digest at least once a week (if not more frequently). The more content you generate, the more opportunities you will have to position yourself as an expert and leader in whatever field your SaaS caters to. This shows that you understand what your target market is experiencing and you can help them. Remember SEO. Everything from a piece of content’s length to other websites’ links to it affects its ‘Google-ability,’ so be sure to keep that in mind when creating informative material. 3. Optimize your site speed. Speed is one of the most important ranking factors directly affecting the user experience. Therefore, it is crucial to optimize your website’s speed. Everyone has experienced the frustration of a slow-loading website. Even a short wait can make a person want to click away. Your website is likely to lose 40% of visitors if it takes more than three seconds to load—and those visitors aren’t the only things lost. Poor website performance can also negatively impact your search engine rankings, lead generation, and sales conversion rates, in addition to lowering your visitor retention rates. Use online tools such as GTMetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights to monitor your website’s loading time and compare your results with those of similar websites. 4. Ensure that your site is mobile-friendly. The ratio of mobile to desktop use is growing in the marketing sector, so it’s crucial that your website is mobile-friendly. Buyers don’t have the time to sit down at their computers to make all their purchases these days. So having a mobile-friendly website is critical for expanding your business. According to ThinkwithGoogle, an average site should take 15 seconds to load on mobile. If you don’t have one, you may be losing leads right when they are most likely to convert. The last thing you want is for a prospective customer to get irritated on your website and leave in search of a competitor that is more mobile-friendly. Make your website mobile-friendly and optimized now! 5. Write articles for other sites. There have been a lot of mixed thoughts on guest blogging lately. Some people think it’s dead, while others are still employing it to drive traffic to their website and generate leads for their company. Choose a site that has readers in line with your target audience. This ensures that you will get the right traffic back to your website. Pick a website with a high